Tuesday, March 3, 2026 - Tenure is a defining feature of U.S. higher education, but these days the practice is in decline and under attack by critics. On this episode, Jeff and Michael talk with Jacques Berlinerblau, a Georgetown University professor who has written extensively about the tenure system, for an explainer on its colorful origins as well as a look at the dramatic changes that seem to be coming. This episode is made with support from Ascendium Education Group.
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“1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure,” and a history of the American Association of University Professors.
“1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure,” from the American Association of University Professors.
"Professors Lay Dying: Selecting a College Amidst an Educational Crisis," by Jacques Berlinerblau
“They’ve Been Scheming to Cut Tenure for Years. It’s Happening,” by Jacques Berlinerblau in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
“Laboratories of Autocracy: A Wake-Up Call from Behind the Lines,” by David Pepper.
“The War on Tenure,” by Deepa Das Acevedo
0:00 - Intro
2:50 - The Colorful History of Tenure
8:14 - A Distinctly American System
9:14 - How Tenure Works
13:26 - What Is the Legal Nature of Tenure?
14:46 - Which Types of Colleges Use Tenure?
16:19 - Is Tenure Different in Different Disciplines?
18:52 - How Difficult Is It For Colleges to Dismiss a Tenured Faculty Member?
20:40 - Can Tenured Departments Be Eliminated for Lack of Student Demand?
22:57 - Complaints Against the Tenure System
24:43 - A Turning Point in the 1990s
31:43 - A Renewed Campaign to Erode Tenure
34:31 - How Professors Are Partly to Blame for Tenure’s Woes
37:33 - Will Only Elite Universities Keep Tenure?
38:49 - Are Younger Faculty As Excited About Tenure?
41:48 - What Can Professors Do in the Face of Tenure’s Erosion?
Michael Horn
Jeff, we're back with one of our most popular formats, which we call Higher Ed 101. It's our chance to step back and take a big higher ed structural question or issue that's in the news and people are wondering about and do an explainer that breaks down how that issue in fact works, how we got to where we are today, and what changes seem to be coming.
Jeff Selingo
And, Michael, for this episode, we picked a very timely issue: tenure.
So we're bringing in an expert to help us understand the past and the future of the tenure system at colleges and universities, on this episode of Future U.
Sponsor
This episode of Future U is sponsored by Ascendium, a mission-driven nonprofit committed to improving learning and training systems to better serve learners from low-income backgrounds. For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org. Subscribe to Future U wherever you get your podcasts. And if you enjoy the show, share it with your friends so others can discover the conversations we're having about higher education.
Michael Horn
I'm Michael Horn.
Jeff Selingo
And I'm Jeff Selingo.
Michael Horn
Tenure is in the news constantly these days. But even people, Jeff, who've worked in higher education for a long time might not know the history of the system and the nuts and bolts of how it actually works and where it's different at different places.
So we're doing this Higher Ed 101 episode today to answer some of the questions that we had, frankly, that we hope will help all of us be better able to make sense of the news on this incredibly explosive issue.
Jeff Selingo
Yeah, Michael. I'm really excited to dig into this one more.
And our guest today is a longtime professor who's written a book that aims to explain tenure to a general audience as well as other ways the higher education system works. The book originally came out in 2017 with the title "Campus Confidential: How College Works or Doesn't for Professors, Parents, and Students," and it was recently revised and reissued as "Professors Lay Dying: Selecting a College Amidst an Educational Crisis."
Michael Horn
And it is quite an intro when you jump into that book right away. And the author of it is Jacques Berlinerblau, and he is a professor of Jewish civilization at Georgetown University. He does have tenure, Jeff, and as the title of his book suggests, he sees many aspects of higher ed as under attack these days, including tenure.
Jeff Selingo
And so we're gonna cover a lot of ground in this episode, so let's just jump right in.
Jacques, welcome to Future U.
Jacques Berlinerblau
Thank you for having me.
Michael Horn
Yeah. We're excited for this conversation, and we wanna really ground folks to understand what tenure is all about.
And it seems useful to first start with some history. And in fact, there's a pretty colorful history as I understand it of the early days of tenure in the United States that dates back to an incident that actually occurred at Stanford University way back in 1900. So tell us what happened there.
