Professors in the Lone Star state are about to lose their job protections. The Texas Tribune reports that the Texas Senate has voted along party lines to do away with tenure for new faculty at the state's public universities. The effort was led by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Republican, who last year vowed to end tenure protections for university professors who he said "indoctrinate" students with left-wing concepts like critical race theory.
It's not just Texas. Republicans in Florida, North Carolina, Louisiana, and Iowa, among other places, have targeted faculty tenure at state universities in recent months. That concerns professors who say that the moves make it more likely they can lose their jobs for teaching on controversial topics. That makes a university "less able to fulfill its mission of providing students with access to diverse opinions, ideas, and experiences," one expert tells USA Today. Why are Republicans taking on tenure? What is the case for keeping it?
Why does tenure exist?
If you don't work in academia, the concept might seem a little funny. "Tenured university professors are the only people in our society that have the guarantee of a job," Patrick said in a statement celebrating the Texas measure. Tenure protections do make it difficult for faculty to lose jobs, except in clear cases of professional misconduct. But professors say tenure makes academic freedom possible. "When faculty members can lose their positions because of their speech, publications, or research findings, they cannot properly fulfill their core responsibilities to advance and transmit knowledge," the American Association of University Professors says in an explainer. Otherwise, the organization says, professors are vulnerable to "corporate and political pressure."
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Why are Republicans taking on tenure?
It's largely ideological. Conservatives say universities are at the center of a "Great Awokening" that indoctrinates students into lefty viewpoints on race and gender. Pulling back on tenure is "often presented as bids to rein in academics with liberal views," The Associated Press reports. That's explicitly Patrick's complaint: Professors "claim 'academic freedom' and hide behind their tenure to continue blatantly advancing their agenda of societal division," he said in his statement.
But there are other factors at play, AP notes: University budgets are getting tighter, and institutions are increasingly relying on part-time adjunct faculty — who don't have the possibility of tenure — to teach classes. And that's not just a red state issue. "Tenured faculty numbers have been declining even in more liberal states."
What is the defense of tenure?
Academic freedom is the primary argument, of course. "You need to have the freedom to be able to pursue work without looking over your shoulders, wondering if you have offended someone or some sort of political entity," Kevin Cokley, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, tells the Dallas Morning News.
Reducing that freedom might be costly. Mark N. Katz, a professor at George Mason University, writes in The Hill that the new measures are going to put red state universities at a disadvantage. "Given the choice between accepting a tenure-track position at one university or a position at a university where tenure is no longer offered or secure," he writes, "young scholars are far more likely to accept an offer from the former." The result will be that red state universities have to pay higher salaries to hire and retain faculty. "I sincerely doubt, though, that this is what Republican politicians seeking to end or weaken tenure have in mind."
How will universities be affected by the new laws?
The American university system is already facing headwinds, including falling birth rates and a public that seems increasingly skeptical of the value of a college degree. That may actually make reduced tenure protections inevitable to some degree — and continue a trend that's already in place. "The proportion of American faculty members on the tenure track has been falling since the 1970s," Molly Worthen, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, writes in The New York Times. Just a third of college professors are tenured or on a tenure track. Continued efforts to get rid of tenure will probably reduce those ranks even further.
What's next?
The new measure now "heads to the Texas House, where Speaker Dade Phelan has expressed less interest in doing away with tenure," the Texas Tribune reports. Even if tenure protections survive this legislative session in Texas, the broader system will remain fragile. The Associated Press quotes one expert suggesting tenure is all but doomed, and "will largely disappear in the coming decades outside the top 100 colleges and universities."
