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This website outlines the benefits of tenure for teachers. It also briefly outlines what teachers must do to become tenured.

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Teacher tenure is under attack in New York state and nationwide. In July 2014, two lawsuits were filed - Davids v. New York and Wright v. New York - that claim New York's tenure laws deprive students of their right to a sound basic education. The lawsuits specifically attack the tenure process, the use of seniority in layoffs, and the three-year probationary period for new teachers, which they claim is too short. Former news anchor Campbell Brown, fronting for a shadowy group calling itself the Partnership for Educational Justice, is bankrolling the Wright case. Brown, who won't disclose her financial backers, makes the unsupported claim that tenure is responsible for low student achievement.

The New York state lawsuits were filed after a lower-court ruling in the case of Vergara v. California gutted that state's tenure laws. NYSUT attorneys believe the California ruling will be overturned on appeal - but meanwhile it has emboldened copycat suits across the country. Bankrolled by the wealthy elite and anti-union forces, these attacks represent an all-out assault on the fundamental labor rights of working people.

NYSUT is mounting an aggressive and vigorous defense of tenure both in the courts and the court of public opinion.

What's really important

New York state is widely recognized for its exemplary teaching force and has earned high marks for its rigorous standards and credentialing requirements - typically ranking among the nation's top ten. Tenure is just one of the safeguards New York state has put in place to ensure every student has an effective teacher. A teacher must earn tenure after three years or more of effective teaching, oversight and evaluation. A teacher then is entitled to a fair hearing before being fired - a basic due process right. Focusing on a due process right that is used by a very few is a distraction from what must be our main priority: ensuring every child has an effective teacher. We need to focus on what helps students the most: recruiting and retaining quality teachers and providing the resources to help every child succeed.

Three key points about tenure

New York state's rigorous teaching standards provide many safeguards that ensure children have good teachers. Tenure is one of them.

Tenure is a safeguard that ensures good teachers can speak up for their students.

Tenure helps safeguard children's right to an effective education because it provides teachers freedom to advocate for their students without fear of reprisal. Because tenure exists, teachers in New York state can speak out freely on issues such as over-testing, cuts in academic programs, elimination of art, music and language and inappropriate placements for students with disabilities.
Without tenure, working under the constant threat of arbitrary firing would have a chilling effect on a teacher's professional judgment and create an environment that would erode, not enhance, educational quality.

There is no evidence that teachers' employment rights have anything to do with student achievement. Teachers in the wealthiest districts have the identical due process and seniority rights as teachers in the poorest districts - yet students in wealthy districts have much higher graduation and college acceptance rates. The real factor contributing to these differences in achievement is poverty.
Students in our poorer districts have the greatest educational needs but are given the least resources, with our richest districts spending 180 percent as much on education as our poorer districts do.
Tenure is essential in empowering teachers to make the case that all students deserve an effective education - not just those who happen to be the children of hedge-fund millionaires. Attacking tenure, and seeking to make teachers vulnerable to being fired at will is a smokescreen for failing to tackle the real reason why students struggle: poverty.
Blaming tenure for low student performance is as illogical as it is inflammatory.

Student safety is paramount and it is safeguarded under the state's tenure laws. Teacher-supported changes to the law in 2008 mean that any teacher, tenured or not, will automatically lose both job and teaching license if guilty of certain sexual offenses - without recourse to a hearing.

Blaming low-student achievement on teacher tenure -a meritless claim not supported by any evidence - is like blaming the due process granted to police officers for crime or blaming the due process granted to firefighters for fire.

If the wealthy elite truly cared about advancing student achievement they would partner with parents and teachers to achieve state budgets that provide equitable funding for all schools. They would oppose the state's tax cap, which worsens constraints on local communities. Instead, the wealthy elite and corporate forces are missing-in-action in these critically important battles. Teachers and parents stand together in calling for a renewed focus on learning and for the resources our students need to be prepared for college and career.