Jacques Berlinerblau
Well, there was a professor. He was a sociologist by the name of Edwin Ross. And go figure, he was at Stanford, and the Stanfords are railroad magnates. And professor Ross was not pro-railroad-magnate. He was a bit of a populist. And he was deeply opposed to all sorts of monopolies, which should have been precisely the type of monopolies that the Stanfords might have been involved in.
What makes the whole thing complicated, and as I say in my current book, kind of funny and sad, is he was a bit of — not a bit of — he was an anti-Asian loon. He deeply disliked Chinese and Japanese folks, Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans. So we got two crosscurrents here. We've got two things to think about. Right? We have this economic populist who doesn't like the rich and wants to eat the rich and opposes what the rich are doing to his fine university and his freedom of speech. And then we have a guy saying things using that freedom of speech that are absolutely insane.
Michael Horn
And what exactly happened to him as this played out? He has these views. It's Stanford University with the name on it. What sort of happens in the story to him?
Jacques Berlinerblau
So Jane Stanford tossed him out on his keister, and he lost his job. And what I think emerges from the story is one of his colleagues, Arthur Lovejoy, a philosopher, resigns in anger and demonstrates what I like to call guild solidarity. He's so upset about this that he resigns, and he founded something called the AAUP or the American Association of University Professors.
Michael Horn
And so then that group, as I understand it, starts to get together and agitate a little bit, start to create some ground rules that turn into tenure over a little bit of time. What was the sort of early formation of tenure that came together in around 1915?
Jacques Berlinerblau
Right. So the three important dates in this grand narrative of tenure, and it's always more complicated than it seems, as we all know, right, are 1900, 1915, and 1940. And I would like to add 2020 COVID, but I'm sure we'll get to that in a moment.
So 1915, Lovejoy brings together a rather formidable cohort of like-minded scholars, and they introduced this concept, which was probably German-inflected, from German institutions of higher education, of tenure, of the idea that a scholar that has demonstrated a certain degree of excellence or even competence should not be removed for their unpopular opinions and should be granted I don't wanna say lifetime employment, but indefinite employment. And that should be the assumption. That should be the baseline.
If they do something stupid or illegal or perhaps seditious, then we can talk.
And this is what happens in 1915. This concept of tenure, this Americanized reading on a German tradition enters the vocabulary, and for a good quarter century, this percolates back and forth with another group called the AAC, the American Association of Colleges, and those are mostly presidents of colleges.
And in 1940, we have the Messiah has arrived, right, in terms of what professors think is revelation and the end of times, the good end of times, the Messiah arrives in 1940.
Jeff Selingo
And what happened in 1940 when the Messiah arrived?
Jacques Berlinerblau
So the Messiah comes in the form of this wonderful declaration called the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, and it really is a great moment. And it sort of offers a glow-up or a sharpening of many of the ideas in the 1915 document. But foremost amongst the ideas in terms of the importance for us are these twin concepts of academic freedom and the idea that a scholar can prove his or her mettle throughout a so-called probationary period. And after the probationary period, if they jump through all the hurdles, they are assumed to be hired unless they do something wrong. Right?
Which is very different from what some might call at-will firing, which apparently is the norm in the United States labor market. So a professor could no longer just be fired. If a professor, in fact, had tenure, they could putter on as a professor until they were in hospice care for all intents and purposes, as long as they didn't transgress some very loosely defined and difficult-to-transgress boundaries.
Jeff Selingo
So Jacques, I'm curious at this point, do other countries in 1940 have tenure, or was this kind of a U.S. Invention from 1900 through 1915 through 1940?
Jacques Berlinerblau
As far as I know I mean, I don't have a doctorate in comparative tenure systems. As far as I know, it's a sort of a reading of the German system, but it's very, very unusual in terms of its precision and especially its tendency to look at meat-and-potato labor issues. Right?
The American tenure system is not just thinking about the greatness and the brilliance of the professor, but as befits the New Deal era, it's really thinking about the professor as a worker entitled to certain types of rights and certain types of protections. That being said, there is a comparable system in Canada. There today, at least, there's a comparable system in Germany, but for the most part, the American tenure system is fairly unusual.
Jeff Selingo
So let's fast forward to today then. Like, how does it work? What does tenure — as it exists today largely — what does it protect? What does it not protect?
Jacques Berlinerblau
It protects a lot of things, and it's been a system that I think worked really, really well.
