\n<\/p>\n
Tom Alter (center) speaks at free speech rally on his behalf in Austin.<\/p>\n
Texas State Employees Union<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI responded, \u2018No, it\u2019s OK, I\u2019m aware. Let\u2019s just ignore it. Let\u2019s not give it any air,\u2019\u201d Alter said about the infiltrator\u2019s doxing campaign. Then the texter followed up with a link to a statement from Texas State president Kelly Damphousse, posted to the university website and on Facebook, \u201cannouncing my termination for \u2018inciting violence,\u2019 effective immediately,\u201d Alter said. <\/p>\n A few years ago, this story\u2014a tenured professor fired publicly without notice or due process for asking a rhetorical question during an unaffiliated talk\u2014would have dominated the higher education news cycle for weeks. In fact, it was such a rare occurrence that the names of those removed for similar speech incidents gained legendary status in academic circles. In 2014, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, under pressure from major donors, revoked a tenure offer to American Indian studies professor Steven Salaita because of his tweets criticizing Israel and its actions in Gaza. The scandal generated news coverage and commentary for years. Similarly, following a coordinated campaign led by law professor Alan Dershowitz, political scientist and Holocaust researcher Norman Finkelstein was denied tenure at DePaul University despite votes in favor from the department and the college. Finkelstein resigned soon after. <\/p>\n But Alter\u2019s story was quickly overshadowed by a bigger one: He was fired the same day that conservative commentator Charlie Kirk was shot and killed during a campus event at Utah Valley University, sparking a more dramatic wave of faculty removals. Like many Americans, faculty took to social media to voice their opinions on Kirk. Under pressure from right-wing politicians and online activists, universities in conservative states responded with academic Jedburgh justice: punish first, ask questions later. <\/p>\n Michael Rex, an English and creative writing professor at Cumberland University in Tennessee, was dismissed for a post about Kirk that said, \u201ckharma [sic<\/em>] is a beautiful bitch.\u201d Anna Kenney, an associate professor of pediatrics at Emory University in Georgia, was also terminated after calling Kirk a \u201cdisgusting individual\u201d online. Karen Leader, an associate professor of art history at Florida Atlantic University, was put on administrative leave and investigated for months after sharing several X posts about Kirk\u2019s public comments alongside the tag line, \u201cThis was Charlie Kirk.\u201d<\/p>\n Tenure was of little help. One of the most unusual and coveted perks of an academic career, tenure historically has come with two key benefits: job security and protection from dismissal or discipline over unpopular ideas, said Deepa Das Acevedo, a legal anthropologist and tenure researcher at Emory University. But the speed and ease with which universities dismissed their faculty for personal speech exposed the tenure system\u2019s corroded foundation, worn away by years of encroaching state policies, administrative leadership changes and a cultural shift in how the American public thinks about academia. Now faculty are left to wonder: Has the drastic politicization of the country, combined with the Trump administration\u2019s relentless attacks on higher ed, rendered tenure moot?<\/p>\n To understand how September\u2019s swift firings became possible, we must start in Wisconsin. <\/p>\n Former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker introduced some of the first modern legislation against tenure.<\/p>\n Sean Rayford\/Getty Images<\/p>\n In 2014, then\u2013Wisconsin governor Scott Walker challenged the \u201cWisconsin Idea,\u201d the state\u2019s century-old philosophy that all citizens should benefit from knowledge produced by the university system and that \u201cbasic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth.\u201d He wanted the university to orient its mission toward meeting the state\u2019s workforce needs\u2014a philosophy of higher ed that remains popular with conservatives, demonstrated at the federal level by President Donald Trump\u2019s ambition to promote vocational and trade schools. <\/p>\n Walker ultimately failed to alter the university system\u2019s mission, but succeeded in another effort: weakening tenure. In 2015, via a $73\u00a0billion budget, Walker, a Republican, made good on his proposal to eliminate language in the state code that protected tenure and shared governance. His new policy handed the power to set tenure policies to the University of Wisconsin system Board of Regents, of which 16 of 18 members are appointed by the governor. The new rules also gave the regents the ability to fire tenured professors when programs were cut or modified\u2014an option that was previously available only in cases of financial exigency. <\/p>\n Walker\u2019s attack on tenure wasn\u2019t the first, but it \u201cmade it big on my radar,\u201d Das Acevedo said. Other tenure experts agreed\u2014Walker\u2019s straightforward attack set in motion a landslide of other conservative efforts to curb tenure. <\/p>\n \u201cA number of the