Should Universities Preserve the Tenure System?

Tenure Provides Job Security and Academic Freedom, but There Are Drawbacks

By Sheri Rivlin and Allan Rivlin, CEO and President of Zen Political Research, Sidney G. Winter, Professor Emeritus of Management at the University of Pennsylvania, and Phil Lieberman, Profesor at Vanderbilt University and the U.S. Naval Academy

Academic Tenure Serves Crucial Functions

By Sheri Rivlin and Allan Rivlin – CEO and President of Zen Political Research and by Sidney G. Winter – Professor Emeritus of Management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

Since the 399 BCE Trial of Socrates and the 1633 Inquisition of Galileo, human civilization has benefitted from the expressed views and breakthroughs of scholars—even when those views were unpopular with ruling authorities, such as monarchs, politicians, and academic or religious authorities. In today’s universities, teaching and research faculty are under constant criticism from both the political Left and Right. 

Many progressive students and graduates view their professors as defenders of a past order corrupted by colonialism, capitalism, sexism, and racism. At the same time, our educational system at all levels is being politicized by those who fear educated elites have an agenda to indoctrinate America’s youth with progressive values, bad medicine, false science (especially in the social sciences), and biased history.

This debate is both necessary and healthy if conducted with civility and good intentions. Academic institutions have earned and defended their place in society through centuries of openness to debate, which led to countless innovations such as penicillin, semiconductors, well-regulated capital markets, and more. Indeed, many university deans deeply believe human advancement depends on giving job security to teaching and research faculty in the form of academic tenure to support the development of unpopular thoughts and theories that challenge existing orthodoxies.

Tenure Guides Administrators and Promotes Academic Freedom 

Academic tenure serves mainly three functions, and any efforts to reform tenure must be evaluated in terms of whether they strengthen or weaken these crucial functions. First, tenure is a central element in staffing decisions for an academic department and the principal goal for those pursuing an academic career. Graduate students work hard to earn a Ph.D. and then strive to earn tenure at a respected university. But the system is “up or out” and candidates who are not offered tenure must seek a new institution to continue their career. 

Second, department chairs use offers of tenure to help define their disciplines’ knowledge base and research priorities. Deans, department heads, and world-leading researchers write recommendation letters that define what is known and what is being debated and studied in each of these areas. Lastly, tenure status protects unpopular thought, research, and speech. This is, of course, where tenure becomes problematic because it is designed to protect the development of controversial ideas. Tenure serves as the antidote to the highly harmful “cancel culture.”

Contemporary challenges to academic tenure take many forms, from disputes over specific tenure decisions, to proposals to reform tenure procedures, to efforts by state legislatures to eliminate tenure for state colleges and universities under their control. Students, alumni, and the broader community have a right to voice their opinions on individual cases where tenure is offered, denied, reviewed, or revoked. In addition, contrary to popular belief, tenured faculty can be removed for violating laws or codes of conduct. The procedures guiding these decisions should be reviewable and open to proposals for reform, but we should be wary of reforms that fail to maintain the many benefits and functions of academic tenure. 

Tenure Is an Inefficient and Damaging System 

By Phil Lieberman – Professor at Vanderbilt University and the U.S. Naval Academy

While the tenure system might have been designed to protect scholars who take controversial stands, tenure today only protects a sliver of scholars at most academic institutions. Its value in protecting faculty is outstripped by the harm it causes by giving the tenured faculty license to opine on matters unrelated to their areas of expertise.

Tenure Hinders Labor Markets and Compensation 

Tenure decreases mobility in the labor market. The assurance of continued employment creates institutional handcuffs and removes competition that would otherwise allow scholars to move on to a different institution where they could be happier. 

Tenure also decreases salaries. A study by The Journal of Business Inquiry found that faculty members essentially pay for their job security by accepting lower salaries. Even worse, every university administrator is familiar with the phenomenon of “salary compression,” whereby veteran faculty are paid less than new, lower-ranking faculty. After accepting employment at a particular salary—substantially less than their colleagues with similar education levels in corporate or government positions might receive—most faculty will see a significant salary increase only once or twice during their careers. First, when being granted tenure, and second, when promoted to full professor. For the rest of their careers, these academics can expect their real wages to drop as salaries fail to keep up with inflation.