So let's just kind of understand how somebody gets tenure. We can take my example, right, which is the example of tens of thousands of other scholars in my generation. I'm hired to a tenure-track job. That's what they're called, a tenure-track job. I apply. I interview. The committee likes me. I get the job. Traditionally, I will have six years to prove my worth or my value to my employer, and those would be, of course, my colleagues.
And how do I prove my worth and my value? What's so interesting about the 1940 statement is it doesn't say. That's something that developed afterwards.
And what happened in American higher education, especially at the R1s, or the more prestigious research universities, was what was called the 40/40/20 rule. The 40/40/20 rule was 40% of your tenure decision after six years was based on your research. Forty percent was based on your teaching, and 20% was based on your service to the university and the university community.
As we all know, at most American universities, that 40/40/20 is a fib. It's more like 75/15/10. Right? And we could play with those numbers.
So what does one have to do to get tenure? One has to publish a lot. Oh, that's that 75. One has to not be a disastrous teacher or at least scare the children, and one has to perform some type of service to the academy. Also, one has to be relentlessly nice to senior colleagues that will be voting on your tenure.
Once you get it, now we can go back to the 1940 rules. Right? You're basically we'll talk about some of the exceptions. You're basically set for life unless you cross certain very difficult-to-cross thresholds.
Michael Horn
So let's stay on that for one moment. Like, in terms of the protections, are we largely talking about academic freedom in the research side of this, or are ... You know, what about teaching? Right? If an institution says, 'Hey, Jacques, you know, they decide to get religion around pedagogy or something like that. Is that under tenure? Or or how do we think about it? Or it's really just these transgressions that you're talking about?
Jacques Berlinerblau
So, Michael, do you mean bad teaching or weird ideology in the classroom? Because those are two different
Michael Horn
Very good point. Very good point. Let's break down both. Yeah. Okay.
Jacques Berlinerblau
Bad teaching is ... I remember back in the day, we used to refer to it as the trump card. If an administration didn't like you, they would laser focus on your teaching even if your research was actually quite good. So bad teaching can occasionally derail a probate, somebody who's climbing the ladder to tenure.
Ideology in the classroom up until very, very recently — up until very recently — was very rare. Alright? And the classroom was this enshrined, protected space, which basically nobody could ever enter unless they kind of had signed documents, and they came at an appointed time to conduct an evaluation. So what happened in the classroom, tenure did a very, very good job of protecting professors in the classroom.
Nowadays, because of certain political changes and certain technological innovations in the form of digital technology and the ability to record everything and microphones, the sanctity or the closed-offed-ness of the physical classroom has been violated, and that's supercharging a lot of the stories that we're hearing in the news today.
Michael Horn
Super interesting. Alright. Let's one other question on these protections, which is you mentioned it's different from an at will employment agreement. Nor is it simply just a lifetime sort of contract, if you will. So what exactly gives faculty these protections? What's the legal nature, if you will, of this employment agreement, and is it also embedded in the university's bylaws and the like?
Jacques Berlinerblau
It is. It's different for private and public universities. But generally, there was an agreement. There was almost like a code of honor that when you come to a university, you're presented with the university bylaws or if you have a union, the collective bargaining agreement. You read the rules. The rules are precisely stipulated, and you know in advance exactly what it is that might imperil your tenure, and you would never dare cross that boundary as a result.
So, one of the great, I would say, accomplishments of this period, this New Deal forward period, which I refer to as the the Period of Liberal Explosion, was in many areas of American life we developed rules and regulations which were codified, and they had a modicum of concern not only for the employer but for the employee. So when one comes to a tenure-track job, one basically knows what one can expect in terms of potentially losing that job.
Jeff Selingo
So, Jacques, you mentioned, for example, the difference between public and private universities. But there are also very different types of institutions. Within higher education. Right? We have liberal arts colleges, for example, that focus less on research and more on teaching. You know?
So broadly speaking, are there significant categories of institutions that are different than the research institutions that you described, for example? Are there others that have never had tenure, or is this pretty well adopted across higher ed?
Jacques Berlinerblau
Junior colleges, for example, generally don't have tenure. Some community colleges do and some don't. Almost every R1 university that I know of has a tenure system. And why? Because as America is building out, right, you've got the push of the New Deal and then the GI Bill, which is like a cause and effect of the expansion of American universities.
