The War on Tenure

Tenure is an employment protection threatened by changes in the labor market as well as declining public attitudes toward higher education and expertise. In this episode, Deepa Das Acevedo joins us to discuss the history of tenure, the value proposition of tenure, and what the cost to society and higher education would be if it were eliminated.

Deepa is a legal anthropologist at Emory Law, the Editor of PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, a past Trustee of the Law & Society Association, and has held leadership positions in the Association of American Law Schools, the American Anthropological Association, and the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology. Deepa has published extensively in scholarly journals. She is the author of The War on Tenure, which will be released in September 2025 by Cambridge University Press.

A transcript of this episode and show notes may be found at http://teaforteaching.com.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Tenure is an employment protection threatened by changes in the labor market as well as
declining public attitudes toward higher education and expertise. In this episode,
we explore the history of tenure, the value proposition of tenure,
and what the cost to society and higher education would be if it were eliminated.

(00:27):
Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective
practices in teaching and learning. This podcast series is hosted
by John Kane, an economist... ...and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer...
...and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make
higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

(00:51):
Our guest today is Deepa Das Acevedo. She is a legal anthropologist at Emory Law, the Editor of

PoLAR (01:04):
Political and Legal Anthropology Review,  a past Trustee of the Law & Society Association,
and has held leadership positions in the Association of American Law Schools,
the American Anthropological Association, and the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology.
Deepa has published extensively in scholarly journals. She is the author of The War on Tenure,

(01:27):
which will be released in September 2025 by Cambridge University Press. Welcome Deepa.
Thank you so much for having me.
Today's teas are… Deepa, are you drinking any tea today?
I am. I have a cup of roobois here, which I began drinking when I was in college,
thanks to a South African friend of mine,

(01:47):
And perhaps the beginning of the journey to tenure.
Yes.
How about you, John?
I am drinking Kyoto cherry rose organic green tea,
which came from a tea store in Canandaigua. Somehow, I ended up with this unexpectedly.
Why? Because I don't like cherry tea, John?
Yes, because you tried it, because you liked the way it smelled, but you didn't

(02:11):
like it. So I got two bags, one a green tea and one a black tea, of cherry-flavored tea.
And it smells so good.
And it does smell very good, and it tastes delicious too.
I’m glad I’m not drinking it. I have an old favorite English afternoon tea today.
That's always a nice, good, solid tea. We've invited you
here today to discuss the war on tenure. Before we discuss this,

(02:33):
though, can you tell us about your own educational path to your tenured position?
So I always meant to go to law school and become a lawyer, but I like to say that I got a little
bit sidetracked into a PhD program. Academia is kind of the family business. My parents are
professors. My grandparents, one of them, was a professor. I have an uncle and a few cousins,

(02:58):
all of whom are professors. So I decided to pursue a research interest that I developed in college. I
started grad school with a project that focused exclusively on religion among second-generation
South Asian Americans, but I very soon switched over to a project based in India that was at the

(03:23):
intersection of religion and law. And by the time I came back from my field work, I was reading Law
and Society scholarship and legal scholarship as much as I was reading anthropology. So I decided
that, yes, I did want to stay in academia, to stay in the family business, but I wanted to do so at a
law faculty, rather than out of the disciplinary faculty. So I went to law school. While I was in

(03:48):
law school, a very prescient advisor told me that “you're not going to get a job on an American Law
School faculty teaching Indian law, so you need to develop a second research area.” I kind of poked
around to find an area of scholarship and teaching that would integrate my anthropological background

(04:10):
and my interests, and settled on labor and employment law, or work law, and eventually that
is what I was hired to teach. So I teach courses in legislation and regulation, employment law,
employee benefits, and I eventually found my way to studying academic employment and tenure.