Tenure is a safeguard that protects good teachers from unfair firing - a basic due process right

Though it's been on the books for more than a century, New York state's tenure laws remain wildly misunderstood. Tenure, simply put, is a safeguard that protects good teachers from unfair firing. Once a teacher is granted tenure - a right that must be earned after three years or more of service, oversight and evaluation - a teacher cannot be fired without a fair hearing. Tenure does not mean a job for life. It means simply that a teacher has the right to a fair hearing on charges that could end a career. This is fundamental due process - an American value enshrined in our Bill of Rights and one that is not reserved only for the wealthy elite.

Tenure must be earned. It is not automatic. During a teacher's three-year probation, school officials carefully evaluate that teacher's job performance. Upon completion of that evaluation, the local school board then votes whether to grant tenure - which simply means the teacher cannot be fired without a fair hearing.

Tenure is a safeguard that protects teachers' civil rights. Tenure ensures good teachers cannot be fired for reasons of race, gender, age, religion, handicapping condition or sexual orientation. It ensures that good teachers cannot be fired because of cronyism or local politics. It ensures they cannot be fired for pregnancy. Before tenure was in place, teachers could - and did - lose their jobs for arbitrary and politically motivated reasons, or for no reason at all.

Seniority rights, which like tenure are a fundamental employment right, ensure that when layoffs are unavoidable, they are conducted fairly and objectively. A system based on seniority guards against abuses by those who would use 'layoffs' as another way to fire those who advocate too fiercely for their students or are at the top of the pay scale.

The obscene, profit-motivated attacks on the rights of working people in places like California and New York are why America no longer has the world's largest middle class. Fundamental rights for workers are essential to a decent standard of living in New York state. And fundamental rights for teachers are essential to fairness and defending what students need.

Tenure is working in New York state

New York's teacher tenure law was amended in 2012 to address criticism that hearings took too long and cost too much. Now, all hearings, by law, must be resolved within 155 days from the point in which formal charges are presented against a teacher. The improved tenure law means swifter consequences for anyone who violates public trust. And when school districts misuse the law or bring baseless charges, innocent teachers are being returned to the classroom more swiftly.

Teacher discipline hearings are now being completed faster and more cost effectively - typically in five months. State Education Department data confirm the statewide trend: Decisions and settlements in teacher-discipline hearings are being reached faster since the 2012 changes.

Teachers' unions do not negotiate tenure. The first tenure statute in New York state was enacted in 1897 - 70 years before public-sector unions had a right to bargain here - in recognition of society's deep interest in safeguarding its teachers from unfair firing and political pressure.

In fact, tenure represents only a small portion of the safeguards and high standards New York state has put in place to ensure a quality teaching force. New York state is widely recognized for its effective and exemplary teachers and has earned high marks for its standards and credentialing requirements - typically ranking among the nation's top ten.

New York state requires numerous safeguards for ensuring the quality of aspiring teachers as well as seasoned teachers. A teacher must:

Be accepted to and graduate from an accredited institution of higher education with a minimum 2.5 GPA.

Complete General Core in Liberal Arts and Sciences - 30 Semester Hours

Complete Content Core - 30 Semester Hours.

Complete Pedagogical Core - 21 Semester Hours

Successfully complete 40 days of student teaching:

Pass required tests such as:

New York State Teacher Certification Exam - Academic Literacy Skills Test (ALST)

New York State Teacher Certification Exam - Educating All Students Test (EAS)

edTPA

Content Specialty Test (CST)

Complete Workshops:

Child Abuse Identification

School Violence Intervention and Prevention

Dignity For All Students Act

Pass fingerprint clearance

Receive an initial certificate

An initial certificate is only valid for five years. During that time, a teacher must complete the requirements for a:

Professional Certificate

Successfully complete additional education:

Master's Degree

Graduate Coursework Content Core -12 S.H.

Three years of paid, full-time Classroom Teaching experience

One year of mentored experience

After obtaining a professional certificate, teachers must complete 175 hours of professional development every five years in order to maintain a valid teaching certificate.

Teachers also undergo an annual professional performance review, including multiple observations by a trained evaluator.

Accountability measures include annual release by the State Education Department of report cards publicly documenting performance data for every school in New York state.

