Kuttner on TAP: The Republican Attack on Tenure

At least five states governed by Republicans are attempting to end or weaken academic tenure. This is part of their ongoing war against liberal intellectuals accused of indoctrinating children. Killing tenure would make it harder to recruit first-rate scholars to public universities in these states, some of which are world-class, including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Texas at Austin, and Georgia Tech.

The campaign has gone farthest in Texas, where the legislature very nearly passed a law abolishing tenure outright. The bill was championed by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, after a group of faculty at UT Austin sponsored a resolution objecting to the legislature’s ban on the teaching of critical race theory in primary and secondary schools.

Patrick’s bill passed the Texas Senate in April; but in May, the Texas House approved a more moderate bill making it easier to fire tenured professors, and the Senate agreed to the House bill. Several other states, including Florida, have mandated five-year reviews of tenured professors, which are weak on due process and fall short of traditional grounds for removal such as “moral turpitude.”

These bills are a slippery slope. The war on tenure is continuing, and tenure as protection for academic freedom is worth defending. But I would have more sympathy for America’s professoriate if tenure hadn’t already turned into something close to its opposite.

When tenure was invented in the late 19th century, donors to universities and some state legislatures had been putting pressure on public universities not to hire scholars with reformist views. In an epic case in 1894, the Wisconsin legislature and business interests put pressure on the University of Wisconsin to fire the great progressive economist Richard T. Ely, who advocated strikes and labor law to defend unions. But the university’s board defended Ely, who kept his job.

In 1915, the modern tenure system was codified by the American Association of University Professors, and gradually adopted by nearly all universities. One key argument was that since college teachers were not as well paid as counterparts in the private sector with comparable credentials, they would at least get job security and academic freedom.

Fast-forward a century. Tenure is not doing a great job of protecting academic freedom, because increasingly scholars of heterodox views never get tenure in the first place. This leads to insidious pressure on young academics to pull their punches and accommodate to the orthodoxy, some of which cries out for dissent.

Meanwhile, the percentage of college professors who are in tenure-track jobs has steadily fallen, in favor of lowly adjuncts. Between 1987 and 2021, according to the AAUP, the number of university teachers with contingent jobs rose from 47 to 68 percent. By definition, adjuncts have neither job security, decent pay, nor academic freedom. They are on short-term contracts that are subject to nonrenewal. Counting prep time, they earn about minimum wage.

Academia, like so much of American society, has divided into a nicely compensated dwindling elite, and an army of serfs who are so harried that they lack the time to be first-class instructors, much less researchers. The AAUP, representing the elite, has issued reports and statements of outrage about the state efforts to abolish or weaken tenure. They would have more credibility if they put as much effort into resisting the plague of contingent teachers.