(04:30):
That sounds like a nice segue into our next question, which is:
Can you talk a little bit about how you began your book project, The War on Tenure?
So I was sitting at home during the pandemic, working on a different book project because
even though I'd developed a body of teaching and research interests in Labor and Employment Law,

(04:52):
I studied gig work for a while before moving on to faculty tenure. I maintain an active
research agenda in India, and so I was working on a book about India during the pandemic and doom
scrolling in between chapters. And like everyone else, I read a lot about the reductions in force,

(05:14):
the closures of committees and departments, the kind of mass layoffs of faculty, both tenure
stream and non-tenure track, that were going on during this period. And it just made me wonder,
how often do the terminations of tenured faculty happen despite the fact that these faculty have
tenure? I kind of thought that this would be an easily answerable and long-answered

(05:39):
question. So on my writing breaks, I kind of poked around higher education literature. I
read a lot of industry news sites and blogs, and I couldn't find an answer.
So in a way, this entire body of research on faculty tenure, and academic employment began
in the way that I think a lot of academic research projects begin. I had a fun question; I thought it

(06:06):
was an easy research question. It turned out to really not be an easy research question,
and five years later, I have an original data set, several research articles, and a book.
It's really nice to have a book on this because it has been so understudied. Critics of tenure
often argue that it's somehow different than other types of employment contracts.

(06:29):
It stands alone. It's unique. But you note in your book that there are a lot
of other similar types of contracts out there in the form of these “just-cause”
contracts. Could you elaborate a little bit on tenure, what a “just-cause” contract is,
and what other types of jobs provide similar types of employment protection?
Sure. So when I started thinking about how often tenured faculty get terminated, and what it means

(06:54):
from an employment perspective to have or not have tenure, I was a little bit embarrassed by how
little I had thought about it, despite being from an academic family and despite teaching employment
law, because one of the things that I spend weeks teaching my employment law students is about
the different kinds of employment contracts that exist out there. So I can kind of break this down

(07:19):
into maybe four steps or four different stages of analysis. The first is that we want to distinguish
between indefinite employment relationships and definite or fixed-term work contracts. So most of
the time, whether you're a bank teller or an architect or a tenure-stream faculty member,

(07:40):
when you start a job, you think that you're going to keep having that job until either you move,
you get fired, or you quit. Those are indefinite employment relationships, as opposed to a job that
you begin knowing that it's going to last for two years or five years, or what have you. In the US,
indefinite employment relationships are governed by a very unique default rule or baseline rule,

(08:05):
and this is called the “at-will rule” governing employment relationships. The at-will rule,
as I make my employment law students recite in class, means that either party can terminate
any relationship for good reason, bad reason, or no reason at all, for any reason, except an
explicitly illegal reason, with no notice and no payment in lieu of notice. What does that mean?

(08:29):
That means that you can walk into work and decide to quit because it's Tuesday. Your boss can walk
into work and decide to fire you because it's Tuesday. Firing somebody because it's Tuesday is
a really unwise reason to let go of an otherwise satisfactory employee, but it's not explicitly
illegal, and the at-will rule says that that's okay. Your boss doesn't owe you any money. They

(08:52):
don't have to give you any advance notice. And so, as you can imagine, the at-will rule creates a lot
of insecurity for the employees who are subject to it. “just-cause” is a type of indefinite
employment relationship that creates a carve-out from the at-will rule. It basically says your
employer needs to have reasonable or just-cause to terminate the employment relationship, and

(09:17):
just having that requirement makes the employment relationship much more secure from the employee's
perspective. Tenure is a form of just-cause. It's not the only type of just-cause contract out
there. It's also definitely on the more protective end of the spectrum of employment contracts,
even on the spectrum of just-cause contracts, but it's not sui generis. It's not even alone on that

(09:45):
most protective end of the spectrum. There are actually a lot of different kinds of employees who
are governed by just-cause principles. So part of the reason that we see a lot of litigation
around federal employees right now is because the federal employee workforce is by and large

(10:06):
governed by very protective just-cause principles. A lot of workers who you might not expect to have
above-average protections at work, meaning that they're not subject to purely at-will principles,
actually do receive higher protection. So, for instance, I think in 2020 or 2021, New York

(10:29):
City passed a law creating last-in first-out time requirements and various other limiting principles
applicable to the hiring and termination of fast food workers. All of those principles constrain
the employer's ability to terminate the employment relationship, and they impose a weaker version of

(10:51):
just cause. Anyone who is employed pursuant to a union bargaining agreement is employed
pursuant to just-cause principles. So the kind of employment contract that tenured employment
relationships are one specific variation of is actually, it's not common. It is probably about

(11:12):
20% of the indefinite employee workforce. But it's definitely not unique to tenured faculty.
Can you talk a little bit about when the concept of
tenure first arose and what the purpose of it was?
I think, like with a lot of these timeline considerations, there’s a lot of possible answers.

