A wave of bills targeting tenure at public colleges have been introduced by Republican lawmakers in seven states during this year’s legislative sessions.
The bills, in Arkansas, Kansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, and Texas, seek to crack down on tenure, either by effectively eliminating it, calling for a stricter system of post-tenure review, or some combination. The proposed legislation is part of a larger effort by Republican-controlled statehouses to overhaul higher education, with provisions regarding tenure often found in bills that also target diversity, equity, and inclusion programming.
The bills reflect a multiyear effort to restrict academic freedom and faculty rights for “ideological reasons,” said Timothy R. Cain, a professor of higher education at the University of Georgia. “They are not based on legitimate concerns about efficiency or quality but are based on a desire to attack higher education for political gain and shape it for political purposes.”
Cain also drew attention to the labor status of today’s professoriate. The percentage of tenured and tenure-track faculty members has fallen over the past several decades, according to the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). In 1987, about 39 percent of all faculty members either had tenure or were on the tenure track, but by 2021 that share had dropped to 24 percent.
“Any conversation about tenure should start with the understanding that most faculty don’t have it,” Cain said.
Similar bills taking aim at tenure have been proposed in recent years, with mixed results — many have failed to advance, but others, including some involving post-tenure review, have succeeded. The current wave may well be different, said Adrianna Kezar, director of the Pullias Center of Higher Education at the University of Southern California. In part, that’s because bills targeting tenure are now being paired with anti-DEI legislation at both the federal and state level.
“There is a much more systematic attack being conducted on the professoriate, and it is manifesting through the attacks at the federal level with defunding research through federal agencies, the attacks on academic freedom of faculty and what they can teach through anti-DEI efforts, and then the tenure attacks at the state level,” Kezar said. “So it is all tied to a larger and broad-scale attack on faculty.”
Successful Pushback
In some states, faculty, staff, and administrators have been able to push back.
In Kentucky, Rep. James Tipton, a Republican, recently introduced a bill that would have removed faculty members for not meeting “performance and productivity requirements.” It also proposed banning tenure in future employment contracts.
The bill stated that employment contracts would be limited to four years, though colleges could offer six-year contracts to full-time faculty in lieu of tenure. Faculty members would be evaluated at least once every four years.
Many colleges have already implemented their own processes of post-tenure review, including the University of Kentucky, where in at least one case the faculty adopted the policy. Tipton’s bill assigned the task of developing performance and productivity evaluations to boards of trustees.
The flagship is “monitoring the legislation,” Jay Blanton, a university spokesperson, wrote to The Chronicle. “We have communicated — and will continue to do so — about the importance of tenure as a tool to recruit and retain the best faculty, who are so critical to the success of our students, our research efforts and what we do to extend health to more people in our state.”
Faculty groups and unions, like the Kentucky chapters of the American Federation of Teachers and the AAUP, the Coalition of Faculty Senate Leadership, and the United Campus Workers of Kentucky, sent a joint letter to Tipton on Monday requesting an amendment to the bill. They asked that the bill instead state that institutions of higher education “may give tenure” after six years to faculty members who have met performance standards, and that institutions will still require tenured faculty to undergo performance evaluations.
Tipton replied that his intent was “not to impact the ability of an institution to grant tenure, but to allow a school to remove a faculty member who is not being productive,” he wrote in an emailed response to the letter, which was obtained by The Chronicle.
But productivity can be difficult to define consistently, said Karen Petrone, president of the University of Kentucky’s AAUP chapter, especially across academic fields and disciplines. For example, her institution has nearly 3,000 full-time faculty members.
“Who is going to determine what productivity is?” she asked. “You can’t really do that from a flyover view.”
Tipton filed an amended version of HB 424 on Tuesday that removed the four-year contract provision. The amended bill directs public colleges to conduct performance reviews of faculty members and presidents at least once every four years, and instructs the state’s Board of Regents to determine what measures are included in the performance reviews.
The only way to keep colleges and universities safe from this kind of interference is to try to maintain tenure and shared governance, which has protected these institutions.
Each public institution in Kentucky would establish its own tenure policies, Tipton wrote in a statement to The Chronicle, adding that the amended bill “has no impact” on a college’s ability to offer or provide tenure to faculty. “Faculty will not lose Academic Freedom or Freedom of Speech because of HB 424,” Tipton wrote. They “will still only be let go for cause,” which would be determined by the outcome of performance reviews.
The amended version of the bill passed the State House in a 78-17 vote on Wednesday. While faculty-union leaders noted that the bill still includes vague definitions of things like “productivity,” they were pleased that language eliminating tenure had been scrubbed.
In North Dakota, the initial version of House Bill 1437 would have prohibited tenure at two-year colleges, but its progress was halted last month. The amended version requires all institutions of higher education to develop and adopt a policy for tenured and tenure-track faculty, and it passed through the State House with an overwhelming majority.
Lisa Johnson, vice chancellor for academic and student affairs for the North Dakota University system, said the amended bill mimics efforts that had been underway. The State Board of Higher Education was already conducting a study of tenure and post-tenure review policies before the legislative session, she said. “The best thing we can do,” Johnson said, “is exit with a bill that at least mimics or replicates board policy.”
