The Contingent Professor: How Tenure Became Negotiable
Executive Summary
The contemporary tenure system has radically altered from a firm assurance of academic freedom and perpetual employment into a variant, contingent contract. Introduced through the AAUP Statement of Principles in 1940, tenure was based on the principle of netting lower wages in exchange for a high degree of autonomy and job security. This secured tenure has a chance of cancellation only in exceptional cases of financial distress. Nowadays, various aspects, such as infrastructure and financial constraints, have changed this approach completely and turned tenure into a mechanism for the restructuring of academic institutions. For example, the recent decision of The New School to let go of tenured faculty in the light of a great loss of $60 million illustrates institutional insolvency being able to undermine long-established tenure rules.
At the same time, the level of tenure has decreased significantly; the share of non-tenure-track contingent academic employees currently stands at nearly 70% of the overall teaching staff in the United States. Along with only a small number of full-time positions available for PhDs (only 10% to 30% of them get them), this trend creates a “permatemp” career pattern. Thus, the idea of return on investment for scholars has reached its lowest point in history. It follows that, although some boards still regard tenure as a privilege, they risk losing both their credibility and their ability to innovate.
The Cracks in the Ivory Tower
The provost of The New School issued termination letters to several teaching staff in early June 2026. Nineteen instructors, including ten who have tenure, were let go as part of a series of activities intended to offset a systematic deficit figured to have grown from $48 million, reported originally, to more than $60 million for the academic term 2025-2026. The layoffs coincided with the dismissal of sixty-eight other members of the staff, merging four colleges of the university into two instead of four, scrapping many academic programs, and postponing the doctoral admissions cycle. According to information from Higher Ed Dive, the fall in faculty numbers at the university characterized the year as one of layoffs—the decrease in the number of faculty members decreased from 430 to 387.
For several years, it was thought that firing a tenured faculty member was the ultimate measure in college administration, such that the triggering of such a measure required the declaration of institutional financial exigency and all the procedural nuances associated with it. What happened at The New School seems, in many respects, to have been just such an event. However, this incident seems to be becoming more of a common occurrence than an exception.
For instance, West Virginia University (WVU) cut 147 positions and eliminated 28 academic programs in 2023 to address a $45 million budget gap, as reported by Forbes at the time, taking advantage of a board decision made in 2018, which eliminated tenure protections in situations of financial exigency and reduction in force measures. Inside Higher Ed has shown WVU going through further cuts long after the first ones. Academic systems from Georgia to Texas have spent several years adjusting procedural guarantees, making tenure less significant and mostly irrelevant irrespective of the specifics of their financial situation.
One of the most relevant examples of what tenure guarantees and what it does not guarantee is the case of Sanjay Reddy, a tenured economics professor at The New School for Social Research and one of the university’s most persistent internal critics of its financial management. Reddy was the only economist among the nine full-time faculty members in his department to lose his job, and the provost of the university justified the decision by saying that it had to do “not with an issue of performance” but with restructuring. More than a dozen eminent economists, led by the Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, wrote a letter saying that in their opinion, the decision was “disturbing” and complained that the university had not explained the criteria used to terminate him.
In this essay, it will be proven that tenure has changed from being an institutional safeguard of job security and freedom of inquiry to something more akin to a contract whose power depends on the solvency of the institution and demographic trends rather than on the quality of an individual scholar’s work. This does not mean that tenure is dead. However, considering it an unqualified refuge for faculty members deciding to pursue an academic career or for the boards that must think about how to position themselves is getting increasingly dangerous.
The Original Compact — What Tenure Was Built to Protect
The concept of tenure was established in the 1940 Statement that was released by the AAUP and the Association of American Colleges. The main idea of this declaration is that academic freedom is crucial to researching, discovering, and conveying the truth, as well as to serving the common good and not private interests of the scholar and the institution. In practical terms, the provision of tenure is based on continuous employment following a certain period of probation and is revocable only for a reason or under closely defined “extraordinary circumstances,” which signify a genuine financial exigency of a university in the opinion of the AAUP to constitute a considerable threat to the integrity of the institution.
In essence, this provision indicates an economic exchange. Although academic salaries are lower than the salaries paid to professionals in law, medicine, finance, and technology, professors obtain something in return that goes beyond the open market: absolute freedom of their research activities, immunity from dismissal for their previous opinions, and freedom to produce long-term and risky scholarly studies that do not deliver results for years. The professor who feels safe and secure in her position can oppose the ideas of her colleague, publish an unpopular discovery, and criticize her university, which was the main aim of the 1940 Statement.
The current mismatch is that this deal was made in times when university finances seemed relatively steady, and leadership roles were few in relation to faculty administration. The New School’s example indicates that nowadays, this ratio is reversed. In a faculty senate investigation published in Higher Ed Dive, it was indicated that if administrative expenses, service fees, and facility costs had grown as fast as university revenues, The New School could have made a profit of seven million dollars instead of a loss in 2024. However, instead of administrative positions being cut, layoffs affected faculty and non-faculty employees, which many professors see as a violation of the original agreements aimed at making universities responsible for their financial success rather than faculty members.