efforts [to erode tenure] have come from Republicans, and they\u2019re often tied to larger complaints about the politics of the academy\u2014that faculty members are too progressive; that they are promoting diversity, equity and inclusion; and that they\u2019re trying to indoctrinate students,\u201d said Tim Cain, associate director and professor of higher education at the University of Georgia\u2019s Louisa McBee Institute of Higher Education. <\/p>\n Between 2012 and 2022, state legislatures considered 13 tenure bans and 3,000 bills that addressed faculty or tenure in some way, according to a 2025 study by University of North Texas professor of higher education Barrett Taylor and Ph.D. student Kimberly Watts. The outright tenure bans proved largely unpopular\u2014to date, no state has fully eliminated tenure for faculty\u2014but many evolved into laws that sought to weaken tenure\u2019s protections without getting rid of the status entirely. <\/p>\n In 2022, Florida enacted a law that green-lighted post-tenure review at public institutions. In 2023, while conservatives fumed over critical race theory, Texas enacted Senate Bill 18, which broadened the grounds for terminating a tenured professor to include \u201cexhibit[ing] professional incompetence\u201d and engaging in ill-defined \u201cconduct involving moral turpitude,\u201d among other reasons.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we\u2019re seeing is an increase in these efforts, certainly,\u201d Cain said. \u201cThe legislation that was proposed in Texas initially was to ban tenure. What was actually passed and signed into law was weakening tenure. A lot of times legislation changes through the process, and you might see more extreme versions that get watered down in one way or another. But they can still be quite problematic for advocates of faculty and advocates of tenure.\u201d <\/p>\n Tenure advocates aren\u2019t against regular evaluations for tenured professors, but the American Association of University Professors argues that post-tenure review \u201cshouldn\u2019t be undertaken for the purpose of dismissal.\u201d State legislatures have weaponized post-tenure review policies in recent years, giving administrators regular opportunities to review and subsequently sanction or fire tenured faculty without real cause. Ohio\u2019s Senate Bill 1 and Kentucky\u2019s House Bill 4, which both took effect in 2025, implemented post-tenure review for public university faculty. In December, the South Dakota Board of Regents also adopted a post-tenure review policy. The University of Tennessee requires tenured professors to be reviewed every six years. Dan Collier, assistant professor of higher and adult education at the University of Memphis, said the lack of protection for tenured professors in the state is discouraging his pursuit of tenure. On LinkedIn, he announced that he told his dean he didn’t care about tenure\u2014only the related pay bump. <\/p>\n \u201cMy protections in Tennessee are nowhere near the same as somebody who would also be protected by a union and other laws that exist in somewhere like Michigan or California,\u201d Collier told Inside Higher Ed<\/em>. <\/p>\n He hesitated to put all the blame on conservatives, however.<\/p>\n \u201cWhile certain Republican-led states may be reducing tenure protections more than they have in the past, that\u2019s not to say that Democrats or blue states are actually ramping them up to protect anybody, either,\u201d said Collier.<\/p>\n Most tenure policies at both the state and institutional level have always allowed for institutions to lay off tenured faculty in cases of financial exigency\u2014periods of extreme financial distress, similar to personal bankruptcy. Financial exigency serves as a kind of escape hatch that allows institutions to bypass their own policies and make large cuts, including laying off tenured faculty, closing programs or undertaking significant administrative overhaul.<\/p>\n In its 1940 statement on academic freedom, the AAUP said that financial exigency was the only case beyond adequate cause in which tenured faculty can be terminated. The AAUP defines financial exigency as \u201ca severe financial crisis that fundamen\u00adtally compromises the academic integrity of the institution as a whole and that cannot be alleviated by less drastic means.\u201d <\/p>\n The COVID-19 pandemic and the financial stress it put on college campuses brought about a flurry of financial exigency announcements\u2014at least, on their face, Das Acevedo said. \u201cI realized that a lot of those schools were not actually declaring financial exigency,\u201d she said. \u201cThey were saying \u2018financial exigency,\u2019 and citing difficulties and the pandemic and whatnot, but they weren\u2019t declaring themselves to be in a state of financial exigency.\u201d <\/p>\n Still, the pandemic normalized tenured faculty layoffs in periods of financial strain.<\/p>\n \u201cMany small liberal arts colleges had used the pandemic, in many cases, as an excuse to reorganize the layout of faculty,\u201d said Anita Levy, senior program officer at the AAUP. \u201cSo yes, there probably was an acceleration at that moment\u201d of tenured faculty layoffs. <\/p>\n It\u2019s not exactly that anything about tenure has changed. It\u2019s more that universities, like many other employers, have become more willing to skirt the boundaries of what is legally permissible.