NYSUT conservatively estimates, based on its member records, that almost one quarter of New York state teachers exit the profession in the first five years - some for personal reasons, many because of the high standards, rigorous requirements and challenging workload for public school teachers. The exit rate for teachers with fewer than five years of experience in 2011-12 was 23 percent- almost one-in-four. That percentage was consistent with the 5-year average (22.2 percent) dating back to the 2007-2008 school year, SED figures show. (New York State Education Department, School Report Card.) These exit rates make it clear that New York state's high standards include many checkpoints where teachers who can't make the grade voluntarily exit or are counseled out of the profession.

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Teacher tenure is under attack in New York state and nationwide. In July 2014, two lawsuits were filed - Davids v. New York and Wright v. New York - that claim New York's tenure laws deprive students of their right to a sound basic education.

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Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
To access extended pro and con arguments, sources, and discussion questions about whether K-12 teachers should get tenure, go to ProCon.org.
Teacher tenure is the increasingly controversial form of job protection that public school teachers in 46 states receive after 1-5 years on the job. An estimated 2.3 million teachers have tenure.

Prior to the introduction of teacher tenure, teachers were often fired for non-work related reasons. Teachers could be dismissed if a new political party took power or if a principal wanted to give jobs to his friends. Calls for special protections for teachers coincided with the women's suffrage movement and labor struggles during the late 19th century. The National Education Association issued a report in 1885 advocating for public school teachers to receive tenure to protect against political favoritism and discrimination based on gender and race. In 1886, Massachusetts became the first state to pass a pre-college tenure law. When nearly 10,000 teachers arrived in Chicago for the 1887 NEA conference, teacher tenure was one of the main discussion topics. In 1909, New Jersey passed the first comprehensive K-12 tenure law in the US. Proponents of the teacher tenure law in New Jersey argued that it would attract more qualified teachers and eliminate political favoritism, while opponents warned that tenure would make it more difficult to remove ineffective teachers.

After the Great Depression, teachers began to organize politically in order to receive funding and job protections. Teachers unions negotiated for tenure clauses in their contracts with state and individual school districts. By 1940, 70% of K-12 public school teachers had job protections. In the mid-1950s, the number grew to over 80%.

Education and tenure reform became a national issue following the release of A Nation at Risk, a 1983 report of President Ronald Reagan's National Commission on Excellence in Education that found "the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people." The report prompted states to look at reforming tenure, strengthening educational standards, and increasing the use of standardized tests.

Tenure protects teachers from being fired for personal, political, or other non-work related reasons.

Tenure prohibits school districts from firing experienced teachers to hire less experienced and less expensive teachers.

Tenure protects teachers from being fired for teaching unpopular, controversial, or otherwise challenged curricula such as evolutionary biology and controversial literature.

The promise of a secure and stable job attracts many teachers to the teaching profession, and eliminating teacher tenure would hamper teacher recruitment.

Tenure helps guarantee innovation in teaching.

Teacher tenure is a justifiable reward for several years of positive evaluations by school administrators.

Tenure is a good system that has become a scapegoat for problems facing education.

Tenure allows teachers to advocate on behalf of students and disagree openly with school and district administrators.

Contrary to public perception, tenure does not guarantee a teacher a job for life.

Tenure protects teachers from being prematurely fired after a student makes a false accusation or a parent threatens expensive legal action against the district.

Tenure encourages the careful selection of qualified and effective teachers.

The formal dismissal process guaranteed by tenure protects teachers from punitive evaluation systems and premature dismissal.

Tenure allows teachers to work more effectively since they do not need to be in constant fear of losing their jobs.

Teacher tenure creates complacency because teachers know they are unlikely to lose their jobs.

Tenure makes it difficult to remove under-performing teachers because the process involves months of legal wrangling by the principal, the school board, the union, and the courts.

Tenure often makes seniority the main factor in dismissal decisions instead of teacher performance and quality.

Tenure is not needed to recruit teachers.

With job protections granted through court rulings, collective bargaining, and state and federal laws, teachers today no longer need tenure to protect them from dismissal.

