There are many good ideological reasons to defend tenure in higher education, not least of which among them is that tenure is perhaps the only institutional guard that society has established to protect its researchers, scientists, and intellectuals against the pressures of the market. That’s no small thing. But we also understand that, to the non-academic public, tenure may seem like nothing more than a guarantee that haughty academics with cushy jobs can’t be fired unless, as the old adage goes, “they’re caught with a dead woman or a live boy”? 

Who doesn’t want job security?

As with all things that we discuss on this podcast, though, the question of tenure is much more complicated that it appears at first glance. Once established as a institutional protection of academic freedom, the dynamics, significance, and real-world effects of the granting and/or denial of tenure have dramatically changed as the University, the culture, and the political intervention of state legislative bodies have changed. 

Today, we’re talking about tenure: “get out of jail free card” or the necessary codification of a social good?

In this episode, we discuss the following thinkers/ideas/texts/etc.:

• The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler (2022)
• A brief history of the brief history of tenure
• The path and timeline of tenure
• American Association of University Professors (AAUP), “1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure”
• American Association of University Professors (AAUP), “Financial Exigency, Academic Governance, and Related Matters”
• Rick Seltzer, “Of Moral Terpitude” (Inside Higher Education, 2017)
• David M. Rabban, “The Regrettable Underenforcement of Incompetence as Reason to Dismiss Faculty” (Indiana Law Journal, 2015)
• Mark J. Drozdowski, “The Plight of Adjunct Faculty” (2022)
• American Association of University Professors (AAUP), “The End of Faculty Tenure and the Transformation of Higher Education” (2023)
• Willard Dix, “It’s Time To Worry When Colleges Erase Humanities Departments” (Forbes, 2018)
• Nathan Heller, “The End of the English Major” (The New Yorker, 2023)
• J. David Johnson, “Administrative Bloat in Higher Education” (2022)
• Maggie Lavantovskaya, “Organizing Against Precarity in Higher Education” (2022)

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