Chapter 10 dispels the myth that tenure-stream academics lead financially carefree lives using a combination of salary and debt statistics and individual stories. It also shows that, in many disciplines, faculty pay a “salary penalty” for choosing academia and that they are expected to provide significant amounts of uncompensated labor without complaint.

Chapter 8 explains how difficult it is to get a tenure-stream faculty position despite years of preparation and thousands of dollars in educational investment. It uses both national statistics and specific examples to illustrate the workings of the academic job market, which is characterized by few, geographically dispersed, institutional employers seeking highly specialized employees. Importantly, this chapter discusses academic hiring as it existed before the 2025 federal funding reductions.

Chapter 22 discusses the phenomenon of reductions-in-force, which are not included in the TTS but which account for a majority of tenured faculty terminations. The chapter explains patterns in RIFs as well as their scale and uses specific examples to show how the impact of RIFs extends beyond the job loss they directly cause.

Chapter 18 introduces the Tenured-Terminations Study data with a detailed explanation of the design choices that inform it. The chapter also revisits and critiques the notion that tenure confers a “job for life” and clarifies why the analogy drawn between faculty tenure and judicial tenure is inapt and dangerous.

Chapter 20 uses a specific insight from the TTS data – that more tenured-terminations occurred at public rather than private universities – to show why tenure is not the root cause of observed problems and why legislative attacks on tenure do not present a solution. It builds on the narrative and counternarrative analysis provided in Chapter 19 as well as the importance of hierarchy and power differentials first discussed in Chapter 13.

Chapter 2 introduces the author as an anthropologist, an employment law scholar, and the child of two professors. It explains how this background informs the method and scope of the book and why it, along with qualitative and quantitative research, provides insight into a range of academic experiences.

As academia increasingly comes under attack in the United States, The War on Tenure steps in to demystify what professors do and to explain the importance of tenure for their work. Deepa Das Acevedo takes readers on a backstage tour of tenure-stream academia to reveal hidden dynamics and obstacles. She challenges the common belief that tenure is only important for the protection of academic freedom. Instead, she argues that the security and autonomy provided by tenure are also essential to the performance of work that students, administrators, parents, politicians, and taxpayers value. Going further, Das Acevedo shows that tenure exists on a spectrum of comparable employment contracts and she debunks the notion that tenure warps the incentives of professors. Ultimately, The War on Tenure demonstrates that the job security tenure provides is not nearly as unusual, undesirable, or unwarranted as critics claim.

Chapter 12 tackles the first of several myths regarding tenure’s effects on individual faculty incentives, namely, that tenure promotes undesirable iconoclasm. The chapter uses available research linking tenure with intellectual and pedagogical risk-taking as well as industry knowledge regarding how newly tenured professors actually behave to show that the “post-tenure renegade” is more assumption than fact.

Chapter 11 introduces and explains the concept of “auto-depreciation”: a phenomenon that forces academics to acquire skills not valued in the general labor market and to lose skills that are valued. It argues that auto-depreciation reduces the exit options available at all stages of an academic career and that it is linked to the rise of Quit Lit and academic coaching services.

Chapter 13 addresses a second myth regarding tenure’s effects on individual faculty incentives, namely, that tenure facilitates predatory behavior. The chapter focuses on sexual misconduct and draws on available research regarding its prevalence inside and outside academia – as well as inside and outside the United States – to show that severe power disparities, rather than tenure itself, are most likely responsible for high misconduct rates in academia.

Chapter 4 argues that, in most cases, pursuing academia means jeopardizing your own future financial well-being as well as that of your family. It discusses implicit and explicit costs, the mistaken but long-lived “six-year standard” for PhD completion, and the time value of money, all en route to dismantling the myth that academia provides financial stability to its flagship workers: tenure-stream professors.