(11:32):
So with respect to the start date for tenure, we could say that it's 1940, that's when the AAUP
developed the Statement of Principles on Tenure that most tenure policies at American universities
are based on, and this is the most common origin point that people give for the invention of

(11:56):
faculty tenure in the United States. We could go a little bit further back to the late 1800s
when Walter Metzger, who's one of the foremost historians of academia, especially in the United
States, says that some tenure-like practices began to be common among American institutions

(12:19):
of higher education, but Metzger is careful to note that there were no due process-like features
attached to employment contracts in that period. We could go even further back to medieval Europe,
when scholars working at the major centers of learning across Europe had benefits like the
freedom to pursue and teach ideas without fear of repercussion. They even had benefits like freedom

(12:46):
of passage across borders. Some of them were exempt from taxes that were generally applicable.
All of that was rolled into what was considered tenure, and in that stage. So there are many
possible answers— 1940s, 1800s, medieval Europe. There are also many possible answers as far as

(13:07):
what the purpose of tenure has been. But I think Walter Metzler, the historian I mentioned earlier,
has one of the best and most broadly applicable responses: “in all the ages of academic man,
the age of the master, the age of the employee, the age of the professional, the desire to protect
the academic office has run strong.” That's it. Tenure is about protecting the academic office.

(13:31):
What protecting that office means entails various things at various points, depending on what the
pressures from the outside and from the inside on the Academy are. It could be freedom of inquiry,
it could be sustained employment. One of my arguments is that it's all of those things.
When people argue for tenure today, under all the threats that tenure is being faced with, which

(13:52):
we'll talk about later, they often focus primarily on academic freedom. But as you already suggested,
there are many other reasons for tenure besides that, including just this employment protection
being an important component. Could you explain why employment protection and some of these other
issues may be important in justifying tenure, even in the absence of the academic freedom argument?

(14:14):
It is true that faculty often hesitate to frame tenure in the light of employment security. And
I think one of the most obvious reasons why is also one of the most correct reasons why,
which is that saying that tenure gives me, the jobholder, employment security feels selfish.

(14:36):
It doesn't feel noble. It doesn't have a higher purpose. It's about protecting the
individual employee's job security. But the thing is, most people like job security, and
most scholars need it in order to do the teaching and research work that they've been hired to do.
I think that one of the most obvious reasons why tenure matters for individual faculty is

(15:01):
also one of the reasons why they are so hesitant to articulate tenure as an employment protection,
which is that tenure helps the individual employee keep their job. It's a personal
benefit in addition to being an institutional benefit or a professional benefit. But most
people like job security, and I think that most scholars need job security to do the kind

(15:25):
of teaching and research work that they've been hired to do. I absolutely believe that tenure's
ability to protect academic freedom is a real and valuable function of the employment practice,
but my point is just that tenure's ability to provide job security is real and valuable too.
I think that tenure provides job security in a couple of different senses, and breaking it apart

(15:51):
may also help us become comfortable with thinking about tenure in this way. So first, I think tenure
as a form of job security provides a non-monetary type of compensation for a job that, in many ways,
is this a tough sell. Getting into tenure stream or full time academia, even if it's not tenure

(16:12):
stream involves long training and apprenticeship periods that are expensive, either in terms of
your explicit costs or your foregone opportunity costs. Most academics do not earn well relative to
their credentials, and what those credentials could buy on the general labor market. Most

(16:33):
academics have unusually low job mobility because there are relatively few and very geographically
dispersed employers. If you're an academic, this is a phenomenon that I call “quasi-monopsony”
in the book, because we think of monopsonies as being markets in which there are few buyers for
whatever is being sold, and there are few buyers for academic labor. More importantly, those buyers

(16:58):
are clustered, so that we think of a major city as being a rich job market for academics
when it has five universities or colleges. There aren't many fields in which you would say that a
particular city presents a rich labor market because there are five potential employers,
but academia is such a labor market. I also think that the job security tenure offers provide a form

(17:21):
of compensation for the fact that academic labor is hard. It involves serious thinking, careful
work, highly intensive, emotional labor, dealing with students and colleagues. It involves free
labor in many ways, when we do all of these peer reviews, when we sit on committees in the summer,

(17:42):
the fact that most academics do not actually even get paid during the summers, although they are
working and doing job-related tasks, job security is a form of compensation that makes up for the
lack of monetary compensation attached to all of these tasks or times a year, and for the hard work

