As states like Florida and Texas gut tenure protections for university faculty, many assume the greatest loss is to academic freedom. But tenure is not just about academic freedom. It also is, and has always been, about labor protection.
The idea of tenure may have emerged from academic freedom disputes, but it became an industry practice because it was used to recruit and retain skilled knowledge workers. Leaving this out of the story of tenure prevents scholars from effectively withstanding attacks that seek to remake how academic labor is performed today.
The 1940 Statement is undoubtedly an important reason why tenure became an industry norm in the decades after World War II. But tenure did not just appear in 1940, and it did not become an industry standard solely due to the AAUP’s Statement.
To begin with, the 1940 Statement merely built on the direction in which higher education was already moving. Indefinite employment terminable only for cause had existed as early as the founding of Harvard College in 1650. Academic employment practices would change considerably over the next two and half centuries, first moving away from this concept, and then back toward it. In the decade before the AAUP statement, universities had begun to adopt something resembling modern tenure.
In 1935, President Edgar Lovett of Rice University had contacted dozens of his fellow leaders to ask how their institutions approached the issue of job security for professors. Among the 78 universities that responded to Lovett’s inquiry, 48% had already instituted formal tenure policies and another 37% had an informal “custom of tenure.”
The 1940 Statement formalized this system after a period of fluctuation and gave it teeth by requiring universities to give faculty due process before termination.
Not only does the traditional narrative of tenure skew the timeline, it also oversimplifies the causes of the change.
Academic freedom wasn’t the only thing pushing universities…
