A Prof’s Possible Last View on Trouble With Tenure (opinion)

I’ve been a professor for more than 50 years and a critic of tenure the entire time. Four universities—the University of Houston, the University of Minnesota, the University of Memphis and Texas Tech University—variously awarded or offered me tenure, and at each one I resigned or declined it as a personal protest. But you might know me better from my highly publicized battle against tenure in U.S. universities for the last 13 years, a fight that has reached the pages of The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and three times this very publication, among others. I’ve won few fans among my peers for my stance on it, as you can imagine. They have asked me why I would want to end our collective job security, especially the ability to speak and write freely without fear of retaliation.

Yet I remain adamantly opposed to tenure—even after settling an 11-year-old lawsuit in January in which I accused a former Texas Tech dean of retaliating against me for my anti-tenure views, which I outlined in a 2013 Harvard Business Review article. Although that lawsuit is behind me, I am still not ready to stay silent about the dangers of tenure. While I am alive— and with a new round of cancer treatments, I realize it may not be for long—I feel the urge to sound the tenure alarm even louder now.

In a nutshell, my argument is this: Tenure renders U.S. colleges less competitive on the world stage by making it difficult to get rid of a faculty’s deadwood and (when budgets are tight) reallocate labor from less popular disciplines to those in rising demand. What’s more, tenure makes too many professors less innovative than they now need to be, at a time in which AI is writing term papers and classrooms are often held as Zoom meetings. Despite the shrinking half-lives of curricula and teaching methods, tenured professors are not under the gun to overhaul their beliefs, curriculum and instructional methods. Tenure protects them from poor job performance.

Please understand that over my academic career, I’ve seen only a small minority of tenured professors misuse tenure. Nonetheless, I believe they’ve had an outsize impact. They’ve worsened the quality of education and made students less equipped to find jobs in workplaces that increasingly want AI to do those jobs. Moreover, most professors and administrators I know don’t realize how much tenure constrains them from the big leap forward they must take for U.S. universities to remain the world’s premier finishing school for talent.

Specifically, I’ve seen tenure contribute to five problems for U.S. universities, ranging from the obvious to the hidden:

1. Complacency. While they are in the vast minority, there are some professors who lose their motivation to excel in the classroom or research lab after securing tenure. Since it’s hard to fire them for performance reasons, they do the minimum required to fill a classroom with students. This problem can be seen in professor ratings, gleaned roundabout from student warnings to “avoid his/her class,” and heard directly in conversations with disgruntled faculty members. I once heard a professor who was faced with teaching a course that wasn’t to his liking say, “If they make me teach that class, I will generate a sufficient number of complaints, and then I won’t have to teach it anymore.”

2. Rigidity. Resistance to making essential changes is a less obvious problem, because I’ve found these tenured professors typically to be extremely hardworking. But their hard work doesn’t mean much when the ideas they possess, the curriculum they teach or the way they teach it becomes grossly outdated. Professors who cling to their ideas and ways of the past can be a hidden problem—especially those who were lauded in the past for those ideas. Telling a professor that their books are long past their sell date is an argument that few peers want to have.
3. Institutional inflexibility. Tenure can make it difficult for universities to quickly reorient budgets from areas of lower appeal to those of higher appeal. With a fixed budget, it’s hard to create 50 new teaching positions in areas of growing enrollment if 50 tenured professors can’t be laid off in areas of plummeting enrollment.
4. Antipathy. This problem is the most difficult for administrators to detect. Tenure can create unenthusiastic teachers who cling to the profession because of job security. Extensive surveys of faculty conducted every three years by the Higher Education Research Institute at University of California, Los Angeles, found that the job dissatisfaction rate hovered between 20 percent and 31 percent from 1989 until 2017. When a fifth to almost a third of your workforce is unhappy, that portends bad things for customer satisfaction—in this case, student satisfaction. For decades I have heard dozens of fellow professors tell me in so many words that they had come to hate teaching. “I no longer enjoy being a professor,” one of them said to me in the late 1970s. “But now that I have tenure, there is no way I will give up a guaranteed job for life.” He did quit college teaching about 10 years later. But I feel sorry for his students in those years, and even for their parents. What parent would want to subject their child to a professor with little joy for teaching?