(18:02):
that these tasks represent. I think the last thing that job security as a form of compensation does
is that it provides a safety net for a group of workers who have to do all of this hard,
long hour, under-compensated work at the end of expensive and long training. All of these

workers have to do this work and do the work well:  learning how to teach well, how to mentor well, (18:25):
undefined
how to write and publish articles or books well, means that you are less eligible, less desirable
for work in the general labor market. You have to essentially depreciate your own skill set in

(18:45):
order to succeed as an academic, and so you need some job security for that reason, too.
There is a second set of reasons why I think job security matters in academia, and this has more
to do simply with the work that being an academic entails. Whether we think of that work as doing
research, lab sciences, archival research, field work, what have you. Whether we think that as

(19:10):
publishing based on that research, or whether we think of that work as being teaching, mentoring,
guiding, the time scale that all of these tasks involve is really long. You spend years planning,
devising, executing research, and then you spend years seeing it to fruition as a published output.

(19:31):
You spend an entire semester teaching a class, learning what went wrong, what students need, what
went right, what to do more of, and then you don't get to put those lessons into practice again for
another year, maybe another two years. And so the risk of not getting something right, whether that
something is a research result or a publication or a teaching strategy, is really high. We don't

(19:58):
think of academic work as risky because it doesn’t involve physical risk, but it is actually very
risky, and the security that tenure offers helps mitigate that risk a little bit as well. So there
are multiple reasons why job security matters for the work that academics do, and I think
that we need to get comfortable with articulating those reasons, because in addition to the way that

(20:22):
tenure protects academic freedom, it also provides security that is necessary to make the job a
rational choice for potential performers of the job and a feasible job for holders of that job.
I'm a labor economist, so one of the things we talk about quite a bit in labor economics
goes back to Adam Smith, the notion of compensating wage differentials, that if

(20:45):
jobs are more pleasant, the compensation does not have to be as large. If jobs are less pleasant,
they have to be paid more. And that's basically, I think, part of the argument you're making here,
that because academics have this tenure, they don't have to be paid as much as they would to
attract faculty of equivalent training, skills, and quality. You'd have to pay people a lot

(21:05):
more if they didn't have that sort of job guarantee, especially because of the risk.
I think what you're saying is absolutely true. There's a point that I actually don't remember
if I make in the book or not, but when I was hired in my first tenure-track job,
I made less than I would have made as a newly minted law school graduate three years earlier.

(21:28):
You take a wage cut in order to be able to do this work, and most people who pursue
academia are quite happy to take that wage cut because they believe in the work that they're
trying to do. But there are limits as to what people can tolerate, and of course,
also limits as to what they will tolerate. We absolutely think that lots of different types

(21:50):
of workers pursue their chosen paths for reasons other than purely monetary gain. There's a lot of
scholarship showing how government workers, civil servants, don't simply go into that line of work
because it's prestigious, it's whatever. They go into it because they believe in the mission,
and because they find the prospect of job security appealing, and they're willing to take a pay cut,

(22:16):
essentially, in order to achieve that job security and fulfill that mission. Academics are very
similar. I don't think that they're engaging in a rational cost-benefit analysis, saying,
“I'm willing to trade X number of dollars for X level of security or Y type of job requirements.”
But there is some type of analysis of that nature going on. And I think one of the things that we

(22:40):
are seeing is that as it becomes harder and harder to do the work that academia supposedly
and ideally, entails, and as the conditions of that work become harder and harder to bear,
academia becomes a less viable and, of course, a less desirable line of work.

(23:00):
I think that transitions nicely into this idea that tenure is providing all these protections
that we've clearly described, but also we've seen a decline in the number of positions or faculty
that are even eligible for tenure-granting positions. Can you talk a little bit about,
like, why that decline has happened, and what that might mean for academia moving forward?

(23:23):
It's been well documented for a few years now, so the statistic is probably outdated,

but I'm going to quote it anyway (23:29):
around 20  to 25% of faculty are, in fact, tenure line,
which means that 75 to 80% of faculty are not. That's a huge decline and essentially a reversal
from where the professoriate was, say, in the mid-20th century. Part of the reason for this

(23:52):
flip between non-tenure-stream and tenure-stream faculty employment ratios has to do with a common
dynamic across industries… it's not limited to academia… which is that the relative commonality
of indefinite employment relationships that I mentioned earlier, the kind that even when

(24:12):
they're at-will come with more benefits and more protections than independent contractor
or fixed-term relationships. There has been a decline in those kinds of relationships over time.
A lot of industries have gone from being based on an employer-employee model to an independent