Universities need good employees, and one way to bring skilled, competent employees with very unique expertise is to offer them this employment perk, and tenure is a wonderful employment perk.
So the majority — well, I would say all R1 universities — have a tenure system. But the one thing we're not talking about is they've always had another track, and that's the nontenure track. And how those two tracks are synergizing or desynergizing, I don't know what the word is, right, is one of the really, really big stories of 2026 and the future of American higher education.
Jeff Selingo
Okay. We're gonna get to that in a little bit, but I wanna talk about the differences in tenure.
And one thing that I've always wondered about is how does — or how should — tenure differ between, for example, a scientist who may be doing research that might not pay off for a very long time. Right? They're working on a, you know, a new, you know, a new strand of something, a new drug, a new whatever. Right?
You know, we know that science research sometimes might take more than six years, for example, to pay off as opposed to somebody in the humanities and the sciences. I'm sure I'm gonna get letters from all of our friends in the humanities. But that might, you know, just have different types of research that has a faster payoff.
For example, they could complete a book within six years. Is there a difference between, especially at an R1 university, how someone in the sciences is tenured compared to, say, the English department, Or better yet, should there be?
Jacques Berlinerblau
There are differences, but the good news is those differences are neutralized by a more general framing principle. And the framing principle is those who are making the decision about your tenure are experts in your own field. So the fields set their own types of criteria for what merits promotion to the level of associate professor, which would be tenure.
So in the humanities, we have one well, we have many sets of ways of looking at a successful candidate for tenure.
The hard sciences have their own rules, which are very, very different from ours. For example, in the hard sciences, there are a lot of multi-authored publications, which are taken very, very seriously. Up until very recently in the humanities, we looked askance at multi-authored publications.
But what is the good news? And again, this is the genius of the 1940 system and its concomitant build-out. The good news is the people who are evaluating you are one of you. Right? There are people who trained you. There are people who trained the people who trained you. They're colleagues. So you're all speaking a common language. And the beauty of the 1940 statement is it returned the decision-making power to experts in the field. And since I work a lot on liberalism in particular, this was a thing in the '40s, '50, '60s, '70s, and '80s, especially in United States Supreme Court jurisprudence. The idea that experts, not the layperson, not the average man, not the religious figure, not the politician, experts should be the ones that ultimately make the decision.
Michael Horn
Jacques, you've talked about how, you know, the protections that tenure has given and so forth. But in practice, and let's speak historically here for the moment because we know it's changing at the present day, but historically, how hard has it been for a university to dismiss a faculty member who is tenured? When those, you know, that gross negligence or bad behavior results.
What sort of evidence or grounds do they need? And is it different in private versus public institutions, historically speaking?
Jacques Berlinerblau
It has been really, really difficult to dismiss a person with tenure.
So generally, the 1940 statement introduced a word. I've only seen it in the 1940 statement. Turpitude. Moral turpitude. It doesn't describe what the turpitude is, but turpitude is generally bad.
So, what have I seen?
Generally, if a professor clearly violates a faculty code of conduct and it's an ostentatious violation, that can get you removed. If you commit a crime, that can get you removed. Right? If you simply disappear, that can get you removed.
But again, what was so interesting about the 1940 system is the decisions were made between a body of faculty and usually a body of administrators. So there was a kind of tensile relationship there, right, where the faculty were looking out for long-term faculty interests. Okay. Professor Jones is a criminal. He's just committed an index crime, let's say. You did have faculty members saying, it's a deplorable crime. It's terrible. However, which is probably not something that the administration might have been saying.
So they were fairly robust checks and balances that made it difficult to get rid of a tenured professor, but certainly not impossible.
Michael Horn
What about if a school wanted to eliminate, say, an entire department for financial or strategic reasons, or, say, because of student demand is changing, which we've seen, you know, more and more these days? What about that?
Jacques Berlinerblau
That's in the 1940 statement. Economic exigencies are real. And what I'm noticing in fields in the humanities, and it's very, very sad, is they're not getting registration. Students aren't signing up for the classes. As a result, the university can enact what are known as reductions in force. They can argue, well, it's great. You've done all this wonderful research. You're a tenured professor and whatnot, but nobody's coming to your classes. And financially, we cannot bear the burden of having your tenured self on our faculty. It's rare. It was very, very rare. Over the last decade, there has been a spike in universities that are adopting this line, and it often is in the humanities, which is of great distress and concern to many of us.