“Ideally, I would wish House Bill 1437 received a do not pass,” Johnson added. “This is a sort of parallel conversation around the board’s constitutional autonomy and the authority to manage its institutions under its control.”
Moving Forward
Bills introduced in four other states continue to advance in their legislatures.
In Nebraska, two bills propose to ban tenure and diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, respectively.
LB551 would “prohibit the practice of tenure at postsecondary educational institutions.” The bill states that a board cannot establish or authorize a system of tenure for college employees who don’t already have it. Faculty members who have earned tenure prior to the effective date of the bill would keep their status, but would have to undergo annual performance evaluations should their college not already mandate them.
The head of the state’s flagship has vocally opposed the measure. “We must protect tenure and academic freedom,” Rodney Bennett, chancellor of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, wrote in a statement last month. “For UNL to remain a top-ranked institution that serves the state of Nebraska, it must be able to attract and retain the best faculty in the world. It can only do so with strong commitments to tenure and to academic freedom.”
A second bill, LB552, proposes to ban institutions of higher education from “taking certain actions related to diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and having offices dedicated to those purposes. Both bills have been referred to the Nebraska Education Committee.
Bennett has spoken out against that bill, too, while also seeking to strike a balance by noting the threat of losing state and federal funding should the university choose to not comply.
“As a public higher education institution, we are legally bound to adhere to all state and federal law, and we will do so,” Bennett wrote in a universitywide email. “But let there be no doubt, you matter to me. You matter to us. Regardless of the outcome of this legislative proposal, we will remain committed to your success.”
In Ohio, Senate Bill 1, or the “Advance Ohio Education Act,” continues to advance through the state’s General Assembly. The bill proposes a sweeping overhaul of Ohio’s public colleges, including a ban on DEI initiatives, provisions regarding the teaching of “controversial beliefs” and fostering intellectual diversity, and a requirement that each campus’s board of trustees develop post-tenure review policies.
We will make it so that any professor tenured or not that wastes time indoctrinating our students instead of educating them can be terminated from their job.
A similar bill proposed in 2023 failed to advance. This year’s bill, despite backlash that included 800 people submitting testimony in opposition, was passed by the Senate and is expected to be approved by Ohio House committees.
In Arkansas, public colleges are potentially facing a similar overhaul. Rep. Matthew Shepherd and Sen. Jonathan Dismang, both Republicans, filed identical 122-page bills on February 17 that would require colleges to develop a post-tenure review process and allow them to initiate a review of tenured faculty at any time. The bills are modeled on a proposal introduced by Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a Republican, last month.
“Arkansas students go to our colleges and universities to be educated, not to be bombarded with anti-American, historically illiterate, woke nonsense,” Huckabee Sanders said on January 14. “We will make it so that any professor tenured or not that wastes time indoctrinating our students instead of educating them can be terminated from their job.”
House Bill 1512 and Senate Bill 246 would also prohibit diversity initiatives and prevent colleges from granting excused absences for political protest. The bills forbid the authorization of student walkouts that advocate for social or public policy.
Shepherd and Dismang did not respond to requests for comment.
In Texas, Rep. Matt Shaheen, a Republican, introduced a bill last month barring public colleges from granting faculty members tenure “or any type of permanent employee status.” The bill would not prevent colleges from proposing an alternative tiered employment status for faculty members, as long as each they undergo a yearly performance review.
The bill follows previous efforts by Republican legislators in Texas who have tried to eliminate tenure. In 2023, one such bill was amended to state that the responsibility for evaluating tenure would fall on university boards.
An Uncertain Future
In Kansas, House Bill 2348 proposes to limit tenure, and it says the state’s Board of Regents shall not define, award, or recognize tenure “as an entitlement, right, or property interest” in the current or future employment of faculty members.
The bill was drafted by Steven Lovett, general counsel for Emporia State University, who is also named as a defendant in a lawsuit against the university for laying off tenured and tenure-track professors. College leaders, including the president and chief executive of the Kansas Board of Regents, the chancellor of the University of Kansas, and the president of Kansas State University, testified in opposition to the bill when it was introduced.
The bill, currently undergoing review in committee meetings, is unlikely to pass in the 2025 legislative session because it lacks sufficient support from legislators, Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, said in an interview with the Kansas Reflector.
Similar efforts to scrutinize and limit tenure have come and gone over the decades, said Cain, the Georgia professor. After student protests and activism in the 1960s and 1970s, state legislatures and individual institutions called for reform, an impulse that he said often came from “the idea that faculty were responsible for student protest.”
Kezar, of USC, hopes that prior efforts by faculty members and administrators that successfully defended tenure will be mounted once again — not just for the sake of professors, but for colleges, too.
“We’ve gone in this direction before,” Kezar said. “It’s problematic. The only way to keep colleges and universities safe from this kind of interference is to try to maintain tenure and shared governance, which has protected these institutions.”