Tenure makes it costly for schools to remove a teacher with poor performance or who is guilty of wrongdoing.

With most states granting tenure after three years, teachers have not had the opportunity to "show their worth, or their ineptitude."

Tenure does not grant academic freedom. No Child Left Behind in 2001 took away much academic freedom when it placed so much emphasis on standardized testing.

Tenure at the K-12 level is not earned, but given to nearly everyone.

Tenure is unpopular among educators and the public.

Teacher tenure does nothing to promote the education of children.

Teacher tenure requires schools to make long-term spending commitments and prevents districts from being fiscally flexible.

Tenure lets experienced teachers pick easier assignments and leaves difficult assignments to the least experienced teachers.

This article was published on January 13, 2011, at Britannica's ProCon.org, a nonpartisan issue-information source.

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Some argue teacher tenure protects teachers from being fired for personal or political reasons, and prevents the firing of experienced teachers to hire less expensive new teachers, while others argue tenure makes the removal of poorly performing teachers so difficult and costly that most schools end up retaining their bad teachers.

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There are many critiques of tenure policies which are outlined in this article. One is the lifespan of tenure. Typically tenure is granted and then is irreversible. Another critique is the disproportionate amount of white male teacher's being tenured which may limit diversity.

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Cases like Halsted's are why the American Association of University Professors eventually established the guidelines on faculty tenure that universities now generally follow. The idea behind it was to promote academic freedom by effectively guaranteeing faculty members a lifetime appointment without the possibility of termination unless there is adequate cause - insulating professors from any political pressure that could discourage them from studying or promoting unpopular ideas or, indeed, speaking out against their own institution. The idea is that society ultimately benefits when institutions of higher education are bastions of free inquiry.

But academic tenure as it stands in the United States today is in serious need of reform. Once granted, the ironclad protections of tenure too often serve to permit subpar teaching. The nearly irrevocable nature of tenure creates a perverse incentive for universities to rely on lowly paid adjunct professors instead, who lack basic job protections and can be fired at will. With tenured seats disproportionately occupied by white men, tenure stands as an obstacle to more diverse faculties. And the system even undermines academic freedom - the very principle it's supposed to support - by creating an incentive for young scholars to self-censor in order to please an all-important tenure committee.

This is not to say that tenure is flawed enough that universities should do away with it entirely. To the contrary, tenure can be an important tool in advancing democracy by keeping educational institutions, particularly public ones, free from the whims of politicians seeking to censor certain areas of scholarship or simply install cronies in university jobs, as Halsted complained about a century ago. But it must be overhauled to promote racial, gender, and ideological diversity, as well as to better advance the academic freedom on university campuses that tenure is purported to protect.

First, colleges and universities should adopt tenure term limits. When tenure literally lasts a lifetime, schools that are either underfunded or unwilling to spend money on expanding the number of tenured faculty have to wait until a professor retires or dies until they can give that position to someone new. Imposing tenure terms would ensure that new people and fresh ideas are always given a seat at the table. These terms should be long enough to cover the bulk of someone's career - somewhere in the range of 30 or 35 years - so that the long-term job security frees the academic from any fear of facing retaliation by criticizing the institution or state, or for studying important but off-trend questions or promoting ideas outside the mainstream.

A limit would also hasten the excruciatingly slow efforts to diversify university faculties. According to data provided by Harvard, for example, in 2007, there were only nine tenured professors who were women representing "underrepresented minorities" (a term that lumps together people who self-identify as Latino, Black, Native American, Native Hawaiian, or other Pacific Islander) at the school. By comparison, there were 665 white men in those positions that year. Fourteen years later, the number of women from underrepresented minority communities increased to 33 and the number of white men decreased to 620. While that's certainly an improvement, it's hardly an achievement to brag about.

These terms should not be mistaken for a de facto retirement age. Thosewhose terms expire should be eligible for reappointment at their school or tocontinue to teach and research at another institution.