Jeff Selingo
And, Jacques, they don't have to keep those lines necessarily. In other words, they could just say, we are gonna eliminate this department, and with that elimination, we're gonna eliminate these lines because you can't simply be an English professor, for example, who goes over to teach computer science.
Jacques Berlinerblau
Absolutely.
Now, often administrations can be very reasonable, and they can try to accommodate the people who they're reducing. They can try buyouts. They can try phased or early retirement.
But it's becoming much more brass-knuckles, especially in public universities in red states, where wholesale firings of tenure stream professors are taking place. And this is really quite new.
In the aughts, I heard about this every couple of years. 2010 to 2020, the red flags went up, and now we're reading many stories in The Chronicle of Higher Education or Inside Higher Ed about entire departments in which professors with tenure are being told they no longer can be employed.
Jeff Selingo
So, Jacques, you mentioned red states. Tenure has long had critics, especially on the political right. What are some of the biggest complaints against this system of tenure?
Jacques Berlinerblau
The complaint that has been there for centuries, almost half a millennia, is the deadwood complaint. The idea that once you achieve your tenure after six measly years, and that's just completely inaccurate, because you usually train for eight to twelve years to get your doctorate, then you put in your six years. Right? So you've been at it now for about 18, 20 years.
But the counterpoint had always been that some professors goof off, disappear, fail to discharge their responsibilities, and they become what is commonly referred to as deadwood. Alright? So deadwood is one of the prevailing talking points, typically in a red state, but it's actually in blue states as well as to why tenure is a really, really bad idea.
A second idea is the notion of ideological indoctrination, and that professors, by virtue of the fact that they are so protected from consequences, are shamelessly, pointlessly indoctrinating their students without any regard for factuality, for accuracy, for history.
Does that happen? It does happen. My own personal opinion is, it's pretty rare.
Deadwood is pretty rare.
What's not pretty rare is a disregard for undergraduate teaching, but I'm sure we'll get to that, a little bit later on.
Jeff Selingo
Well, let's talk about teaching because you argue that something started happening at colleges back in the 1990s concerning tenure's role at colleges and the rise of adjuncts and nontenure-track professors and so forth.
So could you talk a little bit about what started to happen to tenure in the 1990s?
Jacques Berlinerblau
Well, we started to see a dip. So in, like, I have these statistics in my book. In, like, 1976, something like 55% of American professors were tenured. In the '90s, it was, like, was, it like, 40-something percent. And then we start to see the line is sinking of professors who are on the tenure line, either tenure track or tenured. Right now, we're down to somewhere between 21% to 23%. And my own view is this is gonna dip fast because of what's going on in the red states. So within a decade or so, we're gonna be beneath 20%, and we might go as low as 15%.
Alright. So back to your question, Jeff. What happened in the '80s and '90s? Quite frankly, university administrations were beholden by an ethos in which they wanted to drive down the costs of instruction as much as possible so they could invest their capital elsewhere.
How do you do that? You don't hire a tenure-line professor.
A statistic which I don't think is discussed enough, I want people to understand if we have board members out there listening to us, what it means when you put out an advertisement for a tenure-track line. Right? So let's put out as a $120,000 a year might be this a $100,000 a year might be the salary of your average tenure-line professor when they're an assistant at the beginning. Right? If that person gets tenured, given the life expectancy of an American male or female, chances are very good that they're gonna hang on for a good 30 to 35 years.
In 1994, Congress eliminated retirement mandates on professors. And that's why we just go until we croak, unfortunately. Right? We just keep lecturing and lecturing and lecturing, and you have 80-year old professors. You have 85-year old professors. That's something we might wanna think about.
Anyhow, what's the investment? The investment is let's just do the math. Let's assume a $100,000 a year for thirty years. Right? We're already at $3-million, but now think about the office and the computer and the research support. So every tenure line you see is like a $3- to $5-million investment. I wish I were an economist who understood statistical modeling, but I'm not. Actually, I'm happy I'm not. But an economist could tell you better than I, this is a significant investment, for a school.
So naturally, in the '80s and '90s, some enterprising, budget-conscious administrators concluded, why do we need to keep tenuring people when we can just hire folks to one of two situations?