(24:32):
contractor and client or contract model. A very well-known example of this is the taxi industry,
and this is even before Uber and Lyft came onto the scene. Taxis through the early to mid-70s,
taxi drivers through the early to mid-1970s, were mostly employees of taxi companies. Now,

(24:54):
they are overwhelmingly independent contractors who lease their cars, their medallions, whatnot,
from owners of those resources, of those medallions or those cars. They're not employees;
they don't receive the suite of legal protections or benefits that employees receive. They're
independent contractors doing business as part of a broader, more diffuse network of employment

(25:20):
relationships. We've seen something similar in computer programming. One of the most famous cases
that I teach in my employment law class about how to distinguish between employees and independent
contractors has to do with software programmers who worked at Microsoft in the early 90s:
How people who were working side by side in the same office, wearing the same lanyards, doing the

(25:45):
same work, some of them were employees who were protected by various federal and state statutes.
Some of them were independent contractors who weren't protected by those statutes. So again,
in a lot of different industries, we've seen this slip from long-term kind of full-service
work relationships to discrete, shorter-term, less protective types of work relationships. It's not

(26:10):
just academia, in other words. At the same time, I think that there are some developments that
are either uniquely or particularly impactful for academia that also help explain this shift
from largely employing tenure-stream faculty to largely not employing tenure-stream faculty. One

(26:30):
of those is the declining public valuation of higher education. This is something that we see

in the news all the time (26:36):
“How worthwhile do you  think a four-year college degree is?” And if you
don't think a college degree is very worthwhile, you don't think it makes sense to fund higher
education institutions. If those institutions don't have as much funding through public
resources or through grant mechanisms or what have you, then they don't have the ability to support

(26:59):
long-term faculty like tenured professors. Another kind of development that is particularly relevant
for academia, I think, is the always shaky, but recently more vulnerable public attitude towards
expertise, technical expertise, specialization, kind of highly trained elite knowledge forms

(27:21):
and systems. Tom Nichols has a book called The Death of Expertise. If you think that expertise
is not valuable, then why would you invest in creating it? Why would you invest in supporting
its perpetuation? But if you think that expertise isn't that valuable, if you think that you don't

(27:42):
need advanced training to be able to do certain kinds of work or to have informed opinions about
certain types of issues, then why would you fund the labor that is involved in generating
or advancing or perpetuating expert forms of knowledge? So there are both general labor market

(28:03):
changes that are also applicable to academia, and there are specific attitudinal changes
that are uniquely impactful for academia, and I think both of these combined help us understand
why universities in general now are staffed by people who are not full-time tenured faculty.

(28:24):
Whenever I have students who are considering graduate study, I warn them that the probability
of getting a tenure-track job today is quite a bit lower than it used to be, but they're often
still really excited about it. And I remind them of the costs they’re going to be facing,
and you talk about those costs quite a bit in your book, one of the quotes that I really liked was:
“The life of the mind is also often and literally the life of the empty stomach.” Would we have

(28:47):
as many people being willing to go through this whole process of many years in graduate school,
of struggling to get by and pay bills, if they didn't have that prospect or that
possibility of arriving at a tenure-track position at the end of the process?
Well, I would like to hope not, but I think it's important to remember first that academics are no

(29:09):
more universally rational maximizers when it comes to their professional decision-making,
and I think the last several decades of higher ed employment suggests that academics are uniquely
not rational maximizers when it comes to their professional decision-making. So I don't think
it's simply or simplistically the case that making academia a worse job prospect is going

(29:32):
to have a linear effect on the number of people who want to break into academia.
That said, I've clearly thrown a lot of statistics at anyone who comes to me for this kind of advice,
because nobody has come twice. I do think that there is some hope that even if academics or
aspiring academics don't completely lose the hope that leads them into this line of work,

(29:55):
that they will be more mindful and more strategic about choosing this line of work, and the reason
I have some hope in this way is because of what I've seen with law school enrollments.
So for years, law school enrollments continued to grow by a few 1000 a year, actually, until
they reached a peak first year or 1L enrollment level of around 52,000, that was the highest. That

(30:21):
was also around the time when a lot of different actors moved to create more transparency around
law school job outs. How likely were you to get a reasonably paying JD requiring job upon graduation
if you went to such and such a school? If you had such and such entering statistics, like an LSAT