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014Deepa Das Acevedo, legal anthropologist and tenure researcher at Emory University<\/p>\n William Paterson University in New Jersey laid off 13 tenured or tenure-track professors mid-pandemic in 2021 and proposed cutting an additional 150 professors over the course of three years, even though the institution never formally declared financial exigency. Also in 2021, the Kansas Board of Regents voted to allow its universities to terminate employees, including tenured professors, without declaring financial exigency. In 2024, the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents voted to lay off 35 tenured faculty members in University of Wisconsin\u2013Milwaukee\u2019s now-shuttered College of General Studies\u2014a decision that Walker\u2019s 2015 efforts allowed for. <\/p>\n Despite the hair-trigger firings after Kirk\u2019s death, reductions in force remain the biggest threat to tenured professors at present, said Das Acevedo. \u201cThe overwhelming majority of tenured faculty lose their jobs not because they were fired for a cause, but because they were the victim of a [reduction in force],\u201d she said. <\/p>\n She underscored the point with a statistic: More tenured faculty members have lost their jobs as the result of a RIF at 13 universities over the past five years than the total number of faculty members who were fired for cause at all universities in the last 20 years.<\/p>\n When tenured professors lose their jobs, colleges and universities are increasingly replacing those roles with adjunct appointments, which give institutions more flexibility in their staffing\u2014and, therefore, spending\u2014year to year. The trend threatens tenure and academic freedom in a different way: by limiting the number of professors who are granted tenure\u2019s traditional protections, said Levy. <\/p>\n \u201cThere has been an increase in contingent faculty appointments, which influences how the rights of others are treated on campus,\u201d Levy said. \u201cIn other words, right now, 21\u00a0percent of the academic labor force is tenured. While the AAUP holds that all full-time faculty members, regardless of rank, should be considered eligible for the protections of tenure, that\u2019s not the case, unfortunately, in much of higher ed.\u201d A 2023 study from the AAUP showed that, in the fall of that year, 23\u00a0percent of faculty held full-time tenured positions, down from 39\u00a0percent in fall 1987. Between fall 2002 and fall 2023, the number of contingent appointments increased by 65\u00a0percent, while tenured appointments increased by only 6\u00a0percent and tenure-track appointments fell by 7\u00a0percent.<\/p>\n The shift in favor of hiring adjunct faculty reflects a change in leadership strategy, said Collier. \u201cYou have HR policies that continuously change to favor administrators, and intentions to corporatize higher education and treat faculty more as employees instead of shared governance,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n Photo illustration by Justin Morrison\/Inside Higher Ed | blankvoid, chiravan39, Lee Lawson and PeskyMonkey\/iStock\/Getty Images<\/p>\n Tenure isn\u2019t dead quite yet\u2014several faculty members fired or put on leave after Kirk\u2019s death have been reinstated in recent months. The University of South Dakota tried to fire art professor Michael Hook over his post about Kirk before abandoning the effort in October amid a legal battle. Darren Michael, a tenured professor of theater at Austin Peay State University who was terminated for reposting a news headline about Kirk, was reinstated in December and paid a $500,000 settlement. At Florida Atlantic University, Karen Leader and finance professor Rebel Cole, both tenured, returned to the classroom in November following two months of paid administrative leave. <\/p>\n Their untenured colleague Kate Polak wasn\u2019t so lucky. Polak, an English instructor, was put on paid administrative leave in September after the university received complaints that she \u201ccelebrated\u201d Kirk\u2019s murder online, including writing that seeing him killed was a \u201cwin.\u201d The university announced last week that she would not return to her position. <\/p>\n Institutions haven\u2019t been consistent in how they apply social media speech standards. For example, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville suspended anthropology professor Tamar Shirinian for posting on social media that Kirk was a \u201cdisgusting psychopath\u201d and that his wife was a \u201csick fuck for marrying him.\u201d Nine years earlier, when protesters stopped traffic in Charlotte, N.C., after police shot and killed a Black man in an apartment parking lot, UT Knoxville law professor Glenn Reynolds suggested on Twitter that motorists \u201crun them [the protesters] down.\u201d University officials criticized Reynolds\u2019s tweet, but did not sanction him and ultimately said it was an \u201cexercise of his First Amendment rights.\u201d<\/p>\n You get celebrated for all things social justice, but once you try to advocate for justice in Palestine, you\u2019re basically killing your career and no one will stand by you.