And these are the two situations.
One is as an adjunct. They basically teach a course. We owe them nothing. We hire them on a semester-by-semester basis.
The second, and this is the category we should watch very, very carefully, is the nontenure-track full-time professor. I'm gonna repeat that because I know people have a hard time just wrapping their heads around it. Nontenure-track, full-time. That scholar is usually hired to a fixed-term contract, usually three years. It could be five years. In rare cases, I rarely see this, ten years. Sometimes one year.
Alright? So with the tenure-track professor, you've made a commitment to $3- to $5-million. With the adjunct, you've made a commitment of about $7,000 per semester. With the nontenure-track full-time professor, you've made a commitment of, let's say, $60,000 to $70,000 to $80,000, $240,000 across three years.
Oh, and by the way, those nontenure-track full-time professors usually teach twice as many classes as their tenured brethren.
Sponsor
This episode of Future U is sponsored by Ascendium, a mission-driven nonprofit committed to improving learning and training systems to better serve learners from low income backgrounds. Ascendium envisions a world where low-income learners succeed in post secondary education and workforce training as paths to upward mobility. Ascendium's grantees are removing systemic barriers and helping to build evidence about what works so learners can achieve their career goals. For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org.
Jeff Selingo
Jacques, you said something really important there around mandatory retirement which changed.
So we have this combination of tenure, the end of mandatory retirement. We know that back, you know, decades ago, a lot more professors came in as tenure-track and then were tenured. We know the country as a whole is aging.
So is part of this issue that we have kind of a bifurcated workforce here in the faculty, we have a lot of tenured faculty who also happen to be older, and now colleges and universities, just kinda hope they're gonna retire, but they can't force them to retire like they could have.
Like, is that part of the issue that's going on here?
Jacques Berlinerblau
Again, we would need an economist, but I think your premise is sound, and it checks with my experience of empirical reality that the tenure-line professors are much older. I think I saw a figure somewhere like the median age is 60, something like that, or 58 to 60. So as tenure is shrinking as a track, an employment track within American higher ed, right, the professors are getting older, and this is why I expect a tenure cliff to happen within the next ten years. Right?
Between the red state pressure to just detenurify or eliminate tenure. So Oklahoma recently has put forward a measure, I don't know if it's passed, to just eliminate tenure altogether at public colleges. Right? So between that initiative and the second initiative, which is God's wrath and professors just stroking out and dying, alright, between those two things happening, ten years from now, I do think that 20% to 23% number is gonna get really, really low, like 15%, 14%, 13%, and that's when we end the drawdown or the sunset phase of American tenure.
And just as you said, Jeff, you're gonna have a younger, angrier, less gainfully employed, poorer column of scholars who are doing all this teaching with very little in the way of academic freedom protections and job security.
Michael Horn
So, Jacques, you've just described this attrition that occurs pretty dramatically, this tenure cliff, if you will.
And then since the second Trump administration came on to bring it to the present time, it seems like there's also a renewed campaign on top of that to erode tenure, especially at public colleges.
What's happening as you see that at the current landscape?
Jacques Berlinerblau
It actually preceded Trump. I actually should write an article about this.
The first person I heard talk about this was Rick Santorum. Maybe it was 2010 or 2012, and it was very unusual at the time. But he was talking about, 'Why do people go to college and they don't learn a vocation? It would be better if they went to a vocational training school.'
So the Republican Party had always had this fundamental lack of ease with American higher education because they perceived it as ideologically slanted against conservative ideas or Republican ideas. And there's a lot of empirical data which backs that up, which we might talk about. Right?
Under Trump 1, the idea gained momentum, and now it's in overdrive. So across countless red states — Tennessee, Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, Indiana, South Carolina, we should roll-call them all if we had time. Right? — you will see in their state assemblies or their legislatures, which are usually, they have a super majority, right, where Democrats can't do anything. There are countless rather innovative initiatives to do lots of really, really bad things to tenure. One of them is to eliminate it altogether. Another is to really monitor it very, very carefully. Another is to bring more ideologically-conservative folks into the tenure stream.
But the really sinister one is what is known as detenurification, whereby every five years, there's a post-tenure review. This is the deadwood. This is the answer to the deadwood problem. Right? So every five years, a tenured professor would come in front of a committee, and the committee would look at what the tenured professor has done. And if it doesn't meet some newly created threshold or stipulation, that person could be fired for cause.
