Deepa Das Acevedo, Emory University School of Law - What Is Faculty Tenure and Why Is It So Controversial?

Why is faculty tenure so controversial? Deepa Das Acevedo, associate professor of law at the Emory University School of Law, explores this question. Faculty Bio: Deepa Das Acevedo is a legal anthropologist and Associate Professor at Emory University School of Law. Since 2020, she has been studying faculty tenure as an employment protection, blending legal doctrine with qualitative and quantitative social science. Her 2025 monograph, The War on Tenure, was named one of Forbes’ Top 10 Books in Higher Education, and her commentary has appeared in InsideHigherEd, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and TIME’s Made by History, among others. Transcript: You might have heard of professors having “tenure” and wondered what exactly that is or why anyone cares.Tenure is a type of employment contract that applies to around 20-to-30% of all full-time faculty in the United States. Whereas the average American employee can be fired “at-will” – for good reason, bad reason, or no reason at all – tenured faculty, like all employees who hold “just cause “contracts, can only be fired for cause. In other words, tenure provides a level of job security that’s pretty unusual even if it’s not unique.Partly because of this heightened security, tenure triggers strong concerns about how it might affect faculty behavior. Critics both inside and outside the academy worry that tenure makes faculty lazy, prone to unethical (or even illegal) behavior, and more likely to become ideological renegades. The thinking is: why wouldn’t you do these things if you could get away with them while keeping your job? However, my research suggests that tenure doesn’t have these incentive-distorting effects. I built a national dataset of all individual tenured-faculty-terminations across institution, discipline, and region (within the United States) that happened between 2000 and 2021. It turns out that professors maintain fairly consistent levels of productivity before and after they win tenure, that (at least during the study period) they didn’t often lose their jobs because of their ideological views, and – finally – that there is no reason to think that winning tenure encourages professional or interpersonal misconduct. All this means that tenure isn’t encouraging bad behavior or getting in the way of good behavior as its critics understandably (but wrongly) argue. Read More: [The Chronicle of Higher Education] - Is Any Professor Safe From Being Fired Anymore? [Inside Higher Ed] - Fighting Back Against ‘The War on Tenure’ [Time] - What Academic Tenure Is Really About [Cambridge University Press] - The War on Tenure This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org