The quiet death of academic tenure

More than 100 years ago, Stanford University terminated economics and sociology professor Edward Ross and set in motion a wild chain of events that would eventually result in the formal establishment of academic tenure in the United States. 

People today argue about why Ross was pushed out. Some say it was because he violated university rules concerning partisan political advocacy. Others say it was because his political views clashed with the university’s wealthy backers. He publicly supported abandoning the gold standard in favor of a looser system that would help farmers, but hurt bankers. He also spoke out against cheap Chinese and Japanese immigrant labor, which undercut white farmers. In one speech, he infamously said, “It would be better for us to turn our guns upon every vessel bringing Japanese to our shores than permit them to land.”

That didn’t sit well with Jane Stanford, who along with her husband — the Central Pacific Railroad tycoon Leland Stanford — had founded the university. Her railroad fortune depended on the gold standard. Not to mention, 90% of her workforce was Chinese. On top of this, Ross was known to attack the railroad industry in his classes, and had allegedly told students, “A railroad deal is a railroad steal,” though he later denied it. There was also the fact that Ross supported eugenics, and his racial views are often cited today as the reason he was fired, although the Stanfords had a history of anti-Asian racism themselves. But whatever the reason, after that speech, Jane Stanford immediately pushed the university’s inaugural president to fire Ross.

America had just gotten an early taste of cancel culture, and it didn’t go over well. On Nov. 14, 1900, Ross announced he had been let go. The news sent shockwaves through the higher education world and prompted one of Ross’s colleagues, the philosopher Arthur Lovejoy, to resign in protest. The idea that a faculty member could be punished for speaking out in public may seem commonplace in our modern social media ecosystem, but at the time, it represented a new front in the war over free speech, and what one Stanford president later described as the school’s “first academic freedom controversy.” 

Inspired by these events, Lovejoy and the philosopher John Dewey founded the American Association of University Professors in 1915, with the mission of protecting and advancing academic freedom in America. In the AAUP’s declaration of principles, released that year, the group argued that universities serve the public trust only when scholars are free to speak honestly, without pressure from the public, the government, or wealthy backers.

That statement, in addition to the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, became the gold standard for understanding the principles of academic freedom, and helped establish academic tenure in the country, with high bars for terminating tenured faculty members. 

To be sure, there are good-faith criticisms to be made of tenure. One critic argued that under financial pressures, tenure effectively creates a two-tiered system where one set of tenured, and therefore more expensive, faculty take on lighter teaching loads while untenured adjuncts take on heavier class assignments for less pay. Other critics argue that giving faculty job security for life means that they can’t be held accountable for poor teaching or bad behavior. 

Tenure isn’t solely a tool that protects controversial, outspoken faculty. It also protects faculty who conduct research that may lead them down risky paths, allowing them to pursue their research to its limits and previously unknown conclusions. It protects faculty whose work runs counter to the interests of the people in power. And it protects faculty who explore new pedagogical methods in the classroom as they attempt to innovate and push higher education in new directions.

Courts agree, having repeatedly helped defend against attacks on tenure. For example, Linfield University forked over more than $1 million after tenured professor Daniel Pollack-Pelzner sued the school for firing him because he raised concerns about its president and board of trustees. Similarly, former professor James Bowley is suing his institution for firing him after he sent an email to three students in his Abortion and Religions course, on the day after President Trump defeated Kamala Harris, canceling class. “Need time,” he explained, “to mourn and process this racist fascist country.”

In 2024, the private Pennsylvania religious liberal arts school Muhlenberg College fired tenured professor Maura Finkelstein, purportedly for writing on Instagram, “Do not cower to Zionists. Shame them. Do not welcome them in your spaces. Do not make them feel comfortable. Why should those genocide-loving fascists be treated any different than any other flat-out racist. Don’t normalize Zionism. Don’t normalize Zionists taking up space.”

These remarks may be offensive. But they also recall 1977’s famous Skokie Affair, when neo-Nazis tried to march in the town of Skokie, Illinois, which was full of Holocaust survivors. Thanks to the ACLU, the Supreme Court ruled that they had a First Amendment right to do so (though they never actually did so). The point wasn’t that their speech was deemed to be good. It was that the government shouldn’t be allowed to ban ideas just because they’re bad. A free people must be able to explore ideas, especially controversial or offensive ones, in order to work out what to think about such things, rather than having politicians tell them what they ought to think. There are few places where that principle matters more than when it comes to the probing and provocative speech of a professor.

Here’s yet another example. University of Wisconsin-La Crosse professor Joe Gow is locked in an ongoing battle with his university after being fired for creating a pornographic vegan cooking show that he uploaded to OnlyFans and PornHub. Not everyone’s dairy-free cup of tea, to be sure. But it’s hard to believe anyone could manage to find his content without already knowing how to change the channel. 

Or consider the case of tenured law professor and neurologist Amy Wax, who said America would be better off with “fewer Asians” and later added all nonwhites to the list. In September 2024, her history of inflammatory remarks, as well as other claims about alleged violations of student confidentiality and complaints about in-class conduct, led the University of Pennsylvania to sanction her. Wax subsequently sued, citing a violation of her tenure. 

Cases like these are instructive. They raise a stark question. If tenure cannot protect offensive speech, what exactly is it for? However objectionable Wax’s views may be, punishing a tenured professor for expressing them risks turning academic freedom into nothing more than a hollow promise — one that holds only so long as no one’s feelings are hurt. The same principles that protect Wax’s speech protect the speech of all professors, allowing them to speak out on matters of public concern and offer their expertise in service of the public discourse. Tenure, vitally, prevents lawmakers, administrators, or other stakeholders from terminating professors for their protected speech.

After all, the purpose of a university education is not to shield young minds from offensive ideas but to teach them to stress-test those ideas, exposing students to even the most unsettling arguments so that they learn to face the naked horrors of history, think critically about opinions, challenge bad ideas, and dismantle them with reason and logic rather than simply learning to dismiss them and hope for the best.

But this lesson has not been learned. Earlier this year, Oklahoma enacted an executive order eliminating tenure at all public universities in the state, except for research universities. Virginia State University terminated six tenured professors without due process, replacing them with more junior researchers. The university told Inside Higher Ed that the changes were made because of “programmatic adjustments.” In 2015, the Wisconsin state government modified protections for tenure by giving the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents the power to set tenure policies. In 2021, Georgia changed its policies to make dismissing tenured professors for underperformance easier. The following year, Florida implemented a mandatory post-tenure review, and, Kansas simplified the process for dismissing tenured faculty. And in 2023, Texas, a hotbed for censorship, significantly weakened tenure to let administrators fire faculty for “unprofessional conduct that adversely affects the institution.” As this trend continues, and tenure is slowly degraded, more universities will feel emboldened to target faculty who express unpopular views, and classrooms will resemble less the marketplace of ideas and more a Soviet assembly designed to instill consensus. 

Tenure is not a perfect system, and it never was. And, by the way, Lovejoy’s free-speech advocacy had its limits. During the McCarthy era, he argued that communist professors should be fired, claiming that their ideology was inimical to a free society. But even if he himself couldn’t apply the principles he helped enshrine in a perfectly principled way, he nevertheless helped lay the groundwork for the modern ideal of academic freedom. And in a moment where major news events can prompt widespread faculty dismissals, professors may turn around to find themselves without the timeless protection that was progressively weakened in broad daylight.