Schools should move to adopt this measure now, but there has to be coordination to ensure that all universities play by the same rules in order to prevent those with more resources from poaching star professors. State legislatures couldpass legislation to adopt this system at public universities, but they should only do so if the federal government conditions its grants to private institutions on reforming their tenure system in order to level the playing field.

Imposing a reasonable tenure term limit would also take away one of the excuses of universities for their increasing reliance on underpaid, unprotected adjunct faculty, non-tenure-track professors, and easy-to-exploit graduate students. Over the last several decades, the portion of faculty members who are either tenured or on the tenure track has steadily declined, from 45 percent in 1975 to 30 percent in 2015. Many of those scholars ought to be moved onto the tenure track, but universities are loath to do so when it may mean a lifetime commitment. And while some elite schools can certainly afford to make those changes, regardless of what they may say, the Massachusetts colleges that have closed recently, like Wheelock and Mount Ida, are reminders that higher education is under genuine financial pressure that may make lifetime tenure unaffordable.

The other component of tenure reform is creating a more transparent and objective tenure review process. Because despite its well-meaning purpose to promote academic freedom, tenure - or, more precisely, the often opaque nature of the tenure review process - might actually be inhibiting scholars from pursuing certain topics and causing them to self-censor in pursuit of tenure. Typically, it is tenured faculty members themselves who decide whom to allow into their club.

"[Tenure] does establish its own orthodoxy as far as scholarship and point of view among faculty," said Michael Nietzel, a former president of Missouri State University. "So while tenure exists to protect individual point of view and freedom of inquiry and intellectual freedom, I think it is sometimes a disciplinary straightjacket, where you're more likely to get it in departments when you're seen as disciplinarily mainstream. And faculty know this."

Many candidates for tenure have no idea who's reviewing their cases or what is said about their work in their review processes. Setting explicit standards for tenure evaluations, and making schools justify their decisions, should assuage fears of ideological discrimination and of pigeonholing scholars into particular research areas in tenure decisions.

In the end, the tenure system as it currently stands is serving smaller and smaller portions of faculty with each passing year. It's a flawed and unfair system, one that increasingly fails to deliver the academic freedom on campus that it was designed to guarantee. Academia looks increasingly like a caste system of the lucky few who've hit the tenure jackpot, and the far larger group toiling away with little protection and for meager paychecks. Schools and their faculty, as well as the public and democracy, would be better served under a reformed system that brings more scholars onto the tenure track while making tenure itself less of an unaccountable and opaque process. Universities would be more equitable, and more intellectually diverse, if they did.

Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us on Twitter at @GlobeOpinion.

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Academic tenure is in desperate need of reform - The Boston Globe

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Cases like Halsted's are why the American Association of University Professors eventually established the guidelines on faculty tenure that universities now generally follow. The idea behind it was to promote academic freedom by effectively guaranteeing faculty members a lifetime appointment without the possibility of termination unless there is adequate cause - insulating professors from any political pressure that could discourage them from studying or promoting unpopular ideas or, indeed, speaking out against their own institution.

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MSU Changes Tenure Policy to Allow for Revoking Tenure

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MSU Changes Tenure Policy to Allow for Revoking Tenure

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MSU adjusted its policy so professors can now lose tenure because of "gross wrongdoing". Relationship violence and sexual misconduct was one example of what could be grounds for revoking tenure.

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A policy change at Michigan State University will make it easier to revoke tenure.

"This new policy, we believe is a game changer," said Stephanie Anthony, Vice Chair for MSU faculty staff and senate.

"It is historical, in that the University took a proactive standpoint, and basically reduced the amount of time because so often, these types of policies took a very long time to remove tenured faculty that are definitely doing egregious things or anything along those lines," Anthony added.

Before now, the process took over one year to complete.

Tenure is a system put in place to protect professors' freedom to research and teach even sensitive subjects. It gives tenured professors significant job security but can also make the process of firing wrongdoers difficult and time consuming.

MSU Spokesperson, Dan Olsen says the university has streamlined the process and put a date by which decisions should be final, "Which is 120 days from the start of the process to that conclusion."

