Tenure in Texas is weakened but alive. The final version of SB 18 avoids the deathblow proposed by an earlier draft, which would have eliminated the tenure track for all public-college faculty members who begin their jobs in 2024 or after. Instead, as the AAUP puts it, it “codifies a weak faculty tenure system that lacks due process provisions commonly afforded tenured faculty nationally.” It’s tenure-lite. Some things aren’t bigger in Texas.
The bill isn’t quite the catastrophe that might have been expected. Its most onerous provision is the requirement that tenured faculty members undergo a “performance evaluation process” every six years; “a faculty member may be subject to revocation of tenure if, during the comprehensive performance evaluation, incompetency, neglect of duty, or other good cause is determined to be present.” Unless weaponized by bad political and administrative actors (always, of course, a possibility), this sounds less like the end of tenure than like the introduction of reams of annoying and ultimately pointless red tape — an inconvenience, not an existential threat.
There’s at least one exception, as far as I can tell. SB 18 includes “unprofessional conduct that adversely affects the institution” as a reason to revoke tenure. Every word except “that” and “the” is vague, abusable, and at odds with the basic mission of tenure, which must protect faculty members’ right to offend the public and therefore potentially to sully the reputation of their institutions. (“Conduct” presumably includes “speech” — or at least, nothing in the bill says otherwise.)
At first glance, this threatening provision might not seem all that novel. The AAUP’s 1940 statement on academic freedom offered the following: “As scholars and educational officers,” faculty members “should remember that the public may judge their profession and their institution by their utterances. Hence they should at all times be accurate, should exercise appropriate restraint, should show respect for the opinions of others, and should make every effort to indicate that they are not speaking for the institution.” But those sentences would become controversial — who decides what counts as “appropriate restraint,” for instance? — and the AAUP attempted to resolve the ambiguity in a 1970 addendum explaining that they should be interpreted
in keeping with the 1964 “Committee A Statement on Extramural Utterances,” ... which states inter alia: “The controlling principle is that a faculty member’s expression of opinion as a citizen cannot constitute grounds for dismissal unless it clearly demonstrates the faculty member’s unfitness for his or her position. Extramural utterances rarely bear upon the faculty member’s fitness for the position. Moreover, a final decision should take into account the faculty member’s entire record as a teacher and scholar.”
To the extent that they can, Texas faculty should pressure their institutions into defining with as much specificity as possible what “unprofessional conduct” and “adversely affects the university” mean. And for now, breathe a sigh of qualified relief. SB 18 isn’t so much the evisceration of tenure as it is a statement of general disrespect. It says, “We don’t like you very much, and we’re watching you.”
