In this issue

JOE NEILANDS, who has fought Pacific Gas and Electric Co. for almost half a century, once had a bit of a tiff with his employer over his efforts to stop a nuclear power plant from being built at Bodega Bay. It turns out that the institution Neilands was working for had close ties to PG&E. Neilands's boss called him an "Iago, putting evil ideas in the minds" of others, according to the profile of Neilands by Bay Guardian editor and publisher Bruce B. Brugmann that ran in our Best of the Bay issue July 31.

But Neilands wasn't fired. He had what used to be the best sort of job security. He was a professor, of biochemistry, at UC Berkeley – and through all his years of activism, much of which infuriated the administration, his job was protected by tenure and by the principles of academic freedom.

I thought about that when Camille T. Taiara started talking to me several weeks ago about this week's cover story on the move by universities to limit the number of tenured faculty positions and shift the work of teaching to lower-paid adjunct professors.

When I was in college, we had all sorts of problems with the tenure system: It kept some really lame, old, white men who still thought it was 1950 at work in the economics department. It kept some cool, young radical thinkers our of the department. The students had no input in the process at all.

But still, there were some Wesleyan professors who made the president's life miserable – and thanks to their tenured positions, there wasn't anything he could do about it.

The system, archaic as it is, has protected the position of the "public intellectual" for most of this century. (As Taiara reports on page 19, tenure came about in the first place in this country because of a Stanford professor fired in the early 1900s for advocating nationalization of the railroads – a position that annoyed the trustees of a school founded by railroad baron Leland Stanford.) I wonder: What would happen today, in perhaps the most paranoid era in modern history, if Noam Chomsky didn't have tenure? Or Edward Said? The schools trying to eliminate tenured jobs say the motivation is economic – but the impact is very much political.

On a happier note, we introduce this week a new cartoon, "Squidbunny," by our long-time editorial cartoonist Jerry Dolezal and Jason Roberts. You'll find it in the classifieds, on page 116.