At least five tenured faculty members have been terminated or put on leave over comments they made on social media following the killing of conservative firebrand Charlie Kirk. As tenured professors, in theory they should have some of the strongest job security protections in the country, especially when it comes to freedom of expression. But the speed with which they were punished for their speech suggests an erosion of tenure protections years in the making.

In her new book, The War on Tenure (Cambridge University Press), Deepa Das Acevedo, a legal anthropologist and associate professor of law at Emory University, offers a thoughtful response to the mounting attacks on tenure. She walks through the last two decades of state legislation and university policies that aim to weaken tenure protections. Justifications for these policies, she says, are often the same: Tenured faculty are too hard to fire. But, she argues, politicians are solving a problem that “didn’t need fixing in the first place.”

Das Acevedo spoke by Zoom with Inside Higher Ed about her new book, the arguments for and against tenure, and what tenure means to institutions, faculty and America in the current moment.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: “The War on Tenure” is certainly an attention-grabbing title. Is it hyperbolic, or are the ongoing attacks on tenure that severe?

A: The book, as I say in the introduction, isn’t about the war on tenure, it’s a response to the war on tenure. So my first goal was to provide a vocabulary and a conceptual framework for that response. These tools are, unfortunately, becoming more necessary by the day. How do we talk about and explain academic labor in ways that help us defend the industry and the institutions and the individuals that comprise academia? Providing that vocabulary as a basis for response was goal No. 1.

My second goal was to nod to the fact that academia’s problems—and the attacks on academia that we’re seeing right now—aren’t naturally arising. Systems, rules, incentives are all created by people. A war is waged by people. A war isn’t neutral or accidental—it’s strategic, aggressive and intentional. I think we can see this particularly clearly with the fallout from the Kirk assassination. What we’re seeing right now is a series of attacks on higher ed: defunding, the banning of certain topics and perspectives from the classroom and operational infrastructure of the university, retaliation for extramural speech, and so on. But the war actually began decades ago, with attacks on labor structures, with the war on tenure.

Q: In your book you discuss arguments both in favor of and against tenure. Have the arguments in favor been the same since tenure was created?

A: The arguments for and against have remained the same, and the degree to which either of them is more persuasive may fluctuate according to the historical moment we’re in. The employment security that tenure offers is a form of in-kind compensation for all of the hardships and the lower earning potential. And then, the fact that tenure protects from many generally applicable causes of employment discipline or termination helps promote academic freedom. Those two justifications for tenure remain, I think, consistently valuable and relevant across time.

In the current moment we’re seeing now, with Charlie Kirk’s assassination and the social media fallout as a result, and last year and the year before with public speech or social media activity related to Israel and Gaza—these kinds of events seem to be accelerating and ramping up. So you can see why academic freedom as a justification for tenure seems especially persuasive right now.

But I don’t think that employment security ever stops being important. Particularly over the 2000s and the 2010s, we really began to see the expansion of economic hardships on universities, and we saw where a lot of those weak points were during COVID, when institutions just couldn’t sustain the sudden shock … So we’ve been seeing in many ways how the job market and labor dynamics have been ratcheting up the pressure on both institutions and on individual faculty and aspiring academics. That’s a moment that was crucial for me, and I think for a lot of other scholars of higher ed, to point out the employment-security value of tenure.

Q: One of the most common refrains against tenure is that it de-incentivizes work once tenure is earned. But you also explain that that’s not really backed up in the data, and that, in fact, many professors work harder after receiving tenure. Can you tell me more about that?

A: This is one of those standard criticisms that gets thrown at tenure, both from internal critics, like other professors, and certainly by external critics. It uses a very crude classical economic thinking about how people respond to incentives. The thinking is, we all work to get job security, to get money, and then once we have enough of one of those things—in this case, job security—then why would we work?

I think that, for one, fundamentally misunderstands the personality type and the socialization practices that define academia. If you have chosen to go into a field that is commonly known not to pay at the highest rates for the credentials that you have, and then you spend an additional five to seven years jumping through all the hoops in order to get tenure, you’re really committed. The idea that you would get an email—which is how a lot of tenure letters are conveyed these days—and then suddenly you decide, “Well, now I have job security. I don’t need to work anymore,” just doesn’t make sense to me.

