A book with this title could begin in any number of ways.

It could begin, for example, with recent political campaigns to abolish or severely undermine tenure at public universities. Legislative efforts of this type have surfaced in Georgia, Florida, Wisconsin, South Carolina, Iowa, Missouri, and Texas, among others. I know tenured professors who have fled some of these states for what they believe will be more hospitable environments, often sacrificing high institutional rankings and plentiful resources to do so. I know other tenured professors who have lost interest in ever working for a public university again – regardless of regional political climate – because it just feels too difficult to be both a scholar and a state employee right now. And I know many current and aspiring “tenure-stream” professors – that is, professors who are either tenured or on the tenure-track – whose desperation for stable employment or a shared house with their partner has made them willing to go wherever in the country their highly unpredictable job market takes them.

A book like this could also begin with individual stories about tenure – about getting it, losing it, and watching it be disregarded. I could open with the story of Noeleen McIlvenna, a tenured history professor at Wright State University in Ohio. Starting in 2020, “Dr. No” watched and fought as dozens of her pre-tenure, tenured, and nontenure-track colleagues were fired or persuaded to resign by their university-employer. Or I could open with a description of what it’s like to be denied the chance to win tenure according to Garrett Felber, a former assistant professor at Ole Miss. Felber’s contract was not renewed in 2020 because, according to the university, he proved difficult to work with, and because, according to him, his prison-abolition research was unpopular with the university’s donors.¹ Or I could open with stories from the growing number of scholars – Steven Salaita and Nikole Hannah-Jones, among others – who’ve had offers of tenured employment retracted or downgraded after pressure was brought to bear on their intended employers.

Finally, this kind of book could begin with the protests that rocked American university campuses after October 7, 2023. Those protests might seem totally unconnected to tenure, save to the extent that they triggered violations of academic freedom (and one tenured-termination: Maura Finkelstein). But even where professors lost no wages and no campus access – as in the cases of Jodi Dean (Hobart and William Smith) and Abdulkader Sinno (Indiana) – academic freedom wasn’t “all” that was hanging in the balance.² Being disciplined at work is an employment concern, too. Keeping your mouth shut to preserve your job is an employment concern, too. Just ask anyone who’s ever lost their shift or their bonus or their job because they irritated the boss.

All of these are ways that a book called The War on Tenure might reasonably begin. But this book isn’t about the war on tenure. It’s a response to the war on tenure. Because of that, and because this book is about academics but not solely for academics, I’m going to start by talking about tenure itself.

Tenure, as Chapter 5 explains in greater detail, refers to a type of contractual relationship. Actually, it’s more like a subtype of contract, in the same way that dachshunds are a subtype of dog. Tenure is a version of the “just cause” employment contracts that govern millions of American workers across industries ranging from orchestras to fast-food service. This means that tenure both is and isn’t special – and explaining how both these statements can be simultaneously true is an important goal of this book.

My broader goal, of course, is to talk about tenure, and ultimately to defend it. But to do this, The War on Tenure proceeds along two very different paths.

When it comes to the most common criticisms of tenure, I take a head-on approach. A concrete claim demands a concrete rebuttal – and critics of tenure make some very concrete claims indeed when they argue that tenure encourages bad behavior, lazy behavior, or undesirably iconoclastic behavior. They also say that tenure grants the faculty who have it too much latitude to police themselves. But Chapters 12–15 show that these criticisms – even when they’re made by other academics – reflect stereotypes about academia and misconceptions about academic life. For the most part, the critics just aren’t right.

By contrast, when it comes to explaining why tenure is valuable and necessary, I approach things more indirectly. After all, there’s no boogeyman to fight here, just a need to show that tenure matters as an employment protection. It matters for most faculty in most circumstances because it offers job security to workers who face high barriers to entry, long hours, difficult jobs, wage penalties, and poor exit options. Tenure should matter to nonfaculty, too, because the labor that professors perform is wanted by students, needed by university administrators, and beneficial to society. To explain the whys and hows of all this, Chapters 7–11 take you on a behind-the-scenes tour of American academia as it actually operates today.

