I recently spoke with law professor Deepa Das Acevedo about her new book The War on Tenure from Cambridge University Press. Das Acevedo, who teaches at Emory Law School, has written one of the more subtly contrarian academic books released this year. Not contrarian in the sense of taking predictable potshots at tenure from the outside, as I and others have done, but in reframing the whole conversation.
As Das Acevedo explains, tenure isn't some philosophical charter for free thought. Instead, it's one of the remaining areas of labor protection in a country where you can otherwise be fired whenever your organization buys some hot new AI vaporware platform and reports a few million less in Q3 profit than previously expected.
The book changed my mind about something I thought I knew well. I spent four years on the tenure track before walking away, and I'd long been in the "blow it all up" camp. But Das Acevedo makes a compelling case1 that if we blow up tenure, nothing better is coming to replace it. Nothing…or far, far worse things
Read on (or listen) to learn more about why academics aren't actually radical,2 how tenure doesn't protect predators or genuine freethinkers, and what happens when universities try to go without it.
Not Your Parents' Radicals
Das Acevedo started writing during the pandemic, doomscrolling between chapters of another book. Universities were closing departments, firing faculty in droves, declaring financial exigency left and right. Most of those fired weren't tenured. They were adjuncts, contingent faculty, the expendable ones. But it raised the question: what security does tenure actually provide, and what kind of person pursues this sort of security?
The answer might surprise you. "By the time they start their first full-time job," Das Acevedo explained, most professors are "at least in their early 30s. They have done nothing for the entirety of their adult lives besides try to meet external expectations."
Think about that psychology. These are people who spent 8-12 years in graduate school and postdoctoral appointments jumping through hoops. Writing the right papers. Attending the right conferences. Desperately trying to figure out what committees want so they can deliver it. Then another 5-7 years doing the same dance for tenure.
"The idea that because you got an email from the provost with a PDF attachment that says congratulations on your tenure [which is all that happens unless your department hosts some little finger-food party for you], suddenly you're gonna zoom off and become this radical?" Das Acevedo said. "It is just so ridiculous."
The boat rockers are gone long before tenure. They're weeded out in grad school, during the job market, in those brutal early years. What's left are people who've proven they can color inside the lines for fifteen years straight. I saw this at Pittsburgh and Texas-Arlington.3 The cool Marxist with the Porsche who, being a top-shelf prose stylist himself, insisted on nothing less from his advisees. The one Mario Savio-trained radical who voted no on everything ("the only vote you can give you a give a dean or faculty chair is no confidence" was one of his best lines) and stayed an associate professor forever, happily marginalized in his tiny office.
The Work of At-Will Employment
Here's what most people struggle to understand about employment: without providing an explanation beyond "business necessity," your boss can fire you because it's Tuesday. Because you wore purple. Because they don't like the way your voice cracks on Zoom. For "good reason, bad reason, or no reason at all," as Das Acevedo puts it.4
Against that backdrop, tenure is just a version of what's called "just-cause" employment. Your employer needs an actual reason to fire you. They need to give you notice, explain themselves, follow a process. Federal workers have this. Other union members have it. In most European countries, everyone has it.
When I worked at Texas Arlington, my third-year review contained exactly one notable comment: "He needs to reduce his service activities and outside writing." I'd built a program taking first-generation students to debate tournaments, teaching them public speaking, bringing in outside mentors. The results were insane. Kids who'd never left Texas since their immigrant parents had arrived were getting into Harvard Law.
But the university didn't care and the top administrators were clearly angling to rid themselves of me. And without tenure, they could have fired me for caring too much about students. Or for not liking Texas.5 Or for no reason at all, which would have been perfectly "understandishable."
Your Teardown Fantasy Won't Save You
Das Acevedo demolishes the myth that tenure protects predators. Sexual misconduct is textbook grounds for termination. The problem isn't tenure. It's that universities, like all hierarchical organizations, protect their stars to the extent that the numbers justify it and sacrifice their expendables to feed the beast. Hollywood doesn't have tenure. Wall Street doesn't have tenure. They protect most of the apex predators just fine without it.
