After Research, Tennessee Lawmaker Drops Bill to End Tenure

Tennessee’s House Higher Ed Subcommittee chair has withdrawn his bill to end tenure in public universities after saying he “stumbled into a little bit of the history” and “got a little deeper than I thought I would.”

“It got me to thinking about political lines, pendulums, they’re always moving … I kind of think that way about tenure,” Republican Justin Lafferty told his subcommittee Wednesday in a brief but wide-ranging explanation for dropping the bill.

According to a video of the meeting posted on the state General Assembly’s website, Lafferty said he learned tenure goes back to the 1600s or 1700s, “a time when there weren’t that many highly educated folks,” so “it was very important to keep the best and the brightest.”

Though he didn’t use the words “academic freedom,” he echoed arguments for protecting it that proponents of tenure often use. Mentioning the Vietnam War era, Lafferty said, “In a controversial time, I kind of understand you want those protections in place to not lose the talent that you’ve been able to acquire.”

But he also suggested that he filed his bill in opposition to controversial faculty speech. He didn’t mention Charlie Kirk, but he complained about faculty speech regarding someone’s death and a “half a million” payout. (Darren Michael, a tenured theater professor at Tennessee’s Austin Peay State University, was terminated for reposting a news headline about Kirk but was later reinstated and paid $500,000.)

“With tenure now, the pendulum has swung so far that we can have state employees that we pay with our tax dollars—‘mock’ might not be the right word, but can certainly be very insensitive towards the death of another human being,” Lafferty said. “And as a Tennessean, I’m not comfortable with the fact that that person cannot be removed from a job.”

Lafferty withdrew his bill, but he may not be done targeting tenure. He said during the meeting that “we’ll maybe be back.” News Channel 5 reported that Lafferty said the bill likely didn’t have a path forward this year. He didn’t return Inside Higher Ed’s requests for comment Thursday.