For these reasons, as well as a few more I’ll explain shortly, this book differs in both scope and audience from many other scholarly writings on tenure. In fact, as far as I can tell, this book is unlike most other scholarly writings on tenure. That’s not an unmitigated virtue – there is no such thing when it comes to research methods – but it does have its advantages.

First, unlike many well-known books on faculty tenure, this one is not primarily historical in nature. That’s partly because there is so much that needs saying about tenure’s current realities that a prolonged excursion into the past seems wasteful. At the same time, this book’s emphasis on the present also reflects the fact that I have a bone to pick with how histories of tenure are usually told. Most of the time, they come to a halt somewhere around 1940, when tenure was officially “invented” in the United States, instead of continuing on to the post-War era, when tenure became an industry practice in American academia.

That historiographic pattern limits our ability to understand why tenure might matter today. It hides the extent to which tenure was popularized by administrators who viewed it as an employment perk, rather than by faculty who viewed it as an expressive safeguard. When I do spend a little time diving into tenure’s past, as in Chapters 6 and 16, I do so to show that recruitment and retention – in other words, employment concerns – played a much bigger role in making tenure a normative industry practice than is commonly understood. What was valuable about tenure then is still valuable today.

A second way this book differs from standard academic writing on tenure is in its scope – and I mean this in a few senses. As much as possible, I try to talk about tenure-stream faculty writ large. These are the university personnel who have or are eligible to earn tenure, and focusing on them effectively excludes most people (around 75%!) who teach or conduct research within a university setting today.³ Universities have been decreasing the number of people who are hired into tenure-stream positions for decades, to the point where most of the people your child or your friend’s child or your constituent’s child calls Professor isn’t considered one by the institution that’s paying them. Instead, they are viewed as temporary workers who can be given low wages and usually no benefits and who are hired so incredibly last minute that class schedules merely list them as “(Professor) Staff.”⁴

But emphasizing tenure-stream faculty also broadens the scope of this book because most studies of tenure are limited to specific subgroups of professors: computer science faculty or law faculty, or professors in a certain geographic area or at a certain type of institution. I rely on all this prior literature because, to be frank, there are surprisingly few empirical studies of tenure at all. Academics may like talking endlessly about themselves at dinner parties and other inopportune moments, but it turns out that we do not particularly relish studying our most famous perk in any sustained and rigorous empirical fashion.

I want to expand the conversation. Consequently, this book talks about faculty tenure across region, discipline, and institutional type, with the caveat that I limit myself to four-year institutions in the United States (which I will mostly refer to as “universities” for ease of reading). Tenure does exist at many community colleges and some special-focus institutions, like art schools, but it is somewhat rarer, and, by many accounts, it is on the wane. Tenure also most definitely exists outside the United States – for instance, in Canada, where I was born, and where my parents spent their careers, and in Germany, where tenure was developed and whose research universities inspired much of the organizational infrastructure behind American higher education. But the significance of tenure as an employment protection, as opposed to simply being an indication of professional achievement and prestige, is, to a great degree, unique to the American context.

The exceptionalism of American-style tenure makes sense, as we will see, thanks to the exceptionalism of another American employment practice: the At-Will Rule. Nowhere else in the world – certainly in no peer countries, economically speaking – can the average worker be fired for good reason, bad reason, or no reason at all. In the United States, however, this is entirely possible for the vast majority of workers who are classified as “employees.” You can be legally fired here because you support a football team your boss dislikes or because you wore teal to the office or because it’s a Thursday. So long as your termination was not because you belong to what lawyers call a “protected category,” or for another reason that has been specifically outlawed, if you are an at-will employee – which, again, most employees are – you are very likely out of luck. (Even if you were fired for an illegal reason, you are likely out of luck because litigation is costly and punishing, and because legal doctrine is very often stacked against workers… but that’s a different story, for a different book.)

