Tenure Isn’t Above Critique, but Let’s Find New Faults (letter)

To the editor:

Although I’m a compulsive Inside Higher Ed reader, I somehow missed James Wetherbe’s recent argument against tenure (“Possibly My Last View on the Trouble With Tenure,” April 29, 2026)—or, rather, I didn’t read the particular words he used because I’ve encountered those arguments ad nauseam. They’re understandable, but they’re wrong.

Let’s break it down.

Wetherbe writes, “Tenure renders U.S. colleges less competitive on the world stage.”

While our institutions are hurting right now, that’s hardly tenure’s fault. If anything, American institutions came to dominate the global higher education marketplace over the 20th century, exactly when tenure became an industry norm. As many of us have argued, tenure spread because it served as a recruitment and retention device. The “brain drain” we are now experiencing is itself partly responsive to reductions in job security triggered by attacks on tenure.

He writes, Tenure “mak[es] it difficult to … reallocate labor from less popular disciplines to those in rising demand.”

This is true, but beside the point. As I explain in Chapter 8 of The War on Tenure, it takes time to grow academic expertise. Firing a tenured professor today (because computer science is so 2015) doesn’t mean you can replace them tomorrow (with an AI scholar), because there hasn’t been enough time to train experts on that new sexy topic—and, by the time we’ve done that, we’ll have moved on to the next topic. Moving fast can indeed break things, but it can’t build knowledge.

He writes, “Tenure makes too many professors less innovative than they now need to be.”

Ah, this is a perennial favorite. Everyone—politicians, tenured professors and even professors like Wetherbe who’ve actually lived their principles by refusing tenure—thinks job security makes people lazy. Why? Because it’s only rational. (Thanks, classical economics.) Because of Joe down the hall who hasn’t published since the Reagan administration. (The availability heuristic comes for us all.) But as I explain in Chapter 14, the empirics do not bear this out.

He writes, “Tenured professors are not under the gun to overhaul their beliefs, curriculum and instructional methods.”

This is definitely a Rubin’s vase: Wetherbe sees inefficiency and stale practices where others see protection from misguided external pressure. But just as academia’s critics can point to evidence of unchanged practices (disciplinary boundaries, course structures, the Socratic method), supporters can point to transformations (flipped classrooms, flexible learning, experiential approaches). What Wetherbe assumes—and therefore must prove (but doesn’t)—is that anyone innovates best out of fear.

I’ve saved this for last because it relies on my own work. Wetherbe writes, “It can be hard to revoke tenure even from professors found to have committed misconduct.”

If a professor has been found to have committed misconduct, all that’s standing in a university’s path is itself. Like all just-cause contracts, tenured jobs can be terminated. University employers are free to make bad choices, but they shouldn’t be free to blame it on tenure.

I don’t say that tenure is perfect, and I won’t say we shouldn’t critique it during this moment of crisis. But let’s at least think of something new, or something substantiated, to say against it.