5. Misconduct. Finally, it can be hard to revoke tenure even from professors found to have committed misconduct. One study found only 295 terminations of tenured professors between 2000 and 2021 at America’s 2,600-plus four-year colleges, which employed around 240,000 tenured faculty annually in that period. While that number is not comprehensive, it seems clear that only a tiny fraction of tenured professors lose tenure. The most common reason, accounting for 75 percent of terminations in the study sample, was sexual misconduct.

For all these reasons, I have had a growing distaste for tenure. However, I don’t think eliminating all job protections for professors is the answer, either. Instead of tenure, I argue for a multiple-year rolling contract. Unlike an expiring contract, a rolling contract maintains an ongoing time horizon. Once a faculty member is promoted to an associate professor, I suggest they be granted a three-year rolling contract. This means giving a professor who is no longer valued either three years’ notice or a three-year buyout. For full professors, I advise offering five-year rolling contracts. Since resigning tenure at the University of Minnesota, I have had one-year rolling contracts.

At a time of breathtaking technological change in higher education, the rigidity problem may be the most serious one—especially when it stifles innovative faculty. Tenure can shield professors from the mandate to innovate. If a professor’s job is on the line, it’s amazing how many ideas can emerge.

You could view me as a case study on this. I have felt the need to prove my value to the universities where I have taught every year because I haven’t had tenure to fall back on. I believe that motivation, my passion for innovation in higher education and my ability to raise corporate funds for business school research were crucial to convincing several deans to get behind new research initiatives: one funded by FedEx at the University of Memphis that helped pave the way for a FedEx-funded research institute, and another at Texas Tech on consumer internet buying behavior, supported by Best Buy.

I’ve also helped universities create or bolster new academic journals (two at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis, funded by Best Buy founder Dick Schulze’s charitable foundation, on entrepreneurship and family business practices). I’m proud of all those initiatives, but particularly the last ones. The two philanthropically funded, online-only journals (Entrepreneur & Innovation Exchange and FamilyBusiness.org) now attract 23 million views a year. One of our high-traffic features translates academic research for the layperson.

The two journals have helped St. Thomas’s Schulze School of Entrepreneurship develop one of the country’s top 20 entrepreneurship undergraduate programs. And in the classroom, I have prioritized collaborative, project-based teaching methods that engage students more than traditional lectures and reduce opportunities for cheating.

These kinds of innovations are in dire need at universities. But they require a performance-based workplace culture—i.e., one that begins with reducing the number of tenured professors dramatically and retaining them based on their performance. While the American Association of University Professors’ research found the percentage of tenured or tenure-track professors declined from 53 percent in 1987 to 32 percent in 2023, it is still too high and not likely to further fall quickly without a sea change in attitudes on American campuses.

From my experience in Texas this decade, even conservative states find it difficult to end tenure. In 2023, after hearing about my lawsuit, the Texas state Senate asked me to testify twice while it developed a bill to end tenure. The bill passed the Senate but was fundamentally rewritten in order to preserve tenure by the state’s House of Representatives. Still, state by state, there’s growing momentum to eliminate or reduce tenure. Administrators and professors would be wise to plan for campus life without tenure—long before it ends.

As the United Kingdom showed us 38 years ago, that scenario is certainly possible. With the Education Reform Act of 1988, one of the world’s elite higher education systems eliminated tenure. It doesn’t appear to have degraded education quality—Oxford and Cambridge have remained among the world’s top universities.

My private discussions with dozens of tenured professors indicate they believe tenure is at risk, especially in states like Texas that are trying to eliminate it. Behind closed doors, they have confided that tenure is more about job security than about academic freedom. With a worsening economic picture for U.S. universities, tenure-protected job security is a big cost problem.

I realize I probably won’t be around to see tenure end completely in the U.S. I’m fine with that. But I’ll die wondering this: If the biggest argument for tenure is protecting academic freedom, why did the only challenge to my academic freedom come from speaking out against it? It’s an irony that will bewilder me to the end.