Behind the turmoil of federal attacks on colleges, some states are going after tenure

Miami Herald

18-06-2025

HONOLULU - The "gravy train." That's what a Hawai'i state senator called the practice of awarding tenure to university research faculty when she proposed legislation stripping this long-standing form of job protection from them.
The bill got little notice at the time. Now, obscured by the turmoil of the many other challenges to higher education since the start of Donald Trump's second presidential term, tenure has come under siege in states across the country.
Never in the 110-year history of tenure in the United States have there been so many attempts to gut or reconfigure it, said Julie Reuben, a professor of the history of American education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
At least 11 states, including seven since the start of this year, have imposed new levels of review for tenured faculty, made it easier to fire them or proposed banning tenure altogether. Almost all have Republican-controlled legislatures or have seen lawmakers question what is being taught on campuses.
This comes at the same time as, but has gotten less attention than, the Trump administration's higher education funding cuts and investigations into colleges and universities.
"It's the flip side of the same assault," said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, or AFT, which represents 400,000 faculty and other university and college employees. "Some of the assault is coming from taking away grants, and some of the assault is coming by taking away tenure."
Unlike nontenured faculty, who can be dismissed or not reappointed, tenured faculty have more protections - including from being demoted or fired for what they think or say.
Without tenure, "If you pursue the truth in ways that are uncomfortable for donors, for students, for trustees, for the state legislature, then you'll lose your job," said Mark Criley, senior program officer for academic freedom, tenure and governance at the faculty union the American Association of University Professors, or AAUP.
Even before the second Trump administration and this wave of tenure challenges, 45 percent of faculty members said they had refrained from expressing an opinion they feared could attract negative attention, according to a survey conducted for the AAUP and the American Association of Colleges and Universities by the University of Chicago research organization NORC, and released in January. About a third of faculty nationwide have tenure or are on the tenure track, according to AAUP.
Most backers of curtailing tenure say they're not doing it for ideological reasons. They say they're trying to lower costs for taxpayers and consumers by removing faculty whose productivity is low.
The goal is "getting rid of professors who are not pulling their weight," said Nebraska state Sen. Loren Lippincott, a Republican and sponsor of a proposal to abolish tenure altogether for new hires at public colleges and universities in that state and replace it with annual performance reviews.
He hears stories "of professors that have tenure bragging about how little they work, how little they put in or how few hours they show up to teach classes," Lippincott said at a public hearing about the bill.
Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter.
In other states, however, curbs on tenure have been linked directly or indirectly to faculty political views.
An Ohio bill passed in late March will subject tenured faculty to annual evaluations - including student responses to the question "Does the faculty member create a classroom atmosphere free of political, racial, gender and religious bias?" - and allow them to be fired for poor reviews. It was part of a controversial larger higher education bill whose mission is "to enhance diversity of thought, which I don't believe we have at most of our universities today," said Republican state Sen. Jerry Cirino, its Senate sponsor.
Over the governor's veto, the Republican-dominated Kentucky General Assembly in March passed a bill requiring that faculty be reviewed at least once every four years and allowing the firing of any professor who fails to meet performance and productivity requirements, even if they're tenured.
Sponsors said the measure will uphold performance standards, but Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, contended in his veto message that it "threatens academic freedom" in "a time of increased federal encroachment" into how colleges and universities are run.
After faculty at the University of Texas at Austin signed a resolution in 2022 affirming their right to teach such subjects as race and gender theory, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick vowed to end tenure altogether for newly hired faculty and strip it from existing faculty who teach critical race theory.
A legislative proposal in Texas the following year failed to eliminate tenure, but broadened the grounds on which it could be revoked, mandated regular performance reviews of tenured faculty under a process it left up to governing boards to determine, and made it easier for those governing boards to fire tenured faculty.
In Indiana, a measure added to a 232-page budget bill two days before the legislative session ended in April, imposed "productivity reviews" on tenured faculty at that state's public universities, measuring the number of classes taught, the amount of research conducted and other tasks. Faculty members who are judged to have fallen short of standards can be fired.
This follows a law passed last year in Indiana requiring reviews of tenured faculty and denying tenure or promotion to faculty members who are "unlikely to foster a culture of free inquiry, free expression, and intellectual diversity." The American Civil Liberties Union has sued to block enforcement of this law, saying it violates faculty members' rights to free speech and due process. The suit was dismissed for jurisdictional reasons but has been re-filed and a ruling is pending.