So look at these red state legislatures. What's the name of the book? "Laboratories of Autocracy." It's a really interesting book, actually. Laboratories... as places where experiments in obliterating tenure have been waged and conducted for about 15 years now, and now you're starting to see the fruits of that labor.
Michael Horn
So we've described the erosion of tenure from demographic, political, administration forces. You've also argued that professors are partly to blame for this erosion of tenure. How is that?
Jacques Berlinerblau
My accusation of professors, at least in what I've published, has been about a decision we also made in the '80s and '90s, which I think was a really, really bad decision.
We talked earlier about the formula, the formula for getting tenure. And we said it's always assumed to be 40/40/20, 40% research, 40% teaching, 20% service. In truth, at R1s and even schools, let's say, in the top 500 across the country in the '80s and '90s, a new formula took place where it was like 80/10/10, or 90/5/5, whatever.
Michael Horn
Even at liberal arts teaching college.
Jacques Berlinerblau
Even at liberal arts teaching colleges, which had this kind of, like, little brother syndrome where they wanted to be like the big dogs. Right?
So these great liberal arts schools, right, which were renowned in the '50s and '60s for having great teachers on their faculty, wanted to be like R1 universities like Michigan or Princeton or Harvard. Right? So they're all hiring the same type of person.
The mistake we made was to thoroughly denigrate the practice of undergraduate — I'm gonna say undergraduate — teaching.
And I argue, and I get ferocious pushback for this, that this created a lot of long-term pathologies for us. And I'll name one, which is a little bit flippant, but I think you'll understand where I'm going. I look at still images of campuses in the '60s, and I see professors, right, and they're like usually they're men, they're bearded, they're sweaty, right? And in front of them are students, like, hundreds, thousands of students. Right? There's this organic connection between the professor and the undergraduate. Right? The students love their professors or hate them. Right? The professors are gurus. Right? The professors are like these figures.
Well, when you abandoned undergraduate teaching, as many of us, but certainly not all of us did, this long, slow drift away from undergraduate teaching, the organic connection with the great American undergraduate was severed or disarticulated or cut. And one thing I noticed is when we receive yet another punch in the face from a legislature or from the government or from our own administrations, the students don't have our backs — not because they dislike us, but because we're so tangential to their college experience.
So something happened where that organic link between a professor-scholar and students, something happened there where that link was severed, and that is one of the ways. It's probably the most shallow way, but it's one of the ways that we actually made a tremendous, I would say, a tremendous error by abandoning our commitment to undergraduate teaching.
Jeff Selingo
So, Jacques, as we wrap up here, we wanna talk about what's next.
And something you said earlier when we were talking about, you know, the end of, you know, the reduction in numbers of tenured faculty, the changes in retirement and mandatory retirement, it makes me think, 'Is tenure going to be only a thing at the elite universities, the wealthiest universities, the biggest research universities?'
Is that where this is all going?
Jacques Berlinerblau
I have predicted as much. It's very sad if that's where it is going, but that is in fact my prediction that tenure is gonna be something that exists at the top 25, the top 50 universities.
And I think what a tenured professor in the year 2050 does is gonna be very different from what a tenured professor does now. It might be just teaching graduate seminars. It might be just doing public policy work.
But, yes, I think a fundamental shift is coming, and we should assume that tenure is going to dwindle, if not disappear in its entirety. And if it continues to exist, the types of tasks that we ask our tenured professors to perform are gonna be very, very different.
Jeff Selingo
And then let's talk about today's professors coming into the profession. You know, when I talk to them about tenure, they don't seem as, you know, nostalgic for the old days, as I would say older professors do who have tenure.
Is there a change in attitude among younger faculty? Do they like to just be free agents anyway, and they want more flexibility, and not having tenure maybe gives them that flexibility? What are you seeing? What are you hearing?
Jacques Berlinerblau
They hate the so-called flexibility, which is economic insecurity. It's terrible for them. Right?
So your typical graduate of a major doctoral program today does what? They become a postdoc, which means they go to some university far away from where they live and maybe where their spouse and their kids live. Right? So they move across the country, and they teach a lot of courses for two to three years. And then what do they do? They apply for more postdocs. Right? They go postdoc to postdoc, and then they snag the tenure track job. If they're exceptionally lucky, right, I think your odds now I mean, if you have a doctorate and you're on the job market, are between 20% to 30% that you will land on the tenure track.
