The What, Who, How, and Why of Tenure

Faculty Tenure Explained

There has been plenty of press about faculty ‘tenure’ over the last couple of years – and many states are looking to abolish/weaken tenure and/or the protections it provides. Some critics think all university faculty have a lifetime employment guarantee that cannot be revoked or curtailed regardless of what the tenured faculty member does or doesn’t do.

Well, that’s just not true. But, there are arguments for and against this unique element of the academic enterprise.

We’ll focus our next few posts on what tenure is, the benefits of tenure (for faculty, institutions, and society), and the costs (to same). We start with this explainer on the what, who, how, and why of tenure.

What is Tenure?

Tenure is awarded and protected as a matter of institutional policy, so there are variations in how it is defined from institution-to-institution. Most definitions encompass key elements from the 1940 AAUP Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure as summarized below:

• “A tenured appointment is an indefinite appointment – that is, an appointment that is not subject to annual renewal and that can be terminated only for adequate cause or under extraordinary circumstances such as financial exigency or program elimination.”

Basically, this says that a faculty member with tenure has a job as long as the university is financially viable, their specific program is financially viable, and the faculty member doesn’t give the university a good reason to fire them. At our university, this is stated as follows:

• “…it is the policy of the University to renew appointments of faculty members who have obtained Tenured status, subject always to the availability of funds, the continuance of activities in the area of employment, and the absence of circumstances which would otherwise entitle the University to terminate the appointment for cause.”

Let’s look at each part of this definition in turn.

Can Tenured Faculty be Let Go if Universities or Programs are not Financially Viable?

Yes, and there has been plenty of this going on lately: Sonoma State released 46 tenured and adjunct faculty members in 2025 to deal with a 38% decline in enrollment; Manhattan College laid off 19 tenured faculty members and eliminated 20 majors and minors; the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee laid off 32 tenured faculty members when they eliminated their College of General Studies due to ‘financial pressures including lagging enrollment and inadequate state aid’. It would not surprise us if there were many more stories like this in the months and years ahead.

Can Tenured Faculty be Fired for Cause?

Again, yes, violating laws/university policy and not doing their job can lead to a tenured faculty member’s dismissal. At our institution these reasons are defined as:

• “proven incompetence, gross neglect of duty, moral turpitude, or improper conduct injurious to the welfare of the University.”

For those of you (like us) who are not legal scholars, ‘moral turpitude’ is characterized in the AAUP Statement of Principles as “a standard of behavior that would evoke condemnation by the academic community generally”. That definition covers a lot of ground…

As a result, in practice these conditions can be far from clear, particularly whether the conduct is sufficiently ‘injurious’ to merit firing. How often are faculty fired for cause? The only comprehensive study we are aware of reports a minimum of 14 terminations per year across U.S. 4-year institutions over the 2000-2021 period with the caveat “there are many reasons to think that …this estimate …is deceptively low” (page 30).

The bottom-line: tenured faculty can be dismissed from a university for cause – under a set of carefully defined conditions, and subject to a set of procedures designed to include faculty review and input into the termination decision.

This review process amounts to a trial in front of a jury of faculty peers. For this reason, in our experience, most such cases get resolved via resignation or retirement before the case ever gets to the review process. Faculty members who have committed ‘moral turpitude’ don’t want the public humiliation that comes with having the details shared with their fellow faculty.

What Happens if A Faculty Member Isn’t Doing Their Job?

Let’s say they are basically well-behaved, does this mean a tenured faculty member can get away with not doing any work? No. A faculty member’s performance is typically evaluated and recognized through an annual merit raise program – so subpar work means a limited raise or no raise.

Low/marginal performers also face the loss of other sources of support: summer salary support, graduate student funding, research resources, etc. When you look across tenured faculty you will find sizeable differences in salaries and support that are highly correlated with past performance.

Under more extreme circumstances, a tenured faculty member’s appointment and their compensation can be reduced substantially (using the review process described above). If they are only giving half-time effort, their salary can be reduced by half. And yes, this happens.

In addition, more than half (58 percent) of U.S. universities have instituted some form of post-tenure review. This is a periodic review process separate from the typical annual review. A poor showing in a post-tenure review can have compensation/employment consequences. At the University of Florida (in what looks to be an extreme case), about 1 in 5 faculty going through the post-tenure review process either quit, retired, or gave up research to take on full-time (untenured) teaching appointments.

Of course, if the faculty member is really doing nothing of value for the university, they can be terminated for cause (i.e., at our institution for “gross neglect” of their duty). We don’t have (nobody has) the data to know whether such terminations/dramatic salary cuts for low performance are common. We suspect they are less common than in the private sector and in our next post we explain why.

All that said, in our experience most tenured faculty at reputable universities work hard at their job…but there are consequences if they don’t.

Who has Tenure?

Not as many as once did… In 1987, about 53% of (non-medical) faculty in the U.S. were full-time, tenure-track/tenured. By 2022, that number had fallen to 33%. Over the same period, the number of full-time non-tenured faculty went from 13% to 20%. The big change was in part-time, non-tenured faculty which represented 33% of faculty in 1987, but 48% in 2022.