(30:44):
test or undergraduate GPA, where would you expect to land in the hierarchy of law firms, which also
correlates, unsurprisingly, to the hierarchy of salaries? And the movement for increased law
school transparency, both in terms of admissions and in terms of graduation or post-graduation
outcomes, had an effect on law school enrollments. So after that peak of around 52,000 1Ls in 2010,

(31:12):
it's more or less stabilized around 38,000 entering first-year law students every year.
And I don't know, because I don't study this in a kind of focused way, whether 38,000 1Ls a year
is an optimal number or something, but it gives me hope that aspiring professionals, aspiring
practitioners of any kind of advanced professional field, if you give them the data, if you throw the

(31:39):
information at them, eventually, they will begin to absorb it and make decisions in light of it,
maybe making different decisions, maybe making decisions with their eyes fully open to the costs
and the consequences and the potential benefits of pursuing their chosen professional path.
If tenure is eliminated and the proportion of faculty and tenure track lines continues

(32:01):
to decrease and shrink, what are the costs to students and society?
Well, I think the first thing to note is that making tenure less common or less protective means
making academia less desirable and less viable as a profession, and without discounting the extent

(32:22):
to which academics are not unusually rational maximizers of their own best ends, maybe they're
even less rational maximizers of their own best ends than the average person, I do think that at
some point, the consequence of eviscerating tenure is going to be that fewer people are going to try

(32:45):
to become academics at all. But I think a second consequence of eviscerating tenure is going to be
not just that fewer people try to do the job, but that fewer people are going to be able to
do the job well, whether we think of the job as teaching or mentoring or research and analysis,
and I don't mean that fewer people will be able to do the job well because we'll have fewer good

(33:09):
people in the job. I mean that fewer people will be able to do the job well, because the conditions
of work will not allow them to do the job well. Job security is a condition of doing academic work
well. So if you do not have job security, you are not going to take the risk to do research,

(33:30):
to undertake publications that, let's face it, in the peer review universe take months,
years, sometimes decades. You're not going to fine-tune classes and spend hours off of your
regular workday guiding and mentoring students. You're just not going to be able to do all of that

(33:51):
because your job is not secure enough to allow you to do all of the things, and we can debate how we
provide academics with job security, what exact name we use to describe the employment format, the
contract that provides academics with the level of job security that they need. I don't think that

(34:12):
tenure is a magical word; I think that what tenure provides is magical and necessary. The one thing
we can be quite sure of is that if that level of job security is not there, then people are
not going to be able to do all of the things that they are required to do for the job in question.
Outside of academia, a lot of people believe that tenure provides a sort of lifetime guarantee,

(34:38):
that pretty much no matter what you do, if you stop doing any productive work and so forth,
you are going to be guaranteed employment. But is tenure really
a guarantee of permanent employment as long as you stay out of jail?
So describing tenure as a job for life is one of those things that just makes my blood pressure
rocket right up because, for one thing, there is no such thing as a job for life. And secondly,

(35:03):
if there was, tenure would not be it. I'm walking a very fine line here, because on the one hand,
I'm saying “tenure is a valuable form of job security,” and on the other hand, I'm saying,
“but it's not ironclad.” The thing is, those are not mutually exclusive positions to hold.
One of the things that I ended up researching and discovering in the course of my quest to find out

(35:26):
how often tenured faculty actually get terminated was studying and building an original data set,
because we don't have this information of individual terminations of tenured faculty;
there are a lot of smaller studies that look at how often faculty quit or want to quit. There are

(35:50):
some studies about how faculty leave academia before they get to tenure. There's not a lot
of information about terminations of tenured faculty, so I did a lot of data scraping and
cross-referencing and built a data set of individual for-cause terminations of

(36:12):
tenured faculty. That means that these are people who achieve tenure, they were fired
for what the university felt was just-cause. The university said, “You did something that
warrants the termination of this relationship, despite the fact that you had tenure.” Now,
the data set that I built, which covers every four-year institution in the United States,

(36:34):
over 20 years, roughly, 2000 to 2021, the number of individual for-cause terminations
in that data set, which are presumably because the tenured professor in question behaved badly,
whether they behave badly enough or what have you, you know, is up for debate. The number of
terminations in that data set over 20 years across all four-year institutions in the United States

