There are so many Republican wars on things, including critical race theory, transgender rights, gay rights and reproductive freedoms, that it can be hard to keep track of all the sorties, rampages and carnage. But the GOP’s concerted, relentless, multistate war on tenure is something that Americans don’t appear to be sufficiently worried about.
The GOP’s concerted, relentless, multistate war on tenure is something that Americans don’t appear to be sufficiently worried about.
This month, the Republican-controlled Texas Senate approved a bill that would ban tenure for all new hires effective Jan. 1 (final approval is still pending). South Carolina and Iowa recently tried but failed to do precisely this. Republicans in North Carolina are behind a similar initiative. At the same time, GOP legislators in Louisiana have proposed “annual tenure review.” Regular “post-tenure review” laws have been approved in Georgia and Tennessee. And language was just removed from a Florida bill that would have allowed a university’s trustees to demand a review of a professor’s tenure “at any time.”
Wednesday, conservatives whom Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed to the board of trustees at New College of Florida controversially voted to deny five professors tenure.
Tenure is widely misunderstood. It’s a mechanism that binds a school to a scholar, potentially for decades. That’s because it guarantees a lifetime appointment after a researcher and/or teacher has passed a rigorous probationary period of usually six years. Once tenured, professors are exceedingly difficult to fire. The laws and bills mentioned above were drafted by Republicans who would like to make it less difficult, even easy.
Critics imagine the tenure system to be a vast afforestation project that yields metric tons of “dead wood,” a term higher-ed insiders use to describe scholars who stop working the moment they are granted tenure and live large for decades. This vision of whiny,…
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