(Why) Tenure Matters

Welcome to the third installment of “The Academic Worker,” where we’ve been kicking things off with a miniseries on tenure, academia’s most controversial practice.

Consider the two questions about tenure that probably matter most to skeptical (or merely confused) nonacademics: Why should I want you, Professor, to have more job security than I have? and Do you believe there are any limits on what tenure allows you to do?

Caveat: These are big questions. I write a small column. The arguments below are to fully-fledged answers what microcinema is to the Star Wars franchise.

Now, take the first question: Why should professors have above-average job security?

Last month, we discussed tenure as a variety of just cause contracts and noted that this makes tenured employment one of many exceptions to the at-will work default. Remember, the at-will rule probably affects around 70 to 80 percent of the U.S. workforce. This makes tenure an exception to the exception, so it’s fair for outsiders to ask: What’s so exceptional about professors?

Here are some answers I’ve heard or used:

Academic Freedom. This one comes first because I enjoy keeping my head on my shoulders, but its persuasive powers seem variable according to the day of the week and party affiliation. Regardless, the idea is that professors must be able to teach, research and publish controversial or unpopular ideas without fear that it will cost them their jobs. Character development (pedagogical tasks) and research advances (scholarly tasks) both sometimes require engagement with controversial or unpopular ideas. Professors need the protection of tenure so that they can do the job they’ve been hired to do.

Recruitment. I’ve noted before that tenure likely spread because administrators viewed it as a valuable employment incentive during a time when enrollments were booming and professors were scarce. Universities couldn’t (or wouldn’t) match industry salaries, but the job security of tenure offered potential hires something else of value. We obviously don’t live in that post-war boom era anymore but we do still need to recruit new talent. We want our young people taught by qualified, committed scholars, and we want at least some of our research undertaken by people not wholly beholden to market logics. We want these things even though the financial implications of pursuing a job in higher ed are worse than ever—professors in many disciplines take a pay cut to work in academia and do irreversible damage to their long-term financial health. That’s why tenure remains an important recruitment tool.

Knowledge Production and Professional Training. Research of all kinds is slow and risky: Time, money and effort do not guarantee results. Universities dominate pre-commercial research (which may not be an ideal arrangement, but it’s our current reality). Tenure incentivizes the choice to pursue lengthy, expensive education for a lesser-paying job in which you might work hard for years at problems the market isn’t interested in solving and have unreliable results to report. Universities also train most of the people who are capable of producing knowledge—and they train the people who do your taxes, operate on your body, write your will, and design your house. There are other ways to train people and produce nonmarketable knowledge, but so long as we rely on universities to fulfill these tasks and universities rely on underpaying highly credentialed workers, tenure incentivizes choices that directly bear on the public interest.

Institutional Operations and Survival. We often hear that tenure facilitates shared governance by allowing employees to pursue the good of the profession or the institution despite peer pressure and the possibility of employer retaliation. What’s usually forgotten is that shared governance benefits the institution more than the employee—particularly now, with the specter of artificial intelligence looming large. That’s because institutional survival in the age of AI will turn on two things: persuading students and sponsors of a university’s research excellence and convincing them of its ability to facilitate personal growth (rather than mere knowledge accumulation). The employees with the skill or obligation to undertake this work, and to ensure it’s performed well rather than expediently or quickly, do so to the benefit of their employer.

Because this is microcinema, not Star Wars, I’ll move on to the second question: Are there any limits on what tenure allows professors to do?

Many professors will readily reply that tenure does not protect against the consequences of illegal or unethical behavior: sexual misconduct, bullying, harassment, fraud, theft—according to every professor I know, tenure is no shield against legitimate charges of these types.

But that answer hides a lot and it’s not really what the skeptical nonacademic is asking. What they want to know is whether we think tenure allows us to do our jobs however we see fit without adverse employment consequences. Most people don’t have this level of freedom, as the Supreme Court decided in 2006 (regarding public employees). So why should professors be any different?

For instance, should tenure allow Michel DeGraff, an expert on Creole languages at MIT, to teach a class on linguistics and decolonization in Israel/Palestine over the objections of his colleagues as expressed through internal approval processes?

DeGraff believes tenure permits this. “M.I.T. should not be repressing my teaching in this way,” he said. His colleagues believe that the course lies outside his field of expertise.

I’ve written before that it’s often surprisingly hard to accurately define someone’s scholarly expertise. That’s partly because expertise changes over time: If you’re in the business of lifelong learning, you’ll learn new things on new topics—not just more things on the same old topic. But you won’t have new credentials to show for it.

For that reason and others, credentials can be poor proxies for expertise. So can academia’s coin of the realm, peer-reviewed publications. I can’t replicate those arguments here (remember, microcinema!) but DeGraff has a point: He may well have the expertise needed to teach that class.

… but does he have a right to teach it?

This is likely where I depart from many of my colleagues. I don’t think I have a right to do my job any way I see fit regardless of the objections of my equally expert colleagues. I do think I have more latitude than many workers to define what “doing the job” entails. I think I& need that latitude to do the job I was hired to do. But extra autonomy is not complete autonomy—to have that, I would need to be an independent and independently wealthy scholar.

I opened this column by noting that “academics are workers.” I’m wrapping this introductory miniseries with the same observation. Workers can have more or less autonomy, and more or less job security. Professors need a lot of both to do their jobs. But if you need to collect a paycheck—if you need the scaffolding provided by others (students, staff, faculty colleagues) to be able to do your job—then you are a worker, and you work with and for people besides yourself. Those people matter. Tenure matters. Both are simultaneously and equally true.