A shortsighted idea to end faculty tenure puts education last

Mitch Daniels waited until he retired as president of Purdue University to suggest that state legislatures ought to consider abolishing faculty tenure systems. 

The former Republican governor of Indiana recently observed that many schools “desperately need to control expenses and redeploy resources,” but are “handcuffed” but what he calls the “tenure trap.” 

While Daniels is correct that colleges and universities are facing “rising skepticism,” much of it thanks to political attacks from his fellow Republicans, he is wrong to believe that it can be addressed by dismissing the most experienced teachers and researchers. (What reason is there for eliminating tenure other than firing people?) 

Daniels thinks that universities should be, as the cliché goes, run like businesses. If you pick up any management book, he explains, “you’ll run into words like ‘nimble’ and ‘move fast’ on virtually every page.” That is true enough, but you will also encounter phrases like “fail fast,” “creative destruction” and, to complete Daniels’s invocation of Mark Zuckerberg’s famous saying, “move fast and break things.”  

That may work for some businesses (although not for the company formerly known as Twitter), but it is no way to run a university. Even Zuckerberg later revised his motto to the less catchy but more sustainable “move fast with stable infrastructure.” 

A stable intellectual infrastructure is precisely what the tenure system provides to higher education, where the mission includes the preservation and transmission of knowledge. Daniels never mentions stability, scholarship, research or even instruction in his survey of university goals. It is all about management and cost control. Those are important objectives, but Daniels ignores the meaningful role that tenure plays in developing and maintaining an academic workforce. 

In most departments, a tenure-track applicant must first obtain a Ph.D. in the relevant discipline, which can take five to 10 years, living on grants and stipends. Other than in business or STEM fields, a doctorate is a limited qualification, and sometimes a disadvantage, for a job in industry. It is the potential security of a tenure-line position that makes the financial sacrifice tolerable.  

If Daniels doesn’t think scholarship is worthwhile in the humanities and social sciences, generations of alumni can tell him how the study of history, literature or anthropology has prepared them for leadership in their professions and communities. 

Even more important is the protection that tenure provides for the expression of unpopular or controversial ideas. At Minnesota’s Hamline University, for example, a single student complained when her art history teacher showed a slide of a 14th-century Persian painting with an image of the Prophet Mohammed. Although the syllabus provided a clear content warning, and students were allowed to opt out of the session, an administrator immediately branded the display “Islamophobic,” even though the painting was created by a Muslim artist for a Muslim ruler.  

Because the instructor was in a non-tenure eligible position, the Hamline administration was able to rescind the contract she had been offered for the following semester, without notice or due process. Her de facto firing was protested by the entire tenure-stream faculty of the Hamline Art History Department, the American Association of University Professors and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, but to no avail. 

A tenured professor would have been entitled to a hearing and appeal, with the burden on the administration to show cause for termination. In fact, the instructor had adhered to all professional standards, which she easily could have established if given the opportunity. As an untenured teacher, however, she had no such rights, and thus no academic freedom.  

Daniels’s economic arguments also fail. He notes that roughly two-thirds of the typical university’s budget goes to pay personnel, of which the “largest fraction” is faculty pay. His vague wording obscures the fact, revealed by his own source, that faculty at public and nonprofit universities account for only about 35 percent of total salary expenditures, the bulk of the rest going to various categories of administration. 

Moreover, most universities have shifted much of their faculty into “contingent” appointments. According to a recent study by the American Association of University Professors, only about a third of full-time college and university faculty are in tenured or tenure-eligible positions, accounting for perhaps 20 percent of universities’ total personnel costs nationwide. 

Daniels doesn’t say how many tenured professors he wants to see fired, but it could not be enough to make a major impact on the overall finances of higher education. Nor is he troubled by the phenomenal salaries of football and basketball coaches, which dwarf the pay of the most talented sociology professor. 

Purdue’s football coach Ryan Walters — hired by Daniels in the last month of his presidency — will make $4 million this year. Walters’s five-year contract includes guaranteed annual increases and as much as $1.5 million in yearly “performance bonuses.” His 10 assistants average $500,000 each, about triple the median tenure-line salary at Purdue. 

Matt Painter, Purdue’s men’s basketball coach since 2005, will earn a somewhat more modest $3.67 million this year, rising to $4.2 million in 2024-25. Coaches can be fired, usually with multi-year buyouts, but only to be replaced by others, often at still higher salaries. 

Contrary to myth, athletic departments actually lose money at the “vast majority” of schools. According to a recent study, university athletic departments average annual operating deficits of $14-18 million, enough to cover the median pay of about 100 tenure-line professors, or upgrade the salaries of 300-400 contingent faculty, at each school. 

Nonetheless, Daniels proposes that state governments mandate “dramatic” tenure revisions. Universities will not do it on their own, he says, for fear of “handing competitors a recruiting advantage.” Yes, that’s how market forces work, usually with Republicans’ approval (especially for football coaches). 

American universities are the best and most sought-after in the world, enrolling nearly 1 million international students annually. Perhaps Daniels skipped the page in his business manual advising “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”  

Steven Lubet is the Williams Memorial Professor Emeritus at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. He is the author of many books, including “Interrogating Ethnography: Why Evidence Matters.”