Academic tenure

Academic tenure is a commitment by a college or university to award permanent employment status. Most faculty contracts stipulate that tenure can only be removed for cause or for financial exigency. 

In the last year of my postdoctoral fellowship, I applied for tenure-track positions at various universities around the US. Tenure-track means that the university is looking to hire someone they believe will end up getting tenure. It’s not a guarantee of tenure; I’ve known plenty of people hired on the tenure track who were later denied promotion and tenure and had to leave for failing to meet performance criteria. In the event, I accepted an offer as an assistant professor and was tenured as an associate professor six years later.

Recently, some universities have tried to work around the tenure commitment by cutting faculty salaries. Particularly at medical schools, non-clinical faculty are expected to recover 50% or more of their compensation from extramural grants. Faculty who fail to maintain this level of funding are seeing their salaries reduced.

Tenure has long been a right-wing whipping boy:

“The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, has long believed that tenure produces “poor teaching and shoddy research.”

If this were true, elite institutions like Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford would have long ago abandoned tenure, secure in the knowledge that their brand would continue to be a magnet for talent. In the real world, all the top universities still grant tenure, so I guess it isn’t quite the problem the boffins at the Heritage Foundation believe it to be. In my own case, most of the publications and grants in my CV came after tenure.

Yes, there are tenured faculty to refuse to retire after they have checked out of the academic rat race. Universities are not without resources to address this problem. My own university offers buy-outs and phased retirement to encourage faculty who aren’t research-active to retire. But it is also the responsibility of chairs and deans to do faculty development, encourage sabbaticals and otherwise make the best use of the human capital they once found sufficiently valuable to offer tenure. Salary cuts are the lazy approach. Cutting salaries may encourage targeted faculty to leave, but who will replace them? Talented people have choices; they research the institutions they apply to and will ignore ads from universities that make a mockery of tenure.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/05/11/business/tenure-tufts-medical-school/

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