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014Sang Hea Kil, former tenured justice studies professor at San Jos\u00e9 State University<\/p>\n Speech-related sanctions became more common a few years ago, as the American political landscape slid to the right and online cancel culture made it easy to wield a pressure campaign against universities. Student and faculty protests and counterprotests over Israel\u2019s actions in Gaza following Hamas\u2019s Oct. 7 terrorist attack attracted a variety of university responses, but faculty sanctions or firings were more sporadic than they are now, Das Acevedo said. Among those punished was Maura Finkelstein, who is Jewish and a tenured associate professor at Muhlenberg College. She reposted a statement from a Palestinian American artist that criticized Zionists and told readers not to \u201cwelcome them in your spaces\u201d or \u201cmake them feel comfortable.\u201d <\/p>\n Most recently, San Jos\u00e9 State University fired Sang Hea Kil, a tenured professor in the justice studies department who had worked at the university since 2007. University officials took issue with her advocacy for Palestine\u2014but it was her activist work that got her hired in the first place, she said. <\/p>\n \u201cMy department hired me as a scholar activist,\u201d she said. \u201cI won a lot of awards as a student activist\u00a0\u2026 and so I did not miss a beat when I arrived at my tenure-track position, and I kept on doing scholar-activist things.\u201d<\/p>\n Kil\u2019s work has always gotten under administrators\u2019 skin; even before she was tenured, she helped lead a successful campaign against internal corruption that led to the resignations of several upper-level administrators. But things changed in 2024. <\/p>\n \u201cThe two things that I think that are different 1769483473 are one, new McCarthyism heralded by the Trump administration, and then two, Palestinian exceptionalism,\u201d she said. \u201cYou get celebrated for all things social justice, but once you try to advocate for justice in Palestine, you\u2019re basically killing your career and no one will stand by you.\u201d <\/p>\n Kil and Collier agree that the shifting political landscape is partially to blame for the changing rules. If faculty members tick off conservative politicians, it can lead to serious financial and political consequences for the entire institution, Collier said. <\/p>\n \u201cUpper administrators are going to be very, very risk-averse right now, because who wants to get the attention of the Trump administration at the moment?\u201d said Collier. \u201cIf they\u2019re focused on Harvard and they\u2019re focused on Columbia, and you are at a regional institution [that] hasn\u2019t gotten selected attention, are you going to push that envelope and get that attention? Because what they\u2019re doing to those larger institutions would be extremely harsh penalties for a less-resourced institution.\u201d <\/p>\n Kil and others believe that she is the first full professor fired from an American college or university for pro-Palestine speech. <\/p>\n \u201cMy case becomes really important because they\u2019re going after the tenure system,\u201d she said. The progression from Salaita\u2019s revoked tenure offer in 2014, to Finkelstein in 2024 and Kil in 2025, \u201cshows the escalation that higher ed administrators are willing to go in this political context.\u201d<\/p>\n The weakening of tenure isn\u2019t due to a flaw in the tenure system, Das Acevedo stressed, but to institutions\u2019 increasing refusal to stand up for the traditional protections. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not exactly that anything about tenure changed,\u201d Das Acevedo said. \u201cIt\u2019s more that universities, like many other employers, have become more willing to skirt the boundaries of what is legally permissible, or outright go beyond what is legally permissible, and either pay the consequences in the form of a financial settlement or, in some cases, just not suffer any consequences.\u201d<\/p>\n (This story has been updated to correct Dan Collier’s title. The details of Darren Michael’s settlement with Austin Peay have also been corrected<\/em>. And we added that Kate Polak was placed on paid administrative l<\/em>eave.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Tom Alter (center) speaks at free speech rally on his behalf in Austin. Texas State Employees Union \u201cI responded, \u2018No, it\u2019s OK, I\u2019m aware. Let\u2019s just ignore it. Let\u2019s not give it any air,\u2019\u201d Alter said about the infiltrator\u2019s doxing campaign. Then the texter followed up with a link to a statement from Texas State<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":42816,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[10914,1162],"class_list":{"0":"post-42815","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-tenure","9":"tag-threat"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42815"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42815\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/42816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}States Challenge the Academy<\/h2>\n
Exploiting Financial Turmoil<\/h2>\n
Protest as Fireable Offense<\/h2>\n