They’ve Been Scheming to Cut Tenure for Years. It’s Happening.

So honored to have accepted a tenure-track position as an assistant professor in the history department of U.FU. #Blessed

Tweets such as the hypothetical one above leave me troubled. I’m troubled because 500 scholars probably applied for the position at U.FU. What is the destiny of the unblessed 499, other than to mentally counter-tweet with rude, unpublishable hashtags?

A thimbleful of scholars will someday snag a tenure-track job. A few dozen will join the ranks of the non-tenure-line full-time faculty (or NTLFT), laboring from contract to contract, earning a sparse salary and receiving limited benefits. Hundreds will be thrust into the churning, draining gyre that is the adjunct pool. Absurdly low wages and zero job security — that is their lot. As for the remainder, they will eventually realize they were on the “Alt-Ac” track all along, even though they never wanted to be.

Tenure-line, NTLFT, adjuncts: These are the three estates of modern academe. They have been skillfully positioned by their overlords to check, balance, and often immiserate one another. Though as we shall see, external pressures alone don’t explain why we are divided and conquered.

As we enter the Execution Phase (2020-50) of the American professoriate’s reconfiguration, I hazard a few predictions. First, the mightiest of the three estates will be brought to its knees. By the year 2050, tenure will be either the purview of a few scholars at elite schools, or it won’t exist at all.

Second, academic freedom will be as good as gone. We’ll labor as we did prior to the American Association of University Professors’ 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure. The scholar who runs afoul of a trustee, congressperson, tech mogul, or influencer will — poof! — disappear into the night. Last, the divisions and mistrust between the professorial ranks will hasten the developments just described, as well as other malign outcomes.

Only a miracle of guild solidarity can forestall our dystopian future — a future which, for contingent faculty, is actually the present.

Before the Execution Phase, there was the Preparation Phase (1990-2020). Its soundscape was sirens and shrieking warnings about our vocation’s imminent collapse. Higher-ups instructed us to ignore the smoke and odd noises. Everyone was enjoined to calmly return to their offices and publish — so as not to perish.

John W. Tomac for The Chronicle

Those decades had it all: the occasional SLACicide, or death of a small liberal-arts college; plunging humanities enrollments; state legislatures strafing higher-education budgets; entrenched racialized and gendered gaps in employment; bidding wars over celebrity faculty. A catastrophic two-tiered structure loomed: A small number of tenured professors were being paid more to teach undergraduates less and less, while a large number of non-tenured professors were being paid less to teach undergraduates more and more.

By the turn of the millennium, clear-eyed observers, many of whom understood economics and statistical modeling, started identifying independent variables. Their findings pointed to a slow, steady decline in costly tenure-line positions, coupled with the increased exploitation of cheap part-time labor.

A 2008 study compiled by the AAUP demonstrated the problem. In 1975, 56.8 percent of American professors were either tenured or on the tenure track. By 2007 the number had sunk to 31.2 percent. Simultaneously, all contingent positions had risen from 43.2 percent to 68.8 percent.

We also became aware of “administrative bloat,” or the mushrooming of an academic labor force whose mission was neither teaching nor research. A number of upper admins were hired to manage — some might say “rule” — the faculty. Some of those who accepted this task were scholars themselves. A novel hybrid creature, the everlasting tenured admin, was sparked to life. No three-year stint as vice dean and back to teaching freshman composition, for this guy! He was in it for the long haul.

The significance of this development is underappreciated. The decisions which ravaged the future for coming generations of Ph.D.s were made not just by consultants and suits, but by those with Ph.D.s and likely a few peer-reviewed publications. This was scholar-on-scholar violence.

Why is our vocation so vulnerable to fratricide? Maybe spending a doctoral decade in a moldy archive doesn’t heighten your sense of empathy. Maybe repeatedly venting your spleen as anonymous Reviewer Number 2 doesn’t sharpen your sense of solidarity. Maybe class consciousness can’t blossom when our final work products are, in many disciplines, solo recitals.

Another top-line finding had to do with the rise of the NTLFT class. The expansion of this category from the mid-1970s to the mid-aughts was, in and of itself, a positive development. Merely getting on the tenure track — at even the most forlorn, out-of-the-way, campus novel-y seat of learning — had become like winning a lottery. Many excellent scholars never hit the jackpot, even though they may have been more qualified than the grand-prize winners. The surge in NTLFT ranks let them make a living.

