BY MICHAEL SCHWALBE

In recent years, right-wing lawmakers have mounted attacks on tenure in Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, and Kentucky. These efforts have been based on the claim that tenure unduly protects liberal professors who squelch the voices of conservative students. Tenure has also been cited as an obstacle to getting rid of underperforming faculty in times of budget austerity. But these are rhetorical smokescreens; the real reasons right-wing legislators hate tenure lie elsewhere.

When faculty defend tenure, it is usually on the grounds that tenure is part of what makes universities uniquely valuable institutions. Faculty who are protected by tenure can seek and speak the truth in their research and teaching, without being undermined by political interference. The common good is thus served by the creation and transmission of valid and reliable knowledge. A university in which faculty are subject to political control by outside forces wouldn’t be a university at all; it would be a propaganda organ of the state or the ruling class.

And so we say that tenure benefits not only individuals but also society as a whole. Every part of society—industry, government, the professions, a democratic citizenry—needs the knowledge and skills that are cultivated in universities. This isn’t hard to explain, and in fact has been explained again and again. It seems crazy, or at least self-defeating, to wreck a system that, on the whole, has worked wonderfully, despite minor efficiency costs. So, what is it that right-wing lawmakers are trying to accomplish?

For sure, many are playing to a constituency that has been primed by decades of culture wars to resent a vague group of university-based elites who supposedly reject down-home American values and sneer at anyone who embraces these values. It’s an evergreen campaign pitch: “Vote for me and I’ll make sure the godless eggheads aren’t living fat on taxpayer money while they fill our kids’ heads with commie ideology,” though today commie has been replaced by woke.

Yet in what other American institution can one encounter as broad a range of ideas—from reactionary to radical—as in a university? Certainly not the capitalist workplace.

Yes, professors tend to lean left politically, but rarely does this matter for what happens in the classroom, or for how professors treat students. The point has also been made that eliminating tenure—which enables the exploration and expression of unconventional, and perhaps unpopular, ideas—would be bad for students who incline to conservative views. So the question remains, What is it about tenure that so nettles the Far Right?

A hint of the truth is evident when legislators say that tenure limits budget flexibility. From a managerial perspective, one shared by many legislators, trustees, regents (see, for example, Georgia), and university administrators, tenure is indeed an irritant. It keeps administrators from being able to do what they want, whenever they want, vis-à-vis employees, whether the motive is cutting costs or quashing shop-floor resistance to top-down control. Tenured faculty, unlike more vulnerable employees elsewhere, can strongly resist managerial efforts to elevate economic efficiency above all other intellectual and humane values.

It makes sense, then, that conservative legislators, who are often in thrall to business interests, would dislike a system that limits managerial power. University administrators have largely embraced the same principle, at least in practice. This is why we’ve seen a massive shift in the last thirty years from a predominantly tenured (or tenure-track) professoriate to one that is now predominantly non-tenured and contingent. One could thus argue that the personnel management “flexibility” sought by administrators has already been achieved.

And yet tenure continues to elicit an allergic reaction in right-wing quarters, suggesting that there is a deeper objection that has little to do with fears of liberal indoctrination or modest limits on managerial control. The real threat, it seems, is that tenure is a dangerous example to other workers. As Rick Brattin, a Republican state representative who has led attacks on tenure in Missouri, said, “What other job in the US has protections like that? If you looked around, you’d come up short.”

Brattin is right: you’d come up short if you looked for tenure-equivalent job protections in most private-sector workplaces in the United States. And that is precisely the point. The most desirable economic condition, from the perspective of conservative Republicans and the business class they serve, is that all workers of all kinds everywhere be subject to employment-at-will laws, with all the precarity this entails. Tenure is an obstacle to achieving this goal.

There is perhaps a larger ideological mission unfolding here, as Gordon Lafer argues in The One Percent Solution (Cornell, 2017). That mission, led by free-market think tanks and right-wing Republicans, is to lower expectations across the board about what the economy can provide—lowered to the point where people are grateful just to have a job and don’t think about demanding more. All the while the top one percent continues to enrich itself and economic inequality grows.

Right-wing attacks on public sector unions are driven by the same logic. When public sector unions negotiate contracts that protect their members from arbitrary exercises of managerial power, it sets an example for workers elsewhere. “We, too, could have that,” private-sector workers might think. Vilifying public sector unions—casting their members as unfairly getting what other taxpaying workers do not—is a way to quash such ideas and undermine working-class solidarity. Although tenured professors are not part of the working class, attacks on tenure work the same way. The propaganda message is: Pay no attention to the tax cuts we’re giving to corporations and the rich; worry instead about these overpaid professors who are getting something you don’t get, and sucking up your tax dollars in the process.

The threat of tenure, then, is that it affirms the ideas that everyone deserves protection from abusive managerial power; that everyone deserves due process; and that everyone should be able to speak up about workplace issues without fear of losing their livelihood. In a capitalist society, these are disruptive ideas. In a just society, these ideas would be taken for granted. The threat of tenure lies in showing not only that these ideas can be put into practice, but also that doing so is how we protect people’s basic rights and dignity, prevent avarice and the will to power from overriding all other humane values, and serve the common good.

Michael Schwalbe is professor of sociology at North Carolina State University.