Tenure Fails to Protect 

The real question, though, is whether tenure does what it is supposed to: protect scholars when making controversial scholarly interventions in their fields. Tenure is only granted to scholars chosen by the members of the institution. Scholars who say controversial things, or who the existing faculty members simply don’t like, can be terminated before receiving the “protection” of tenure, a process that can take about five to nine years. It is worth noting even tenured and tenure-track faculty are just 32 percent of all faculty, and roughly a third of them are unprotected while on the tenure track. Thus, at most, only 24 percent of faculty are protected. 

Moreover, tenure only protects scholars from colleagues and administrators at their home institutions—not from criticism in the public sphere. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s Faculty Legal Defense Fund has now established a hotline for faculty at public institutions who are afraid of losing their jobs because of expression. If the tenure system were effectively protective, this would be unnecessary. If tenure were successful in helping scholars take big risks, why would this study in the Social Science Research Network Electronic Journal show that post-tenure scholars actually take less risk after receiving tenure?

Finally, most administrators neither care about nor understand the sort of radical scholarly interventions in which their faculty might engage. Thus, the fear of reprisals for making radical statements with one’s research is simply not there. On the other hand, for those who wish to transform their jobs into a bully pulpit and aren’t sufficiently productive in research to survive an open competitive market, tenure is indeed a boon.

Potential Reform Does Not Warrant Elimination 

By Sheri Rivlin and Allan Rivlin – CEO and President of Zen Political Research and by Sidney G. Winter – Professor Emeritus of Management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

We agree with Dr. Lieberman that academic tenure serves important functions but also has important deficiencies that create opportunities for reform. We also agree he correctly questions how to grapple with a flawed system but suspect that we reach different answers to this question. 

Dr. Lieberman raises three challenges: (1) The “loudmouth” problem, where faculty pontification and indoctrination draws student and public criticism. (2)  Economic, career, and managerial challenges, including diminished labor mobility, salary compression, and declining productivity. And (3) The failure to protect academic freedom because most university faculty are not tenured and administrators do not understand the frontiers of research.

Tenure Does Not Give Faculty Members a Free Pass to Indoctrinate  

The first problem may be the least important from a policy perspective while also the most politically relevant. As we noted, professors constantly face public criticism and organized opposition from both the Right and Left. But reforming or even eliminating tenure would not amend this because neither the professors nor their critics derive their license to express opinions from their academic expertise. The First Amendment guarantees everyone’s constitutional right to pontificate.

In a society that values free speech in general but also recognizes restrictions, we have laws, academic codes of conduct, and procedures to evaluate individual cases limiting speech that is defamatory, racist, or incites violence. Tenured professors can face discipline, loss of tenure, or criminal penalties for speech judged to be illegal or improper, but the existence of these exceptions shows the system is working as designed and does not support the discontinuation of tenure. 

Faculty With Tenure Are Compensated Fairly

The economics of the academic system are complex, highly idiosyncratic, and certainly subject to reform, but we believe the voluntary arrangement of the academic tenure track treats most participants fairly. The tenure track offers high job satisfaction, stable employment, and fair compensation that rises with seniority, along with many benefits such as housing, health, and forms of paid leave. Indeed, academic compensation is highly rank-based, so salary increases are infrequent. If long periods between major raises are a problem, universities could emulate the rank-and-step compensation system for government employment rather than eliminating tenure.

Since tenure covers only a fraction of university faculty, alternative career paths are possible. However, many choose to compete for tenure-track positions, and few would argue that teaching faculty would benefit from removing the track option.  