This shows how current tenure debates have emerged. The 1940 Statement was written in times when financial issues were rare and unusual. Boards nowadays frequently regard restructuring, cancelling certain programs, and merging with others as established business practices that could come in handy when the number of students is less than expected, or the university does not get as much money as anticipated. Moreover, there are no requirements laid down by the original agreement that should be fulfilled when an educator is dismissed. While the understanding of the term “tenure” has not changed since its initial usage, its underlying meaning can mean different things to people who enter into tenure agreements in one period but find themselves governed by new, different rules two decades later.
The Fall of Tenure Density — From Core Profession to Gig Academy
The apparent proof of the fact that tenure has become an exceptional form of employment in academia is what is known in the AAUP reports as tenure density, which indicates the proportion of teachers being tenured or being on a tenure track. The data from the AAUP for Spring 2025 shows that only 32% of professors who were employed in the USA in Fall 2023 had tenure or were on a tenure track. The data for Spring 2025 shows that only 32% of professors who were employed in the USA in Fall 2023 had tenure or were on a tenure track. The data for Spring 2025 shows that only 32% of professors who were employed in the USA in Fall 2023 had tenure or were on a tenure track. The AAUP analyzed the data showing that full-time contingent appointments grew by approximately 65% between 2002 and 2023, while full-time tenure promotions increased by only about 6%.
This change is not uniform. The level of contingent employment reaches 51.5% at Research I universities and 82.6% at university colleges. Nonetheless, the decline is visible even in the top-ranking public universities. Inside Higher Ed showed in its report that as of 2002, the percentage of academic appointments in the California State University system was equal to 64.2%, only to drop to 56.3% in 2020; and the swiftest decline was in the years following 2008.
From a balance-sheet standpoint, the institutional logic behind this change is obvious, despite the harm it does to the fundamental principle of the profession. Contingent staff do not have any long-term liabilities associated with tenure: they do not incur the expenses that a long-term salary commitment implies or any defined benefits retirement costs, and more importantly for institutions that deal with fluctuations in enrollment—they do not face any obstacles hindering termination should an academic program cut back or a budget squeeze occur. An institution can manage its uncertain income by hiring and firing temporary faculty, while the same would require declaring a financial emergency to lay off tenured staff.
The result for the process of producing academics is what we can call a trajectory of perma-temp. Because the number of tenure-track jobs does not keep pace with graduates of PhD programs, the number of adjunct professors and postdoctoral researchers is growing, and they compete with each other for a smaller number of tenure-track jobs. What is more worrying is that the majority of them have to work at different institutions on temporary contracts for many years before they earn an academic appointment permanently or abandon their career path altogether. This trend is not restricted to one discipline or area. Even among those academic fields that are relatively successful in terms of employment, hiring is still done by a handful of top programs, and from 20% to 30% of all tenure-track hires are done by one of the top ten programs in the field; the ratio is even higher in economics and business. Therefore, graduates of other doctoral programs can hope for a very small number of tenure-track jobs.
Financial Exigency and the Mirage of Absolute Security
It is essential to state precisely what tenure has historically guaranteed legally in order to magnify the contrast between popular views of tenure and the real protections offered by it. The essence of tenure is a procedural right, which protects the employee’s due process, standard of proof, and presence of faculty in the process of dismissal rather than an unconditional protection against being relieved of the duties. The 1940 Statement defined financial distress as a legitimate ground for termination of even tenured employees, providing that the distress can be proved to be real. All the contemporary discussion of the deterioration of tenure hinges on the possibility of institutions having the right to define this exclusion broadly and the degree to which original due process is preserved in the case of its being invoked.
The New School restructuring illustrates that financial threats serve as an excuse, whereas underlining the procedure used to dismiss shows that either effectiveness or sustainability was truly considered. The AAUP chapter of The New School pointed out that most of the employees who were dismissed were tenured workers who had recently gone through tenure and promotion or had received awards for their teaching and research, and that the cuts were particularly impacting humanities and social science departments, including tenured minority faculty. Reddy’s department was not included among approximately two dozen departments that were getting closed and restructured, which is why his colleagues from the department of economics told the reporters from The New York Times that it was difficult to consider that Reddy’s dismissal was not connected with his criticisms of the administration’s financial policies.
West Virginia University presents an instance from the public sphere that is structured slightly differently. In the year 2023, to address a $45 million deficit, the Board of Governors of WVU endorsed the reduction of 147 faculty roles and 28 majors while ceasing its operations of the whole department of world languages. What is essential is the fact that, based on the Inside Higher Ed analysis, WVU did not need to apply for financial exigency because the rule, which was validated in 2018, excluded the whole process of terminating positions and closing programs from the requirements set by exigency. It is significant to mention that the faculty members of the university did not know about this fact beforehand. What happened when the reporting of West Virginia Watch took place on this event was the description of the chaos that resulted from the abovementioned events.