The Board of Trustees voted unanimously and approved the new policy last week.

Tenured faculty may face disciplinary action for relationship and sexual violence, harassment, and financial misdoings.

To revoke tenure, a professor's actions must meet the standard of "gross wrongdoing."

"If they are found to have violated the university's relationship violence and sexual misconduct policy, the next step in that process would be applying appropriate sanctions. And so an individual would enter into this policy process the tenured discipline and dismissal for cause process to ultimately determine what their sanctions will be," said Olsen.

Also, if a faculty member's conduct is determined to be egregious enough for tenure revocation, they will no longer be able to retire from the university.

"The MSU faculty, the staff and the administration, we believe our students are priority. They are number one. And we want to make sure that when they come to Michigan State University, they will be in an environment that supports them," said Anthony.

MSU is also working on a professional standards policy for faculty and academic staff to provide a common understanding of what behaviors are appropriate and inappropriate.

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MSU policy change makes it easier to revoke tenure

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A policy change at Michigan State University will make it easier to revoke tenure. "This new policy, we believe is a game changer," said Stephanie Anthony, Vice Chair for MSU faculty staff and senate.

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Georgia University System Allows Tenured Teachers to be Fired

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Georgia University System Allows Tenured Teachers to be Fired

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They have adjusted their tenure policy to allow for the removal of tenured teachers. Professors can now be removed after consecutively failing two annual reviews.

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The Board of Regents has given its universities the power to fire tenured professors without faculty input. Now some fear that academic freedom is threatened, too.

"Every person involved in higher education will recognize the headline that tenure died in Georgia today," said Matthew Boedy, who teaches at the University of North Georgia. Credit... Micah Green for The New York Times

In a direct challenge to the hallowed tradition of tenure, Georgia's public university system will now let its colleges' administrations remove a tenured professor with little to no faculty input.

The Board of Regents on Wednesday approved the new policy, which is the only one of its kind in the country, according to the American Association of University Professors. The move is being criticized by many professors, politicians and advocates for academic freedom as a threat to tenure, which is intended to protect faculty from dismissal without just cause, allowing them to develop thoughts or ideas that may be unpopular.

"Georgia is a huge outlier now, because that's the whole point of tenure: it includes due process protections," said Irene Mulvey, president of the professors' association, which is threatening to censure the university system. "There should now be a new word for it in Georgia, because tenure will not mean tenure there."

The Board of Regents, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment, has maintained that the policy change will streamline the process of removing faculty members who do not adequately contribute to a university, and the 19-member board unanimously approved the new measure on Wednesday. In the fall of 2020, there were more than 5,800 tenured faculty in the entire Georgia university system.

"Our intent with these policy changes is to promote faculty development and accountability as well as to align these with our mission of student success," Erin Hames, a board member, said on Tuesday.

Previously, the process for removing tenured professors included a peer review process with other faculty. Now, professors at 25 of its 26 public universities can be removed after consecutively failing two annual reviews. If a professor also fails to complete an improvement plan after the reviews, then that alone would be justification for termination. The new policy also included an additional benchmark - student success - in evaluating a tenured professor's performance.

The new policy is the result of months of back-and-forth between professors and the Board of Regents, the governing body of the state university system, since it announced last year that it would establish a working group to review the post-tenure review process.

In a report published by the working group in June, the group cited several shortcomings in the existing process including time concerns, onerous documentation and that "very few low-performing faculty members are identified and remediated."

The report also stated that there was a "need for accountability" with the tenure process and that, in its form at the time, the Board of Regents had difficulty having "oversight."

Last month, the board published a draft policy that included a clause stating that a tenured professor could be removed for reasons "other than for cause," which generated concern leading up to the approval of its final policy.

While that language is no longer in the approved policy, critics remain concerned that the changes could squash the academic freedom of professors who publish research or speak out in ways that go against the beliefs of the board, or the state's Republican governor, Brian Kemp.

More than 1,500 professors in the state have signed a petition opposing the policy. Credit... Audra Melton for The New York Times

"The faculty voice is now being heard less and less," said Matthew Boedy, a tenured associate professor of rhetoric and composition at the University of North Georgia, a public university, and the president of the Georgia conference of the Association of University Professors.

