Tenure threatened in US more by universities than politicians

US faculty are steadily losing the rights of tenure, but far less from bombastic politicians weakening their protections than from universities quietly refusing to grant them, academics’ main advocacy group has concluded.

The number of tenured full-time faculty members in the US held steady between the autumn 2019 semester and autumn 2020, while the ranks of tenure-track candidates coming up behind them shrank by more than 4 per cent, according to data from the American Association of University Professors.

At the same time, while most US colleges and universities now have some kind of ongoing job assessment process for tenured faculty, few of those mandatory reviews ultimately hold out the possibility of being fired, the AAUP determined.

The data, shared with Times Higher Education, are being prepared for the AAUP’s annual report on the economic state of the academic profession, due for release this month. They suggest that some heavily protested instances of states enacting tougher post-tenure review policies do not reflect the most substantive threat to the decades-old practice for ensuring that educators have the full freedom to teach as they see fit.

“We are highly concerned about post-tenure review programmes where the outcome could lead to termination,” said Glenn Colby, the AAUP’s senior researcher. “But those are still relatively rare.”

The “more alarming finding” from the new AAUP data analysis, Mr Colby said, “is the increased prevalence of institutions replacing tenure lines with contingent appointments”.

The AAUP, with chapters on more than 500 campuses, played a central role in the establishment of tenure more than a century ago, as a means of protecting faculty in their classrooms from outside political pressures. Those types of concerns have regained vibrancy in recent years, with lawmakers in several US states – typically those with conservative governors and legislative majorities – pushing initiatives to undermine tenure rights.

That outside political threat does remain real, Mr Colby said. But the AAUP’s upcoming assessment will show that universities may be doing much more damage through their own hiring practices, he said.

Counting from federally reported data, the AAUP found the US had slightly more than 1 million faculty in autumn 2020, after a single-year decline of nearly 5 per cent during the early stages of the pandemic. By faculty type, the biggest drop by far came among part-time contingent faculty, down nearly 9 per cent. Full-time contingent faculty declined 3 per cent, the ranks of faculty on the pathway towards tenure lost 4 per cent, and the number of those with tenure was virtually unchanged.

The implication, Mr Colby said, is that tenured faculty who died or retired generally were replaced, but that tenure-track professors moving up into tenured status often were not.

Tenure as a concept remains strong, with some 87 per cent of four-year US institutions offering it, the AAUP said in a separate recent analysis. And while the use of a post-tenure review programme is now the norm – it exists at 58 per cent of institutions, up from 46 per cent in 2000 – only 27 per cent of four-year institutions offering tenure have a review process that includes the possibility of termination, it said.

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com