It also set the stage for the imminent implosion of the professoriate.

The rise of the NTLFTs is a story that spans my two phases. The Execution Phase commenced in 2020, when the Covid pandemic — that alehouse crony of disruption — blasted us out of our classrooms. Some recent data provide perspective on where we now stand.

A survey of 3271 institutions (1271 of which have no tenure system) from 2002-21 revealed that NTLFTs are the only one of the professorial ranks that has been trending “up.” If the status quo holds, my eyeball extrapolation suggests that by midcentury, there will be nearly as many NTLFTs as tenured professors.

But as regards tenure lines, why would the status quo hold? Why wouldn’t our extinction event occur well prior to January 1, 2050?

According to the survey, 23.63 percent of professors are tenured, and 8.77 percent are on the tenure track. The former number will likely diminish quickly. Tenure-track positions are not being renewed (53.5 percent of all institutions have replaced tenure lines with contingent faculty in the past five years). Existing tenured professors are increasingly subject to “post-tenure review” or the vagaries of “de-tenurification” — antilabor munitions that were test-bombed during the Preparation Phase.

I imagine a moment called “Tenure’s Tribulation.” Upon its arrival, we will all realize that, cliché or not, Ernest Hemingway’s dictum, “gradually, then suddenly,” is prescient. On a summer day (circa 2035) a small consortium of schools (and soon thereafter hundreds more) will make a historic announcement. Because of unforeseen financial “challenges,” they can no longer hire tenure-line faculty. Those who are currently tenured on staff can remain and play out the string of their careers (subject to post-tenure review).

Which leads us to the war of the ranks. Through no fault of their own, the growing NTLFT cohort will occupy more of the administrative roles mentioned earlier. Untenured department chairs, untenured vice deans, untenured deans, and untenured provosts — they will manage/rule the graying tenured faculty and the irate part-timers.

Not that professors would ever disagree about anything, but in a disagreement between an untenured dean executing a command from a tenured provost against the will of the tenured codgers, who comes out on top? Who slays? Who, come to think of it, is actually running the institution at this point?

I hope the NTLFT folk will be more conscientious than their tenured counterparts have been; we wouldn’t be in such straits if the latter had demonstrated more foresight, heroism. Then again if a provost wants an opinionated full professor or adjunct “put in their place,” or a donor’s pet project made into a major (see below), or the Gateway Course’s enrollment cap to rise from 15 freshmen to 150, what sort of “pushback” might an NTLFT dean be able to muster?

What else awaits us? Goodbye robust, academic-freedom protections for the tenured. Hello provost’s Ad Hoc Committee to Resolve Academic-Freedom Disputes. Free-speech conflicts will now be handled on a “case by case” basis. Maybe we’ll see a rise in programs catered to “lifestyle Ph.D.s.” They could service a leisure class curious about aesthetics in the age of neoliberalism.

As for donors and foundations, they will feast on the flailing, overturned, host organism which is the American university. Fields of inquiry that colleges don’t care about (like religious studies), or areas only the wealthy find intriguing (like the history of the capital gains tax), will find committed benefactors.

Imagine some foundation in Manhattan or Lubbock, Texas, overseeing yearly funding for 20 postdocs, 100 adjuncts, 20 NTLFTs, and one tenured professor sprinkled across a few dozen elite schools. It would be like a transnational academic department, albeit one whose “chair” never finished college and made a fortune in venture capital.

Now what? The best course of action is collective bargaining, and it is the hardest to achieve. That’s not only because laws regarding labor organization at private and public universities are complicated. It’s also because we scholars don’t “do” solidarity.

But what if we did? Graduate students are effectively organizing themselves; maybe they should offer seminars on the subject to faculty members. Ideally, the tenured might leverage their (present) security on behalf of the next generation. We could “pay it forward,” offering to teach more classes for free if administrators stopped vaporizing our lines when we die and retire. Or maybe we’ll promise to retire well before we die? Anything that creates a future for scholars. Anything that fosters solidarity.

This is what I am going to do. One day before the spring break of 2023, I’ll spend five minutes telling my undergraduates why I became a scholar, what I think is happening to my profession, and how it affects their education. I invite you to do the same. I have no script for you to follow; all takes are welcome. Just listen carefully to your students’ responses. Then, maybe, tweet about guild solidarity.