(37:01):
is less than the number of tenured faculty who lost their jobs through reductions in force at
13 universities in five years. What do we make of that little fact? Fewer people, fewer tenured
faculty, lost their jobs because of ostensible wrongdoing at all institutions over 20 years,

(37:25):
then lost their jobs through no fault of their own at 13 institutions over five years. That tells me
that tenure does not grant a job for life, because even when you do nothing wrong, market forces
alone will mean that you are extremely vulnerable to losing your job. You are more vulnerable to

(37:47):
losing your job through no fault of your own than because you did something wrong. If you
lose your job, whether through your own fault or not, because you spent enough time to get tenure,
you learned how to jump through all of the hoops, how to craft the courses and the syllabi,
how to publish the articles, how to construct the research. You unlearned, or you forgot, or you

(38:13):
failed to learn, the tasks that might make you on the general labor market an employable applicant.
So more people are losing their jobs despite having tenure for reasons that have nothing
to do with wrongdoing, and then because they did all the things that they had to do to get tenure,
they're going to struggle to get a position in the general labor market. All of these things

(38:38):
are so many ways of saying tenure does not provide a job for life, even if you do everything right.
So, given all of this information that you've just shared about contracts and
not permanent employment, should faculty be concerned who are on tenure-track lines?
I think that one thing that faculty should always keep in mind is that academia is still an

(39:01):
industry. Tenured employment is still employment, which means that it's a contractual relationship,
and there are no guarantees in contractual relationships. But they should also remember
that tenure is still more protective, more security-enhancing than the baseline rule of

(39:22):
at-will employment that applies to most indefinite employees in the United States, and even more
security-enhancing than most forums of just-cause employment. So tenure is still worth having,
but I think that one thing academics should remember is that academia is still an industry.
Tenured academia still represents an employment relationship and employment relationships are

(39:47):
contractual. You always have to keep your eyes open. One of the reasons why we have all been able
to benefit so much from the wide variety of tasks that faculty perform is because there is this idea
that you pursue academia, not because it's the best paying job, or it's the easiest job to get,

(40:12):
or it's an obvious career path, but that you pursue it because it's a vocation, it is mission
aligned for who you are. And I think that faculty would do well to balance that commitment to the
job and what it entails and what it really can be, which I think is magical. After all, I'm doing

(40:34):
this work, but that they balance that commitment with an understanding that this is a job. This is
a contractual relationship, and you need to maintain an eye on the relationship between
yourself and the other contracting party, which is your university employer. At the same time,
I do think academics shouldn't go off on the deep end by saying that, “Well, tenure is meaningless.”

(41:01):
It's really not. It is worth having because it is far more security-enhancing and protective than
the baseline at-will rule that applies to most indefinite employment contracts in the United
States, and it is even more security-enhancing than the various forms of just-cause contracts

(41:22):
that apply to a lot of indefinite employees. So tenure is worth having, but it's worth
being clear-eyed about what exactly a contractual form can offer you and how you should approach a
relationship that, in the end, is an employment relationship, and should be treated as such.

(41:42):
In your book, you note that at-will employment is much more common in the U.S. than it is in
much of the rest of the world. Are we seeing the same attacks on tenure in other countries as we're
seeing in the U.S., or critiques of tenure in the rest of the world, as we're seeing in the U.S.?
That question is a little bit tricky to answer, because at-will employment simply doesn't exist

(42:03):
anywhere else. So carve-outs from at-will employment, just-cause contracts, and specific
forms of those carve-outs. Tenured employment has different implications in contexts where the
baseline assumption is different. So I think that it's worth beginning from an understanding that

(42:27):
security of employment for academics contrasts with something else outside the United States,
and as a result of that, there's less of a contrast. Even the word tenure doesn't get
used as frequently in many other countries. It does exist elsewhere, tenure. Canada has

(42:51):
tenure. Germany, famously, has tenure. There are other countries where the particular employment
relationships between faculty, or at least some faculty, and their university employers,
are called tenured relationships, but the implications of having or not having tenure
are very different in those countries. That said, even though tenure either doesn't exist in

(43:16):
a lot of other countries or doesn't have the same implications for job security in those countries,
because none of those countries are operating on a baseline assumption of at-will employment,
attacks on Higher Education, on the security of faculty at universities on the freedom of

(43:36):
inquiry of faculty at universities, those are not unique to the American context by any means.
So, following up on that, what are some things that we can advocate for to protect against the
war on tenure and against this war on higher education more broadly?
So I think that there are a handful of things that we in academia can do,