Finally, there is the issue of protecting academic freedom at the frontiers of research. Dr. Lieberman suggests that department heads are not sufficiently knowledgeable or engaged to make the decisions about who should be granted tenure. However, this is the purpose of the tenure letters that Deans read from world-leading researchers to guide their decisions. But the larger question is who would be better to decide these questions? Academic leaders may be flawed, but the solution is not to place these issues in the hands of politicians or eliminate the tenure system altogether.

Reform Is Not Enough

By Phil Lieberman – Professor at Vanderbilt University and the U.S. Naval Academy

Ms. Rivlin, Mr. Rivlin, and Dr. Winter are certainly right that college professors face constant criticism from the Right and the Left. They are also correct that eliminating tenure wouldn’t cure this problem. However, I disagree with their statement that professors don’t “derive their license to express opinions from their academic expertise.” That is certainly true on its face, but whenever academics use their position (rather than their expertise) as a source of authority to weigh in on matters beyond their scholarly expertise, they are misusing the privileges tenure grants them. 

The First Amendment does indeed guarantee one’s right to pontificate. But it doesn’t pay them a salary and give them the time to do it. Tenure gives academics the time to voice opinions on whatever they wish—regardless of their area of expertise—without fear of repercussions. In what other universe can someone not do their job, misuse the job’s prestige, and continue to be paid? Eliminate tenure and academics could instead be evaluated on their devotion to research, teaching, and university service.

Salaries Fail to Keep Up With Inflation

Ms. Rivlin, Mr. Rivlin, and Dr. Winter also assert that one of the benefits of the tenure system is a living wage. They are right about this as well and for the fewest of the few, academia can even pay well. However, given that salaries do not track inflation, academic wages are decreasing in real terms. What started as a living wage eventually ceases to be. Eliminating tenure and allowing market forces to work would reset faculty wages.

However, even if my correspondents’ assertion about livable wages were correct, the tenure system engenders a bifurcated system under which most faculty are not tenure-tracked. Those faculty are often not paid a living wage, whether they are long-term contract faculty teaching a significantly heavier load than their tenure-track colleagues for a fraction of the pay, or they are adjuncts taking whatever work they can to stay in the academic game. These non-tenure-track faculty are the vast majority of university instructors. So even if the system is working for their tenure-track fellows (which it isn’t), it is definitely not working for them. 

Locking Academics into Lifetime Employment Isn’t the Answer

I could not agree more that academic freedom is paramount. It is the very job of academics to produce research their colleagues disagree with to make progress in their field. Further, some research projects have such a long timeline that they would be difficult to complete without tenure because it is challenging to judge their progress from year to year. However, creating a system that locks academics into lifetime employment and does not consider or incentivize their continued progress and productivity is not helpful. This may not matter much to our universities, whose expenses are primarily not related to instruction, but it certainly matters to the lives of academics themselves—tenure-tracked and otherwise—to say nothing of the students they are ostensibly retained to educate.

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Sheri Rivlin and Allan Rivlin

Sheri Rivlin and Allan Rivlin are the CEO and president, respectively, of Zen Political Research, a public opinion, marketing research, and communications strategy consulting firm founded in 2015. They are the son and daughter-in-law of Alice M. Rivlin, and since she passed away in 2019, they have been working to complete her final manuscript, “Divided We Fall, Why Consensus Matters” was published in October 2022 by Brookings Press.

Sidney G. Winter

Professor Emeritus of Management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

Sidney G. Winter is the Deloitte and Touche Professor of Management, Emeritus, at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. During his career he has held faculty appointments at four universities, served on the staffs of the RAND Corporation and the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers, was Chief Economist of the U.S. GAO. He has been a consultant for several governmental and nonprofit organizations, and appeared as an expert witness in antitrust and other litigation.

Phil Lieberman

Professor at Vanderbilt University and the U.S. Naval Academy

Dr. Phil Lieberman is a faculty member at Vanderbilt University and the U.S. Naval Academy. He is also the Chief Operating Officer at Divided We Fall. Dr. Lieberman holds a Bachelors Degree in Economics from the University of Washington, a Masters of Science in Economics from the London School of Economics, and a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University.