BY HANK REICHMAN

Tenure and the tenure system are again in the news. It is therefore fitting that the latest issue of Academe is devoted to tenure—what it is, what it isn’t, how to defend it, and how we can and must improve it. My own contribution, “Eight Myths about Tenure,” sums up a few of the lessons I’ve learned from a near half-century of fighting, first for my own tenure and then for the tenure system itself.

When I completed the PhD at University of California, Berkeley, in 1977 there were few jobs, tenure-track or adjunct, in my field, but after six years in the wilderness I landed a tenure-track position. It wasn’t the best situation for my family, however, but as luck would have it I ended up back in California, and finally gained tenure at California State University, East Bay, in 1994. Little did I know, however, that, although my own struggle for tenure had successfully concluded, I was only beginning a much longer fight for tenure that would be a defining element of my academic career and continues today.

Soon after I got tenure, I became department chair. This came after a significant state and university budget crisis that was resolved, in part, by the incentivized retirement of a large number of senior faculty, including quite a few in my department.

As finances were improving, however, I hoped that we could revitalize our ranks by hiring new assistant professors. Instead, I was compelled to hire a steadily increasing number of part-time lecturers.

Since those days our CSU union, the California Faculty Association, has won important contractual protections for non-tenure-track lecturers. I’m proud to have played a part in that effort, both in my campus chapter and during nine years on the systemwide bargaining team. But in the 1990s CSU lecturers, like adjuncts everywhere, were in an exceedingly precarious position. And, frankly, many tenured faculty were shamefully ignorant of both their situation and how extensively lecturers had come to replace those eligible for tenure.

I set out to change that. I decided it was not enough to argue with my largely hapless dean and unsympathetic provost for more tenure-track lines. I needed to make some noise, maybe even, as John Lewis would later and famously put it, make some “good trouble.”

That was how my name first appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education in a March 28, 1997, article, “Reliance on Lecturers Said to Produce ‘Faceless Departments.’” The piece focused on my department and quoted me, which was fitting since I had solicited the reporter’s attention. A small “debate” of sorts between my provost and me in the Chronicle’s letters pages soon followed.

A few years later I published a piece in the campus newspaper, “The Incredible Disappearing Faculty.” It’s no longer discoverable online, but I’m proud to say that a Google search reveals that the title has been used many times since by others, and not without good reason. The article quoted a recent local newspaper, which reported that “between 1995 and 2000, 35,000 new students entered the [CSU] system’s 23 campuses, but CSU only added—after replacing those lost to attrition and retirement—one new permanent faculty position to the entire system.” I then noted that on my campus, in fall 1991 there were 449 tenure-track, full-time regular faculty, teaching the equivalent of 9,685 full-time students. In fall 2000, by sharp contrast, just 352 tenure-track faculty were available to teach the equivalent of 9,971 full-time students. The loss, I pointed out, was not entirely due to budgetary constraints. “Between 1997 and 2000—the years of California’s boom economy, a state budget surplus, and record-high enrollments—the number of tenure-track faculty continued its plunge by an additional 32 professors.”  I went on to note how in the most highly enrolled programs on campus as much as 77 percent (in English) and 78 percent (in teacher education) of classes were being taught by non-tenure-track instructors (almost always listed in the class schedule as “staff”).

Did my efforts have an impact? I hope so, but, frankly, it’s not easy to swim against a powerful current. The problem was never local, I learned, and so I knew I had to expand the scope of my involvement, which, in a nutshell, is how I ended up active in the national AAUP. In 2019, when I was invited to deliver the annual Davis, Markert, Nickerson Academic and Intellectual Freedom lecture at the University of Michigan, I entitled my talk, later published in Academe, “Do Adjuncts Have Academic Freedom? or Why Tenure Matters.”

Over the years, I’ve learned some lessons about how to defend tenure. “To restore tenure we must rethink tenure, ironically, by returning to its original conception. We must fight for tenure as it could and should be, not as it too frequently has become,” I concluded in that 2019 talk. But it’s critical that we not fall victim to “divide and conquer” schemes, which pit tenured against adjuncts. “All faculty members, including the tenured, need one another in this effort, but a precondition for unity is that the privileged among us, the tenured, must discard their too-frequent indifference to the plight of our peers,” I wrote. “The fight to expand the reach of tenure . . . is the fight of all who teach and do research in higher education, regardless of employment status.”

As my piece in the latest Academe concludes, myths about tenure “help keep not only the public but much of the professoriate from recognizing a harsh reality: tenure, for nearly a century the strongest bulwark in defense of academic freedom, protecting independent scholarship from shifting political winds and the whims of scholarly fashion, is under withering assault. Indeed, in many places, with more than three-fourths of the faculty denied even its prospect, tenure all but hangs by a thread. If tenure itself is not to become yet another myth, we will have to get to work.”

Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and president of the AAUP Foundation; and from 2012-2021 Chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. His book, The Future of Academic Freedom, based in part on posts to this blog, was published in 2019.  His Understanding Academic Freedom was published in October, 2021. 

Articles from the current and past issues of Academe are available online. AAUP members receive a subscription to the magazine, available both by mail and as a downloadable PDF, as a benefit of membership.

Photo by Popochen (CC BY-SA 4.0), Wikimedia Commons