Academics Are Workers

Welcome to the first installment of “The Academic Worker,” a monthly column that explores the academic workplace through a legal lens.

Scratch that.

We’re going to explore the academic workplace—period. My goal is to normalize talking about academic labor as work and academics as workers at a time when everyone wants to talk about the aims and risks and merits of higher ed. Those are valuable conversations to have, but they aren’t the conversations we’ll be having here.

Instead, I want to discuss the work of academia because the conditions in which this work is accomplished are poorly understood and rapidly changing. Since I’m legally trained and teach in a law school, this column will often explore how the law shapes our work in ways that are and are not industry-specific. (“Industry,” by the way, is a term that will appear frequently and nonpejoratively in this column.) But my real focus is on academics, who, like all workers, must navigate organizational dynamics and legal constraints. As much as possible, I want academic workers to turn both to their advantage.

I’m Deepa Das Acevedo, author of The War on Tenure. Right now, it feels like my whole life has been building up to the task of dissecting academic labor. I’m a third-generation professor who grew up discussing tenure around the dinner table and tagging along with my parents to academic conferences. I’m a work-law scholar who teaches classes like Employment Law and Employee Benefits. And I’m also an anthropologist—not the Indiana Jones variety, but the sociocultural kind tasked with “making the familiar strange, and the strange familiar.” Nothing has ever felt as natural to me, or as necessary, as the work of translating academic labor for a broader audience—including an audience of academics.

Let’s start with one of the most controversial aspects of academic labor: tenure.

Since 2020, when COVID-era mass layoffs first prompted my curiosity in academic job security, I’ve been studying faculty tenure as an employment protection. I began with an empirical question: “How often do tenured faculty lose their jobs despite having tenure?” As I searched for answers, I realized how much confusion exists about what tenure is and what it does—even among tenure-stream academics.

So let’s begin there: What is tenure? Here’s where the labor focus of this column comes into view. Instead of explaining tenure with reference to academic freedom, let’s consider tenure the way an employment lawyer would—as a contractual feature.

Tenure creates a “just cause” employment relationship: The employer of a tenured employee must articulate a reasonable ground—a just cause—to terminate that employee. Lots of employees in the United States work under just cause contracts, including most government employees, all unionized employees, any employee hired for a specific length of time and even orchestra musicians.

But although just cause contracts aren’t unique to academia, they are unusual within the larger context of the U.S. labor force. Most American workers—probably 70-to 80 percent—are governed by something called the at-will rule. This rule famously allows employers to fire employees for “good reason, bad reason or no reason at all.”

That’s right: firing someone for no reason is explicitly acceptable under the at-will rule, as is a bad reason for doing the same thing. (As an athletically ungifted person who was born in Canada, supporting the wrong football team is my favorite legal bad reason, because it is incomprehensible to me on so many levels.)

You can imagine that the at-will rule doesn’t provide a whole lot of job security. And you might reasonably assume that most people like having job security. But what you would probably find surprising is that most Americans think they have more job security than they actually possess. Most people in this country think their employers can’t fire them for “bad reason or no reason at all”—and most of them also think it is a good thing that their employer is (supposedly) constrained in this way.

Against this backdrop of legal rules and popular opinion, tenure does indeed start to look puzzling. Why do academics need “extra” job security? Why can’t they be satisfied with what the rest of us have? What’s so special about academia?

We academics need to take these questions seriously. Tenure creates a remarkably protective contractual relationship even compared to other forms of just cause employment. In a garden-variety just cause contract, an employer might fire an employee in the morning and, if the employee objects, retroactively articulate a reasonable ground for termination later that afternoon. As more than one legal scholar has pointed out, just cause doesn’t imply just process.

Tenure, however, does come with due-process rights (or, at least, it’s supposed to). Most tenure-granting institutions stipulate that a tenured professor is entitled to some type of notice, explanation and chance to defend themselves before they lose their job. Most institutions also incorporate peer assessment into the process.

These are powerful improvements on the at-will working conditions experienced by most Americans. They mitigate the harshness of the at-will rule, which requires no notice before termination and no grounds for termination. They leave academic workers who are tenured significantly better off than those who lack tenure, much less the general American workforce.

Despite this, academics have long downplayed the legal and material advantages that tenure brings. Instead, we’ve defended tenure based on its connection to academic freedom—essentially, we’ve sought public support for one unusual benefit on the grounds that, without it, we can’t have another unusual benefit. In doing this, we’ve limited our own ability to understand, evaluate, critique and defend this important (if vanishing) employment practice.

This column is not about tenure, although that’s where we’ve started and where we will no doubt frequently return. Rather, this column is about centering labor dynamics and employment considerations in higher ed conversations where they’ve long been overlooked. We need to know ourselves better as workers before we can evaluate past practices or future directions. We need to know ourselves better as workers before we can feel empowered at work.