He considers the decision, he said, to be a "deep ideological attack on higher education," adding, "Every person involved in higher education will recognize the headline that tenure died in Georgia today."

Others are concerned that the new changes will affect the state's ability to both recruit and retain faculty and students at its public universities, which include Georgia Tech, one of the top public research institutions in the country.

"People are not going to want to go to a place where something like this has happened," Dr. Mulvey said. "So students and teachers will suffer as a result of this decision."

By Tuesday, more than 1,500 professors in the state had signed a petition against the new policy. Stacey Abrams, the former Democratic candidate for governor, also publicly voiced her disapproval of the measure in the hours before the meeting adjourned.

"Academic freedom guaranteed by tenure is more than a hiring gimmick," Ms. Abrams tweeted on Wednesday. "Georgia cannot compete for talent or produce innovation if we undermine our public universities."

The decision comes at the same time that the state's leadership is receiving pushback from some faculty members over a ban on mask mandates at academic institutions. The board stood by the ban.

"We continue to be in alignment with the governor's expectations and requirements for state agencies through this pandemic," said Teresa MacCartney, the acting chancellor of the university system.

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Georgia's University System Takes On Tenure

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The Board of Regents has given its universities the power to fire tenured professors without faculty input. Now some fear that academic freedom is threatened, too. In a direct challenge to the hallowed tradition of tenure, Georgia's public university system will now let its colleges' administrations remove a tenured professor with little to no faculty input.

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Without The Protection of Tenure Professors are Hesitant to Teach CRT

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Without The Protection of Tenure Professors are Hesitant to Teach CRT

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Florida Governor DeSantis is in the process banning the teaching of CRT. At UCF many classes on racism and equality were canceled because professors are not tenured. With tenure on the decline they are unsure if they will ever be protected enough to challenge the ban on CRT.

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Muzzled by DeSantis, Critical Race Theory Professors Cancel Courses or Modify Their Teaching

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As fewer faculty members are protected by tenure, they’re finding it harder to resist laws that ban certain racial topics. Their students suffer the consequences.

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Texas officials are looking to eliminate tenure but not for the reason you would think. Because they cannot ban the teaching of CRT they instead aim to have the power to fire professors teaching it.

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MISSION, Kan. (AP) - When Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick asked Texas colleges to disavow critical race theory, the University of Texas faculty approved a resolution defending their freedom to decide for themselves how to teach about race.

Patrick said he took it as a message to "go to hell."

In turn, Patrick, a Republican, said it was time to consider holding the faculty accountable, by targeting one of the top perks of their jobs.

"Maybe we need to look at tenure," Patrick said at a news conference in November.

It's a sentiment being echoed by conservative officials in red states across the country. The indefinite academic appointments that come with tenure - the holy grail of university employment - have faced review from lawmakers or state oversight boards in at least half a dozen states, often presented as bids to rein in academics with liberal views.

Tenure advocates are bracing for the possibility of new threats as lawmakers return to statehouses around the country.

The trend reflects how conservative scrutiny of instruction related to race, gender and sexuality has extended from schools to higher education. But budget considerations also play a role. Tenured faculty numbers have been declining even in more liberal states. Universities are hiring more part-time, adjunct instructors amid declines in financial support from state governments.

Traditionally, tenured professors can be terminated only under extreme circumstances, such as professional misconduct or a financial emergency. Advocates for tenure say it is a crucial component of academic freedom - especially as controversy grows over scholarly discussions about history and identity.

Without tenure, faculty are "liable to play it safe when it comes time to have a classroom discussion about a difficult topic," said Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors.

But in difficult financial and political times, even tenured professors may not be guaranteed employment.

In Kansas, Emporia State University this fall cut 33 faculty - most of them tenured - using an emergency pandemic measure that allowed universities to bypass policies on staff terminations to balance budgets.

Max McCoy, Emporia State's sole journalism professor, penned a column that began, "I may be fired for writing this" - before learning this would be his last year teaching at the school.