There is relatively sparse empirical data on faculty productivity. And generally, when we say faculty productivity, we’re just talking about publication outputs, even though there are a lot of other things that faculty are supposed to do and could be used as a metric of their productivity. But most of the empirical data we have just doesn’t support this stereotypical image of how professors respond to the incentive of having job security via tenure.

There are field-specific studies I’ve found that show a little bit of ramp-up just before tenure, which makes sense if you think about it in a general workforce context. If you know you have a big promotion coming up, you’re going to be extra productive and you’re going to be on your best behavior … but you can’t sustain that forever, and so it’s probably going to level off a little bit after you get that promotion.

Q: A lot of folks who argue against it seem to cite one or two professors they know who are unproductive, right?

A: A lot of these internal critics are probably drawing on their own personal experience. You know, the colleague down the hall who just hasn’t published anything in five years and you’re really irritated about it, and that’s understandable. But that is a cognitive failure that, in behavioral psychology, is called the availability heuristic. I think that just goes to show that academics are no more immune to this kind of decision-making or analysis failures than many others.

Q: Another frequent argument against tenure is that it can protect bad actors. But from what I’ve seen in my reporting, whether bad actors are disciplined seems to depend more on the institution and leadership. Do colleges need escape hatches to get rid of tenured professors?

A: Fundamentally, no form of employment contract—including tenured employment, which is a form of just-cause employment—says that you can never be fired regardless of how many bad things you do. The employer can terminate the relationship if they have just cause to do so. Certainly, predatorial behavior—not every single kind, but most of the kinds of predatorial behavior that we hear about in media coverage with regard to professors—would probably constitute just cause, and in the same way it does in the private workforce. Employees, or powerful employees, often get a pass on bad behavior when they shouldn’t, even when it was within their employer’s legal ability to punish them or terminate them. The same thing happens in academia.

Q: Beyond physical or sexual misconduct, is the same true for tenured faculty members who violate academic integrity standards?

A: The same is true in the sense that just cause isn’t limited to a specific kind of bad act. The reasonable explanation that’s needed for terminating an otherwise secure form of employment isn’t subject matter–specific. Even if you have tenure, if you do something that is bad enough that it is just cause to terminate this otherwise strong, secure employment relationship, then that’s enough.

If we’re talking about academic misconduct like misrepresenting your research results or plagiarism or something like that, there could be a similar range of responses that are fully within the employer’s ability to pursue. It could be censure, formal or informal. If it’s bad enough, it could be termination, and the fact that the professor is tenured is not preventing the university from pursuing anything along that range of actions. The only thing preventing them is their own willingness to pursue those responses and the circumstances of the case.

Q: Your book feels especially relevant right now, because we’ve seen several tenured faculty members dismissed from their jobs with very little due process in recent weeks. So I’m curious, what has changed since you finished writing the book that you would add to it now?

A: What’s becoming increasingly clear to me is that the details both of tenure and of an idea like academic freedom, which is so closely related to tenure, are largely dependent on the university’s willingness to constrain themselves when they need not necessarily do so legally.

I think that’s what we’re seeing with a lot of the Charlie Kirk fallout. Tenure is supposed to require that your employer have a reason for firing you, as opposed to at-will employment, where they don’t need to have any reason at all, and it’s supposed to provide you with either some notice or process. The version of just-cause employment that tenure represents usually explicitly requires universities to undergo previously agreed-upon processes that involve some faculty input before firing a tenured professor. And although the ultimate decision is never that of the faculty, their input is supposed to weigh significantly on the decision that’s made.

All of these things take time, and we’re seeing tenured faculty as well as untenured or tenure-track faculty being terminated in a matter of, sometimes, hours. There’s more than a couple of cases where it’s been a 24- to 72-hour process from start to finish. And these are not hour- or daylong processes that unfold in the aftermath of a physical act of aggression or violence; these are processes that are unfolding after social media posts.

What that’s showing us is that although the tenured professor has some legal rights by virtue of having just-cause contracts with their employers, the details of what tenure means to them and the processes that tenure affords them are entirely within their universities’ purview to change, to follow or to disregard. University employers are increasingly proving willing to disregard those processes … And I think we could say similar things about what academic freedom means as well.