Does Twitter Endanger Tenure?

At the risk of sounding like an old promo for Batman, can it be that technology will do what about a half a century of books, editorials and speeches couldn’t?

“An ever-lengthening list of faculty have come under fire for tweets and other social-media posts that they have made,” Martin Kich writes in the academe blog maintained by the American Association of University Professors. “But anyone who actually looks regularly at Twitter feeds must know three things: first, the medium itself stokes extremes of expression; second, almost nothing that a faculty member has ever tweeted comes close to the outer boundaries of what has become not just possible but commonplace on Twitter; and third, the responses to something that is deemed offensive are almost always as offensive, if not more offensive, than what they are condemning.”

Perhaps, but:

1. It helps if you don’t use verbs like kill and die.
2. The It didn’t Start with Watergate of They all do it defense hasn’t worked very well.
3. Those of us on the right have frequently experienced this treatment from the Left and avoided responding in kind.