So, about 1/3 of the faculty workforce (not counting graduate students) have tenure/are on a tenure track and about 2/3’s are in part-time/full-time non-tenured appointments. (Note: the definition of ‘faculty’ does vary across institutions, with some classifying part-time/non-tenured instructors as ‘staff’.)

Source: AAUP

Where do these tenure-track/tenured faculty work? The so-called R1 (research intensive) universities employ the highest percentage of tenure-track/tenured faculty – about 50%. At the other extreme are baccalaureate/associate and associate degree colleges at 25% and 18% respectively.

Source: AAUP

Men hold a greater proportion of tenure-track/tenured jobs than women and Asian faculty hold a higher proportion of tenure-track/tenured jobs than white and URM faculty. Interestingly, the number of graduate student employees has skyrocketed since 2002 – up more than 44%.

To summarize, U.S. universities have aggressively moved away from tenure-track/tenured appointments over the past 35 years to non-tenure/part-time positions and graduate student employees. Why? Cost (part-time faculty are cheaper) and flexibility (no long-term contractual relationships with non-tenured faculty).

How Does A Faculty Member Earn Tenure?

The short version is work your butt off for some extended period of time, submit everything you have ever done as a faculty member to a committee of faculty who have tenure, then another committee, then likely a third. If your career accomplishments make it through the gauntlet, then you pray the university senior leadership and Board of Trustees will bless you with tenure…

Okay, that’s a bit crude – but not far off the process at most places. Those faculty fortunate enough to be hired into ‘tenure-track’ positions begin a probationary period of several years – the average is about 6 years. During this time they work (hard) to establish themselves as professionals and build a record that will ultimately be evaluated for tenure.

Tenure review committees want to see (a lot of) evidence that you are intellectually alive and are contributing in some substantive way to what the world knows about your specific area of expertise. Beyond the candidate’s personal academic record, multiple scholars at other institutions are asked to write letters evaluating the candidate and comparing the candidate’s record to peers nationally. Talk about scrutiny!

Faculty take this process and the decision to grant tenure (and promotions in rank) very, very seriously. We have both served on promotion and tenure committees at every level of the university and, in general, the discussions are robust and the decisions carefully considered. Some evidence of importance is the time invested in the process. At a major research university like ours, a conservative estimate would be 18,000 faculty hours annually – almost 10 work years!

A few other points regarding the process are in order. First, what faculty actually ‘do’ in their scholarly work varies dramatically across a university. Many faculty do research, for some the primary focus is teaching. Some faculty write books; other faculty publish journal articles. Some faculty create works of art or music; other faculty obtain patents for their inventions. Even within these highly varied categories, there is much scrutiny as to what ‘counts’ for tenure: just how high profile is that journal? Just how important is that book? Should scholarship include work related to teaching or engagement?

Second, across disciplines, it is virtually impossible for a faculty member in one field to truly understand the scholarship in a different field. As economists, how much would we understand about leading-edge paleogenomics (and vice versa)? This presents real challenges once a tenure case gets beyond the disciplinary unit: how good is that faculty member, really? A Provost or President has to lean heavily on the unit-level evaluation of a faculty member’s scholarly productivity.

Third, where the tenure ‘bar’ is set will vary dramatically with the institution and according to its mission. Tenure at an elite private research university may mean you need to be on the path for a Nobel Prize. The bar will look different for a faculty member at a regional public university. But few faculty at any given institution think the bar is easy to reach – standards may differ, but they are high for each institution in the context of its mission.

(Whew – writing this section made us both twitch thinking about our experience going through the tenure and promotion process…and it hasn’t gotten any easier.)

Why Do We Even Have Tenure?

Tenure as we know it today in academe is a relatively recent concept – dating back to 1940 and the of guidelines (mentioned earlier) put forward by the AAUP in the Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure. The objectives of tenure were defined as follows:

• “Tenure is a means to certain ends; specifically: (1) freedom of teaching and research and of extramural activities, and (2) a sufficient degree of economic security to make the profession attractive to men and women of ability. Freedom and economic security, hence, tenure, are indispensable to the success of an institution in fulfilling its obligations to its students and to society.”

The concept of ‘tenure’ was formalized to address two long-simmering issues: one was providing protections against firing/persecution based on criticisms of faculty work (‘academic freedom’) and the second was extending the term of employment beyond an annual contract. We’ll talk more about these issues in the coming weeks.

Where Are We Now?

Maybe back where we started before tenure existed – or at least on the way. Most faculty work part-time and are not protected by tenure. They have annual contracts and no longer-term assurances about employment. These individuals do not enjoy ‘academic freedom’ – at least they don’t enjoy whatever freedoms tenure provides.

At the same time, despite higher education moving dramatically away from the concept, it appears the cries to end tenure have never been louder. Why and does it matter? What are the pros and cons of tenure for faculty, universities, and society more broadly? What happens if it goes away? We will take up these questions and more about tenure over the next few posts.

Research assistance provided by Marley Heritier.

“Finding Equilibrium” is coauthored by Jay Akridge, Professor of Agricultural Economics, Trustee Chair in Teaching and Learning Excellence, and Provost Emeritus at Purdue University and David Hummels, Distinguished Professor of Economics and Dean Emeritus at the Daniels School of Business at Purdue.