(44:00):
and some of them may seem like they are mutually exclusive, maybe they are, but I think they're all
important. One is that I think we need to change the framing of why the things we're fighting for,
in this particular instance, say, tenured employment structures, matter. So what matters

(44:22):
most to us from within academia, what seems the most compelling argument in support of something,
may not be what resonates outside academia. I think that a lot of academics want to defend
tenure purely because tenure makes academic freedom more possible. That's a valid argument,

(44:44):
but I don't think it's one that is resonating particularly well socially or politically right
now. On the other hand, I think that job security and the ability to perform a job that you've been
hired to do and that at least many people still want done and done well, that is an argument that

(45:04):
may resonate more broadly outside the academy, and just because many of us think that academic
freedom is the reason we should have tenure, doesn't mean that it is the only reason we
should articulate support for tenure, especially when engaging in public-f acing conversations. A

(45:25):
second thing we could do is kind of the opposite. So if, on the one hand, we want to change the way
we frame arguments in support of tenure, to account for what resonates well with a public
audience or even a political audience, as opposed to what seems most significant or relevant to us,

(45:46):
we also need to be unafraid to claim what is necessary to describe how things
actually happen within academia. We need to be unafraid to say that research and teaching are
long-horizon endeavors. We need to say that you need flexibility in order to be able to

(46:08):
do the range of tasks that academics are asked to do: teaching, devising syllabi,
mentoring, guiding, conducting various forms of research, conducting peer review, engaging
in shared governance practices, publication. These are many very different types of tasks.
They require flexibility. Flexibility requires security. It also requires long time scales,

(46:35):
and it is okay to say this is what it takes to do the job and do it well. I think a final thing
we could do to help defend academia against the war on tenure is to try to resist the urge to dig
in our heels or circle the wagons around what we have grown up professionally, thinking of as the

(46:57):
industry ideal or industry norm. If we think that we are in a period of flux where attitudes towards
higher education, understandings of what expertise brings to an individual or to a profession,
what the good life is after you complete your education, as you search for a job, then we need

(47:22):
to be willing to change with that transformation. Insisting that nothing about the way academia
has existed so far in the United States change during a period of extreme flux is unrealistic,
and I think it's also a little unfair. And so even as we say, “this is what it takes to do academic

(47:44):
work well. It takes time, it takes flexibility, and those things take security, and that's why
tenure matters.” We also need to be able to think expansively about how to provide those things,
instead of saying it must remain as it always was. Where that will take us, I don't know,

(48:04):
but flexibility is not simply something that we do every day in our own jobs. It has to also come
into play when we talk about our jobs and think about what they might look like in the future,

We always end with the question (48:17):
what's next?
Well, the more I've studied tenure and faculty relationships, the more I've become interested
in how those practices and these professional structures exist within a broader social
context. And so I really started thinking a lot more about and leaning into the study of

(48:41):
the academia-society relationship. The way that I've been doing this most recently is by thinking
about public scholarship and public engagement, an example of which we're engaged in right now.
I've been working as part of a fellowship program here at Emory under our senior vice
president of research's office. That's allowed me to do a mini institutional

(49:05):
ethnography on how faculty colleagues across the university, across disciplines and career stages,
think about what it means to translate academia and scholarship for a public audience. What are
the various ways in which we do this? How do we make ourselves understandable and

(49:25):
approachable for the people who ultimately we want to reach? That kind of research, I think,
is where I'm headed in an intellectual and professional sense in the near future,
but in a more literal sense, I'm about to take my six-year-old son for his birthday dinner.
Very nice. Well, I've really enjoyed reading your book and public scholarship, I think,

(49:48):
is a great way to go. If we just keep talking to each other about our research,
it's not going to have as much of an impact with the public in terms of the public views of higher
ed unless we can show that we're doing things that actually matter in some way to society.
Absolutely, I think that this next line of research, or next direction of my research,

(50:09):
is basically me trying to do as I say, and to explain and reach out widely, because I think
that both academics and the public need to adjust as we figure out where academia is heading next.
Well, hopefully we can have you on again to talk about that topic.

(50:29):
I would love that.
Well, we look forward to our next conversation. Thank you.
Thank you both so much.
Thank you.
If you've enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple
Podcasts or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation,

(50:49):
join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page. You can find show notes, transcripts, and other
materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
Editing assistance provided by Madison Lee.