"This is a purge," he said. He said all the fired professors were "Democrats or liberal in our thinking."

University spokesperson Gwen Larson said individual professors were not targeted for dismissal. She said the cuts followed a review of how demand for academic programs is changing and "where we needed to move in the future.

Attacks on higher education have been fueled by a shift in how conservatives see colleges and universities, said Jeremy Young, of the free-expression group PEN America. The share of Republicans and independent-leaning Republicans who said higher education was having a negative effect on the country grew from 37% to 59% from 2015 to 2019 in Pew Research Center polling.

In Texas, university administrators are working behind the scenes to squash anticipated legislation that would target tenure, fearful it will hurt recruitment, said Jeff Blodgett, president of the Texas Conference of AAUP.

Some people already aren't applying for university jobs because of the discussions, said Pat Heintzelman, president of the Texas Faculty Association.

In Florida, a federal judge in November blocked the "Stop-WOKE" Act, a law pushed by Gov. Ron DeSantis that restricts certain race-based conversations and analysis in colleges. The governor's office is appealing the injunction. Compliance with the law would be part of the criteria for evaluating tenured professors under a review process that the university system's Board of Governors is weighing.

"They've latched onto the idea that many totalitarian regimes have done over the years, which is if you can stop students from learning about ideas that a political party in power disagrees with, that is one way to stop those ideas from existing in the society at all," said Andrew Gothard, president of United Faculty of Florida.

DeSantis, though, has questioned the argument that tenure provides academic freedom.

"If anything, it's created more of an intellectual orthodoxy where people that have dissenting views, it's harder for them to be tenured in the first place," he said at a news conference in April.

In Louisiana, lawmakers set up a task force to study tenure with the Republican-backed resolution noting that students should be confident that courses are free of "political, ideological, religious, or antireligious indoctrination." Professors raised concerns until they learned the task force's members were mostly tenure supporters.

In Georgia, the state's Board of Regents approved a policy that made it easier to remove tenured faculty who have had a negative performance review. Elsewhere, legislation to ban or restrict tenure also has been introduced in recent years in Iowa, South Carolina and Mississippi, but failed to win passage.

The pushback follows decades of declining rates of tenured faculty. According to the AAUP, 24% of faculty members held full-time tenured appointments in fall 2020, compared with 39% in fall 1987, the first year for which directly comparable information is available.

Part-time college instructors rarely receive benefits. They frequently must travel from campus to campus to cobble together a living.

"It's a nightmare," said Caprice Lawless, who wrote the "Adjunct Cookbook," replete with recipes that poorly compensated Ph.D.s can cobble together with food pantry staples.

"I've taken Ph.D.s to foodbanks and watched them cry because they can't get enough food for their family," said Lawless, who said she served as a social worker of sorts before retiring two years ago from Front Range Community College in Westminster, Colorado.

The opposition to tenure has united conservatives for different reasons: Not all share the same concerns about "woke higher education," said Marc Stein, a San Francisco State University history professor, who has written about the shift to part-time faculty.

"But," he said, "if you attack the 'wokeness' of higher education and that leads to declining funding for higher education, then economic conservatives are happy."

Tenure exploded after World War II when it helped with recruitment as the GI Bill sent enrollment soaring, said Sol Gittleman, a former provost of Tufts University who has written on the issue. Lately, the country has overproduced Ph.D.s, said Gittleman, who predicts tenure will largely disappear in the coming decades outside the top 100 colleges and universities.

"Critical race theory - that's an excuse," he said. "If there was a shortage of faculty, you wouldn't hear that."

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Associated Press writers Paul Weber in Austin, Texas, and Anthony Izaguirre in Tallahassee, Florida, contributed to this report. The Associated Press education team receives support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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Conservatives take aim at tenure for university professors

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MISSION, Kan. (AP) - When Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick asked Texas colleges to disavow critical race theory, the University of Texas faculty approved a resolution defending their freedom to decide for themselves how to teach about race. Patrick said he took it as a message to "go to hell."