Fifteen Eighty Four

In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the New York Times documented over 145 instances of workers being disciplined or terminated for comments related to Kirk. Many of those workers were professors—and a surprising number were tenured professors. In other words, academia’s most elite workers were being punished or fired alongside “health care workers, lawyers and journalists, restaurant workers and airline employees” even though tenured professors are often described as having “jobs for life.”

This means it is an unfortunately good time to be studying faculty tenure.

What is tenure? What does it do? (What does it not do?) And where, based on these questions and others, might we see tenure going?

In The War on Tenure, I explore these questions from the angle of employment security. When professors talk about tenure, they use the language of academic freedom. Non-academics, on the other hand, tend to focus on the job security that tenure affords. This disconnect over tenure is symptomatic of a larger disconnect between academia and society—and The War on Tenure seeks to translate between the two sides.

Take the first question: what is tenure? Academics almost universally answer this by saying something like “tenure makes academic freedom possible.”

This is true, to a point.

Tenure is a type of “just cause” contract. Just cause contracts provide more job security than the baseline American rule of employment relationships, called the “at-will rule,” which says that employees can be fired for good reason, bad reason, or no reason at all. Just cause employment means that employers need a reason to fire employees and that it should be a good reason. Tenure, uniquely, usually also means that the employer’s justification should have nothing to do with the substance of the employee’s teaching or research.

As the Kirk fallout is showing, though, tenure is more like a necessary but not sufficient precondition for academic freedom. Universities have moved quickly to discipline or terminate tenured faculty for their commentary on the grounds that it disrupts the workplace or raises concerns about the employees’ fitness—justifications that non-academic employers have been using, too.

Now, consider the second question: what does tenure do? Supporters and critics alike often say that tenure creates “permanent” employment or a “job for life”—but, as I’ve argued before, neither is true.

What tenure does, like all just cause employment, is require reasonable grounds for termination. Like many types of just cause contracts, tenure also requires due process before termination—a chance to hear the arguments against you, to be presented with the evidence, and to contest both (preferably with some assistance). And what tenure does, ideally (though decreasingly) is allow your peers to weigh in on your fate.

None of this is unusual. All just cause employment requires “cause for termination”—it’s in the name! Many just cause relationships, including the federal contracts overseen by the Merit Systems Protection Board, stipulate elaborate pre-termination procedures. And most professions—medicine, law, architecture, among others—involve significant amounts of peer evaluation. Tenure and academia function in surprisingly familiar ways.

Finally, jump ahead to the last question: where might we see tenure going?

I don’t have a crystal ball. But if researching The War on Tenure has taught me anything, it’s that academics care about job security as much as anyone else—possibly more, given how much time and money they spend getting trained and their frighteningly shallow job market. Meanwhile, the Charlie Kirk fallout has shown that job security is as much a concern for tenured academics as it is for at-will employees across several industries. It’s time for academics to understand how tenure functions as a labor protection so they can respond to public concerns and chart a path forward.