BY YASHA HARTBERG

Across the country, the foundations of academic freedom and shared governance are under strain. Legislatures are rewriting university missions. Boards are bypassing faculty senates to close programs, mandate ideological “balance,” and discipline professors for political speech, real or imagined. Even at institutions once thought insulated from such incursions, the authority of faculty to determine curriculum and hiring has been steadily eroded by administrators wielding the rhetoric of efficiency.

For nearly a century, the promise of tenure was supposed to protect against exactly this. Awarded for research, teaching, and service—the classic triad of academic life—tenure was meant not only as a measure of scholarly rigor but also as a guarantee of a stable seat at the table of governance. Yet the metaphor of the three-legged stool has become a relic in universities that are increasingly built on contingent labor.

And here’s the thing about three-legged stools: Outside academia, most people know only the milking stool—a low, backless seat designed not for leadership but for labor. You don’t govern from a milking stool; you crouch on it to extract productivity from a compliant body. It’s a revealing metaphor, really—less a throne than a tool of controlled extraction—and yet it became the credentialing standard of the modern university.

For a while, it worked. But as costs rose, public funding evaporated, and administrative ranks swelled, tenured faculty clung to their stools. Rather than broaden the definition of academic labor, they gilded their seats. The symbolism endured; the stability of the profession did not. Contingent colleagues—those teaching the majority of credit hours—were told that without all three legs, they didn’t belong. In refusing to add leaves to the governance table, tenured faculty weakened their own position. Their stools now wobble in the shadow of lawmakers, donors, and political appointees who no longer see tenure as sacred—or even necessary.

The View from the Margins

I entered academia as an undergraduate in 1989, just as the stool began to creak. The Cold War was ending, the neoliberal turn was underway, and faculty—many of them tenured—were already warning about administrative creep and the rebranding of students as customers. Faculty governance still held rhetorical power, but its reality was slipping. Even then, many believed tenure was the last thing standing between the academy and capitulation. What they couldn’t see—what some still refuse to see—is that tenure, hoarded and unshared, was becoming part of the problem.

A decade later, I joined the faculty—precariously and obscurely—as an assistant lecturer, with no blueprint for advancement, no seat at the departmental table, and not even the courtesy of a folding chair in the back row. Years later, my position was “terminated”… so I could be rehired as a lecturer, the only administrative path available for promotion. The new title came with a few upgrades—I could now serve on committees, though still not attend faculty meetings. I was deemed competent enough to deliberate, but not to decide.

Around that time, non-tenure-track faculty across campus began comparing notes. Titles varied wildly, as did pay, responsibilities, and rights, so we formed OPAL—the Organization of Professional Academic Lecturers, a name so tortured it could only have come from academia itself. We weren’t a union (this was Texas, after all) but a data-gathering coalition. We started counting: credit hours taught, titles held, service assigned, authority withheld. What we found was staggering. Non-tenure-track faculty were already teaching more than half of all undergraduate credit hours.

We weren’t asking to be equals. We just wanted consistency—reasonable contracts, some job security, transparent advancement, and, audaciously, a say in decisions affecting our work. Even those modest requests triggered existential alarms. The language was polite—protecting standards, maintaining distinctions—but the posture was unmistakable: Extending rights to us would dilute theirs. The stool that once represented balance had become a throne, an emblem of who counted.

From Stool to Scaffolding

Meanwhile, universities kept changing. Research became a high-stakes, grant-chasing enterprise. Teaching—once central—was increasingly handed to contingent faculty. The ideal of the balanced scholar fractured under specialization. Academic professional-track (APT) faculty—nominally hired to teach—quietly joined committees and published scholarship in their spare time. Everyone began comparing stool legs—who had enough research to “count,” who was overloaded with service—as though the game hadn’t changed. But it had. The stools were no longer seats, they were scaffolding, holding up institutions built on labor never meant to be temporary.

Nationally, the numbers are stark. According to the AAUP, nearly three-quarters of instructional staff in US higher education are now off the tenure track. At many institutions, non-tenure-track faculty teach 70 percent or more of all undergraduate credit hours. In other words, the people doing the bulk of the teaching are precisely those excluded from the protections and participation tenure was designed to safeguard. The stool, once a model of shared legitimacy, has become a gatekeeping device—a relic of a time when the ground beneath it was more stable.

A Wider Table

By refusing to make room for other forms of faculty labor, the tenure system hollowed itself out. The result is a shrinking class of privileged faculty, increasingly powerless to defend the very principles tenure was meant to preserve.

It doesn’t have to stay that way. Tenure can survive—but only if it evolves. Shared governance must extend beyond the tenured and tenure-track ranks to include all who contribute to the academic mission— full voting rights for APT and contingent faculty, equitable recognition in service and leadership, and transparent paths to advancement and security.

Tenure can’t be saved by tightening its circle of privilege; it can only be preserved by sharing its seat. Otherwise, we may all end up grooms of the stool—dutifully maintaining an institution too proud to notice the ground shifting beneath it.

Yasha Hartberg teaches science writing and issues in science and technology journalism at Texas A&M University.