Related: Fewer students and fewer dollars mean states face closing public universities and colleges
Arkansas legislators passed a law in March allowing university administrators to call for an immediate review of tenured faculty at any time and to fire them or remove their tenure status. North Dakota's governor signed a bill in April requiring post-tenure reviews at least every five years. Utah lawmakers last year imposed annual performance reviews of tenured faculty that include student evaluations. And a proposal this year to get rid of tenure in Kansas narrowly failed.
There have been earlier attempts to weaken or ban tenure in Iowa, Missouri, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and West Virginia, according to research conducted at the University of North Texas.
Tenure was established in the United States in 1915 just after the founding of the AAUP. Once awarded tenure, the association pronounced, a faculty member should be terminated only for cause or because of a financial emergency, a decision it said should be made by a committee consisting of fellow faculty and the institution's governing board.
The move was largely a response to firings around that time of university and college faculty for teaching the theory of evolution, said Reuben, the Harvard historian.
"Faculty had to be able to have the freedom to ask questions, and they could not be tied down to any sort of intellectual test imposed by church dogma or political parties," Reuben said.
Related: Tracking Trump: His actions to dismantle the Education Department, and more
Momentum for removing this protection comes against a backdrop of falling trust in colleges and universities and of the people who work at them.
Only about a third of Americans have "a great deal" or "a lot" of confidence in higher education, down from 57 percent in 2015, a Gallup poll found last year. College professors now rank below doctors, teachers, retail workers and construction workers among people Americans believe "contribute to the general good of society," a 2021 survey by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences found; only 40 percent of respondents, in that poll, said professors contribute "a lot" to the greater good.
Only a little more than a third of Republicans believe university professors act in the best interests of the public, according to another survey, by the Survey Center on American Life.
"This level of attack couldn't gain the kind of momentum it has without the declining public support for higher education," Reuben said. "It couldn't have happened to this magnitude before, because there was a general sense that higher education was good for society."
In Hawai'i, it was a fiscally conservative Democrat, state Sen. Donna Mercado Kim, who pushed, beginning in 2022, for tenure to be banned for University of Hawai'i faculty who do research and other jobs besides teaching, such as providing student support. Although she did not respond to repeated requests for comment, Kim has written that the effort was a way to make sure taxpayer and student tuition money given to the university was being "prudently spent."
After hundreds of faculty protested, she agreed to a compromise under which the university has set up a task force to study its tenure procedures.
Related: A battle at one university is a case study in why higher education is so slow to change
"To me, it's about the Senate wanting control over the university," said Christian Fern, executive director of the University of Hawaii Professional Assembly, or UHPA, the faculty union.
"Being able to teach without political retribution - which rings really loudly right now - do you want to have a faculty member able to teach what they learned in their research, even if it's politically incorrect?" Fern asked. "I think yes."
Karla Hayashi, president of the board of the UHPA and a former lecturer and English composition professor who now runs a tutoring center at the University of Hawai'i at Hilo, said she expects more attempts to weaken tenure. Hayashi sees them as an extension of political pressure that starts at the federal level.
"If I take away your tenure, then you're dependent on doing what I want you to do to earn your living," she said.
Contrary to arguments from critics, tenure "is not a job for life," Criley, of the AAUP, said. "It's a guarantee that you'll only be dismissed for cause when a case can be made that you're not fit for your professional duties - that you're negligent, incompetent or guilty of some sort of misconduct that violates professional ethics."
Related: A case study of what's ahead with Trump DEI crackdowns
Not all faculty agree that tenure is fine the way it is.
"If your main goal is job security, I don't think you're going to be that adventuresome of a professor," said Jim Wetherbe, a professor in the business department at Texas Tech University and a longtime critic of tenure, who has turned it down every time it has been offered to him.
Academic freedom at public universities is already protected by the First Amendment, Wetherbe has argued.
But Weingarten, the AFT head, said the immediate worry is that what faculty can say or teach will be narrowed.
"The right wing keeps talking about free speech, free speech, free speech, and an attack on tenure is an attack on free speech," she said. "It's basically an attempt to create compliance."
Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556, [e-mail].82 on Signal.
This story about tenure was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.
The post Behind the turmoil of federal attacks on colleges, some states are going after tenure appeared first on The Hechinger Report.