In the sphere of public institutions of higher education, there is another avenue of dilution of the importance of tenure, aside from financial problems. The Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia faced criticism from the AAUP after it separated post-tenure reviews from due-process opportunities during the employment termination procedures. Due to this initiative, university leaders gained the possibility of dismissing faculty members without involving their co-workers. In Texas, a few bills related to tenure practices were under discussion, while in other states like Arkansas, Kansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Ohio, similar proposals were brought to the legislative assemblies as well. Such actions are frequently grouped together with more general efforts for better governance in higher education. Thus, while tenure is being weakened in the public sector, the reasons for this are political as much as financial.
Thus, academic freedom is affected by all this directly. If a tenured professor can be removed from his position because of either some obscure restructuring rules or a new law that changes the meanings of “good cause,” this means that academic freedom will depend on the success of the department—something that the authors of the Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom were trying to prevent. The usefulness of tenure as a safeguard for unpopular opinions and criticism of institutions depends on the due process level, and that level is not as unchangeable as many professors and PhD students think.
The Paradox for Aspiring Academics
Anyone considering an academic career in the present day will find that the math surrounding tenure is no longer easy to support using economic criteria. Many PhD programs take five to seven years, during which time candidates earn their doctoral degrees, followed by two to four years, or more, of contingent teaching positions during which they are preparing for tenure-track jobs—if they are lucky enough to receive one. All of this adds up to seven to eleven years with insufficient earnings, which causes pertinent retirement contributions to be delayed and adds an element of geographic instability that is associated with tenure attainment.
The likelihood of success depends heavily on a specific field of study. The situation in the life sciences field is that only 8% of graduates can secure tenure-track positions. Throughout the entire STEM field, the number of people who were able to obtain tenure-track work dropped from 77% to approximately 18% in a period of about twenty years, between 1993 and 2015. The impact of the situation on the biomedical PhD is similar, with only 23% eventually finding work in a tenure-track position and with rates shown by the cohorts of postdoctoral fellows studying this branch of science varying between 21% and 77%. The reported statistics regarding the humanities vary essentially due to the methodology of this research—the Modern Language Association numbers show that the percentage of English PhDs who eventually find a tenure-track position can be as high as 48%, while a reality check within the group of the postdoctoral fellows working in this field shows the number of people attaining faculty positions is likely to be closer to 12%. Outside of the mentioned field, the work showed that only 10-30% of PhD holders achieve their desired academic positions.
Aside from the probability, we also must consider the reality of an opportunity cost. Typically, a PhD candidate who has opted for the academic route instead of getting into industry, consulting, or technology right after finishing their bachelor’s or master’s degree would be able to earn a full salary and build both career and stability for a significantly longer period compared to the time before their academic counterpart finds a job. Another interesting point is that the job search entails what in academic circles is known as the “anywhere in the country” mandate, which means that a person looking for a job must apply for whatever job is available and move to whatever corner of the country that offers the position. This requirement raises the existing problems of dual-career families, adult parents who could potentially need the help of their grown-up children soon, and the necessity to cut expenses that most people in their late twenties and early thirties aim for.
The qualitative expenses only build on top of the quantitative ones. The years of contingent teaching that take place at several institutions at the same time led to both the high risk of burnout and the decline in overall health conditions, as well as the postponement of the family and home purchasing process compared to people in other professions.
Strategic Outlook for Academic Leaders
Should you still go for tenure? The honest answer is yes, but not as a safe guarantee. The benefits of tenure are real, including due process of law, where the institution must provide evidence, and limited protection against retaliation in case of unpopular research throughout one’s career. What tenure does not provide anymore is immunity from the financial problems of the institution, from changes to the policies of the boards, or from actions or interventions of the state legislature. As a result, both faculty members and administrators are burning themselves in the gap between what tenure is said to mean and the actual meaning of this term.
The implications of this for those seeking academic jobs are to view the PhD-tenure process as a venture with varying outcomes instead of an assured plan. It is also wise to develop skills needed in a non-academic career at the same time one is trying to get the tenure-track job. More specifically, evaluating a potential academic employer should also include what is usually called due diligence in business when one evaluates a new promising start-up, i.e., one should check how many students there were at this institution for the last several years, what losses the institution has suffered in budget, how many of the institution’s professors have tenure, and how the boards of the institution behaved during the challenging economic periods of time.
For the various university boards and authorities considered to be at the center of the audience, the issue of strategic risk happens to come up oppositely. The tenure system that functions just like any other privilege that can be revoked does not only result in the problem of legal and reputational exposure in cases like the one of Professor Reddy. The tenure system influences the incentive structure for each researcher whom the institution is trying to recruit or keep. In particular, researchers able to make unpopular, long-term research that requires the protection of tenure would also notice this change in protection. Reducing the density of tenured professors and using financial hardships as a management tool rather than a serious measure to save the financial situation of the institution would ultimately cause damage to the very things that concern the boards.