My focus on tenure as a type of contractual relationship represents the third way in which this book differs from much of the existing scholarship. Tenure becomes easier to understand when we stop talking about it only within certain disciplines or only as an expressive safeguard and, instead, consider what it means as an employment protection. In the pages that follow, you will see a lot of information about job market statistics, threshold credentials, exit options, and other factors that shape academia as an industry like any other. You will also see less about academic freedom than you might have reasonably expected to find in a book about university professors. It is not that I think academic freedom is unimportant – how could I? It’s simply that, as someone who teaches employment law, and as someone whose universe is thickly peopled by individuals trying to get and keep one very specific (increasingly rare) type of job, I think tenure matters for reasons that are far more prosaic than pedagogical or intellectual autonomy.

After all, even though tenure is supposed to make someone harder to fire than the At-Will Rule allows, there are still many reasons why a tenured professor might face termination. Tenured faculty do not, despite the favorite slogan of critics inside and outside the academy, have “jobs for life.” A professor who has engaged in academic misconduct (usually, plagiarizing or falsifying research), sexual misconduct (anything from inappropriate relationships to assault), or unprofessional conduct (most commonly, nonsexual workplace bullying) can be fired by their university on those grounds. The simple fact that universities must have grounds to fire tenured faculty is one of the most important ways in which tenure modifies the At-Will Rule. (That same requirement is also what protects millions of other employees who are similarly exempt from the At-Will Rule on the basis of contractual terms or statutory law.)

But a tenured faculty member can also be fired through no fault of their own. It may happen because their university is restructuring its departments and no longer has an institutional home for them. Or it may happen simply because their university is experiencing financial hardship and can no longer afford their salaries. Very often, these two processes are related. Both are becoming increasingly common. As Chapters 18 and 22 explain, these varied paths to job loss – for individual cause and for economic reasons – make academia a lot more like other industries than is commonly appreciated. What makes academia different are the ramifications of losing a job, which are surprisingly and unusually severe. Tenure helps to square the circle, but it is not – and is not meant to be – impermeable.

Fourth, this book also differs from earlier scholarship on tenure by not drawing exclusively on the research methods of any single discipline. Sometimes I will zoom out to give you a sky-view perspective, as I do while discussing income statistics in Chapter 10. At other times I will dive deeply into one or two human examples, as I do in Chapter 3 while describing the very real, very material hardships that aspiring professors experience just to have a shot at an excruciatingly tough job market. Often, I will rely on data and narratives that have been produced by other people, whether those people are academics, journalists, government actors, or industry analysts. Many times, I will reach for material that I, with the help of several talented assistants, have created myself.

Finally, my approach to thinking about tenure does more than inform the topics I choose to cover in this book: it also informs the language I use and the tone I strike. For instance, whether I call them academics, faculty, or professors, I make a point of also referring to the people who want, win, or lose tenure as workers and as employees. This usage is gaining popularity as more and more faculty exist outside the tenure-stream and are finding it both useful and necessary to identify as wage-earning laborers. But I want all parties – including tenured and tenure-track faculty, as well as the nonacademics who think about them – to understand that everyone in this book is a worker, that most of them are employees, and that there is neither shame in those facts nor any gains in denying them.

I’ll also generally refer to academia as an industry even though this description is extremely uncommon among academics themselves, and most of them would consider it to be pejorative. While I understand where they’re coming from, I don’t think that academia exists outside market forces any more than I think that it has to in order to deserve respect. Saying that academia is an industry doesn’t mean that the values governing academia should be identical to the values governing any other industry, whether the workers in it produce engines or toothbrushes or salon services.

These kinds of language choices reflect my sense that academic exceptionalism is overblown by both supporters and critics of tenure. Critics of tenure tend to argue that the professors who have it invariably achieve almost superhuman levels of iconoclasm, predatorial behavior, or laziness. Meanwhile, supporters of tenure tend to talk as if academia has a monopoly on noble motives and on contributions to societal well-being, or even to democracy itself. Since I’m a professor, and since one of my goals here is to defend tenure, I won’t bother pretending to be neutral. But I also won’t bother pretending to find either of these attitudes anything other than a bit silly. Put simply: we’re better than you think but not as good as we think.