She found something even more revealing in her research. After four years building a national database of every tenured professor fired for cause, the total number was less than the tenured faculty who lost jobs in departmental eliminations at a handful of universities. The real threat to academic employment isn't misconduct proceedings. It's administrators with spreadsheets declaring "financial exigency."
One of my mentors learned this the hard way. Did everything right for tenure at a small liberal arts school in the 1980s. Published a great first book. Then they eliminated his entire department. He spent twenty years as an adjunct at Pitt, making PBS documentaries and writing bestsellers while teaching for peanuts. When I sat on his hiring committee in 2012, I'd never seen a more qualified and talented person so hungry for a mere associate professorship.
The Economics No One Talks About
When Das Acevedo graduated from the University of Chicago Law School, big firms offered her a starting salary that it took six years in academia to reach. And she teaches at Emory Law, not some backwater. The average social science PhD takes eight years now. Then a postdoc or three. You're in your thirties before you start a "real" job that pays less than what you could have made at 22.
"Why on earth would anyone choose to do this," she asked, "if there wasn't even the potential for some job security at the end?"
The universities know this. Pittsburgh’s picturesque and formerly all-female Chatham University eliminated tenure in the early 2000s, thinking they were ahead of the curve. Twenty years later, they had to bring it back. Picturesque Shadyside campus aside, obody wanted to work there. Why sacrifice your twenties and thirties for a payoff that pays so little and offers nothing in the way of security?
The Crappy Alternative Is Already Here
I have a friend at Western Governors, the massive online university. His bosses' dream? Replace everyone with AI. Not AI-assisted teaching. Just AI. Maybe keep a few humans for the most complicated customer service and securing that financial aid bag.
This is what's coming if we let tenure die. Some CEO-type president will waltz in citing financial data that may or may not be real. They'll clean house. Outside the Ivies and a few elite schools that need to educate future leaders, everyone else gets the ChatGPT treatment.
"AI will not do the kind of shaping and molding of character that people want higher education to do," Das Acevedo said. The mentoring, the office hours, the letters of recommendation and introduction, the subtle work of turning confused kids into functional adults — the work of human-to-human contact, assuming we6 still desire a human-centered world. "Those things can't be just plugged into ChatGPT."
What Actually Needs Fixing
Das Acevedo isn't naive. She knows the system needs reform. Some universities are already creating teaching-focused tenure tracks, where you're evaluated on pedagogy and student development instead of publication counts. Others are developing better metrics for the service work that everyone does but most administrators can’t bring themselves to credit.
If academics want to preserve what’s left of the university, they need to change before change is imposed on them. "If we're not willing to move beyond that," she argues, "others will certainly do their part to alter those institutions."
The choice is stark. Make thoughtful reforms based on careful analysis like Das Acevedo's. Or watch as politicians use legitimate criticisms as talking points for a scorched-earth march through higher education.
Tenure isn't perfect. But in a country built on at-will employment, it's the minimum viable structure for work that takes decades to bear fruit. Kill it, and in this flawed world of ours — the only one we’ve got, alas, and thus the best of all possible worlds — you aren’t getting a better system. If you’re lucky, you’ll get Western Governors with an AI chatbot teaching your kids how to click buttons, type words into prompts, and (most important of all!) fill out the FAFSA.
Most are small-c “go along to get along/don’t rock the boat/do what we’re told” conservatives, for reasons Das Acevedo explains in her book and Michael Yates discusses here.
If you’re laying people off in this context, never give any indication as to why they’re being let go.
Many such cases.
We as in “us nobodies,” not the big bosses. Many of the top dogs, like Zuckerberg and his dream of an AI-filled Facebook (“80% of your friends will be AI”; we’re mostly there, if by “friends” you mean 100% AI slop accounts), would like to figure out the all-AI social media/entertainment/labor ecosystem, with the poor humanzees plugged in as UBI recirculators to at least keep the lights on (for now)