The generation that I'm looking at now is intimately aware of this problem and this dilemma. They were warned by people like me. We were like, 'Guys, this is not a good idea.' It's like they're sailing into a squall, and the harbor master is saying, 'Don't go there. The waves are gonna be really, really choppy.' I always respect them for that decision. That's their decision.
But it's not as if they're going in unaware of how terrible the job market is. Basically, every scholar is telling them don't do this. Right? How often have I told one of my undergraduates, 'You know, kid, 30 years ago, every one of your professors would have been telling you, go to graduate school. Right? You're a blue-chip intellectual prospect. You're so damn good.' And then the undergraduate will stop me and say, 'Yeah. Yeah. I know. There are no jobs. I get it. I've been told this by other professors.'
So we're warning our students, but I don't wanna warn them to the point where I completely destroy their desire to study something that would be incredibly uncool and too domineering. But they're very, very well aware.
So they entered the job market cynical, ready for anything that life throws at them, and wishing that this institution of tenure still existed. I think they all wish that it existed so they could be like the professors that they studied with for their doctorates.
But what can you do? They just love... I mean, it's for the love of the game that a lot of them do this. Right? They're really interested in these historical questions, or they're really interested in sociology or social theory or literature, and they do it.
And we have to show them tremendous respect and tremendous sympathy and empathy for what they're going through.
Jeff Selingo
Okay. So, Jacques, let's end here. We're probably not going back to the early 1900s, the first quarter of that century. We know that tenure has evolved a lot since the 1990s as you laid out.
We know it has evolved even more since the 2020s, and now we're seeing all these state laws as we're we talked about. It seems like we're kind of in a limbo now of, like, a land that nobody's really thrilled with.
So if you got to run higher ed for a day, what would you do about tenure? What would the best system we could live with, what would it look like?
Jacques Berlinerblau
Well, okay. Macro and micro.
On the personal level, the only thing that professors that currently have tenure can do is to really teach well. That's something I've been ... I talk to my students about that. Right? I'm spending so much time on this syllabus. I'm gonna spend so much time grading your papers. So that's just on a personal, personal level. Alright? The best we can do is to just bravely acknowledge what's happening and commit ourselves to excellence in the classroom and giving our students the best we can.
On the macro level, what are professors to do?
Well, one thing we should have done 20 or 30 years ago, but we seem incapable of doing is what Max Weber called guild solidarity. The red flags were popping up in the '90s and the aughts, And for whatever reasons, it is impossible to get scholars to organize. It's very difficult to get them to unionize. Right? Even unionizing on a local level.
So what I would hope professors would do one day, and in a piece I wrote for The Chronicle of Higher Education I lightly suggested not a national walkout, but using the first five minutes of class just to talk about why we became professors and what it meant to us and why we think this vocation is worthwhile.
On a structural level, outside of solidarity and protest and working together with professional organizations, there's not much I could suggest.
I do have a fantasy of a university that decides they're gonna play the long game, and they're going to be renowned for putting scholars in the classroom that know how to teach. Because there are lots of people that can do this. Right? I mean, there are tens of thousands of fantastic professors who are conducting research, and then they bring that research back into the classroom, and they light these students on fire. And then they go back into their research as a result of what they've learned in the classroom. Right? And they produce better research.
I'd love to see some enterprising university find those people, usually when they're 30 or 40 years old, collect them together and say, this is a long-term project. It's a 20-year project, but it'll pay dividends when more and more parents want their kids to come to this college, where professional experts, where researchers, with pure pedagogical skills are working intensely with their children. I would hope somebody would have that idea, a startup, if you will, but probably not.
Jeff Selingo
Well, thank you for taking us through that incredible walkthrough of the history of tenure at a moment where everybody is talking about the word, but most people actually don't really know what it means.
So thank you for your time today.
Jacques Berlinerblau
Thank you so much.
Michael Horn
Well, that'll do it for us today on this episode of Future U, a deep dive into the nuts and bolts of tenure and where this practice is going and where it will be or not in the future of higher education.
Thanks so much to Jacques for joining us and for all of you for tuning in.
We'll see you next time.