Taken together, these differences in what I say and how I say it mean that this book will occasionally send mixed messages about tenure itself. It will sometimes sound as if I’m arguing that tenure is a powerful form of protection for any academic who’s lucky enough to have it. I am. At other times, it will sound as if I’m arguing the opposite: that tenure isn’t anything like the ironclad guarantee of the sun and the moon that it’s made out to be. I’m doing this, too. The reason I vacillate between these positions is that tenure gets attacked on two sides. It gets attacked by critics who say that it isn’t really meaningful (and should therefore be abandoned) and by critics who say it’s way too meaningful (and should therefore be abandoned). I think both criticisms are too extreme to be accurate. Tenure is valuable, not impermeable or perfect… but since no employment practice is either of these things, I think it’s fine to say as much about tenure.

The rest of this book very loosely follows a chronological arc.

The two substantive chapters of Part One are concerned with what it takes to get a tenure-track job. I talk about the material hardships imposed by the credentialization and training processes aspiring academics must go through. I also talk about the long-term consequences of taking on those hardships given the goal that they’re meant to be in service of (a tenure-stream job) as well as the odds of reaching that goal. These are considerations that regularly surface in discussions about jobs in other industries without necessarily amounting to fatal indictments of either those jobs or those industries. We need to learn to speak of academia in similar ways.

Parts Two and Three are the core of the book, both conceptually and in length. Some chapters in each part clarify what tenure is, legally speaking, and set the record straight on how tenure came to be a normative industry practice, even if it is no longer a dominant one. But most of the chapters here are connected by a shared focus on what tenure does – to legal entitlements, to incentives, to personal lives, to exit options, and so on.

The bulk of Part Two explains the costs of pursuing academia. More specifically, it explains the costs of pursuing a tenure-stream job – and, even more specifically, it describes the costs of successfully winning tenure. The costs I’m talking about here are both monetary and nonmonetary, and while many of them are well known to academics, they’re often hard to see or to fully appreciate if you’re on the outside looking in. Tenure-stream academia can be a great way to earn a living, just like many other elite professions, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. By remaining silent about the realities of their jobs, tenured and tenure-track faculty have allowed their critics to define what those realities are. We’ve forced nonacademics to learn about our industry from people who have little first hand – or even third hand – knowledge of it. Small wonder, then, that popular perceptions of what it means to be or become a professor are unrecognizable to many of us within the profession.

The bulk of Part Three refutes the most common criticisms of tenure. Both internal critics (other academics) and external critics (politicians, journalists, and other commentators) make these arguments to justify the weakening or abolition of tenure. But, as the chapters in Part Three show, most of these criticisms are based on anecdotal experience or blatant and often incorrect assumptions about how tenure influences professorial behavior. We don’t have a wealth of on-point data, but what we do have doesn’t support the critics.

The last section of the book, Part Four, considers what happens when tenure is overcome. Some of the chapters here draw on original national-level quantitative data that I’ve compiled, and they help dispel common assumptions about the circumstances in which individual tenured professors lose their jobs. Another chapter in this section relies on existing scholarship and media coverage to describe the circumstances of professors who did nothing wrong but got fired anyway as part of a “reduction-in-force”; they probably account for an overwhelming percentage of tenured job loss. Chapters 23 and 24 close with some ideas for what all of this means and how to move forward.

Public commentary on tenure is characterized by heated and frequently unsubstantiated rhetoric on both sides. This book lowers the temperature by reframing the debate in terms of employment conditions rather than academic freedom. Scholarly analyses of tenure, for their part, are dominated by history, law, and theoretical critique. This book connects those ideas with empirical information from the field of higher education as well as with media coverage and personal narrative – my own and others’ – to provide a more well-rounded understanding of what tenure is, why it matters, and how it could be better. In a way, the chapters that follow represent an expression of faith in one of my home disciplines, anthropology, because they’ve been written with the idea that greater understanding brings empathy, humility, and maybe even a smile. All of these are valuable aids in navigating the war on tenure.