You know the old joke about tiger repellant, the one with the guy who says he’s wearing it and his pal responds “but there aren’t any tigers around here” and the guy says I know! it works so well.
Imagine a sequel. His pal says, “Come on, take it off, it smells disgusting and looks ridiculous, you don’t need it” and the guy does. Ten seconds later, they both get buried under an avalanche of tigers and torn to shreds.
Unfortunately this is a pretty compact metaphor for the removal of legal and institutional protections in the United States that were created for a reason, as an actual response to actual threats and problems. The Supreme Court has mostly dismantled the Voting Rights Act, the Republican Party is doing their best to dismantle Watergate-era protections aimed at protecting some measure of autonomy for federal offices to fulfill their responsibilities free from nakedly political directives, and so on, often on the grounds that we don’t need those protections because that’s all in the past. No tigers around here. Whoops.
Nowhere is this proving more the case than in the aftermath of the general dismantling of tenure protections in a large proportion of higher education.
I remember when I first started my blog Easily Distracted in the early 2000s, the nascent academic blogosphere was engaged in a sustained argument about the pros and cons of tenure as an institution. I was somewhat sympathetic to the critique of tenure as perversely suppressing rather than enabling the creative and intellectual autonomy of faculty because of how it forced junior faculty to adhere to the norms and preferences of senior faculty in order to be tenured. I was often asked by junior faculty, for example, whether being active in the public sphere or in online discussions would harm or help them at tenure time, and whether my own college had made any active recognition of my public writing.
It was a discussion that was almost immediately irrelevant even as we were having it, however, because tenure was more or less being dismantled as a strong system of protection for university and college faculty via the conversion of many tenure lines to short-term contingent positions. Tenure still exists but at most large universities, it protects only a proportion of the faculty, sometimes a very small fraction. For the last twenty years, most teaching faculty have had to step carefully around their administrations, their colleagues and wider publics if they wanted to continue teaching.
In the meantime, a vigorous strain of there-are-no-tigers-here criticisms of campus speech codes, Oberlin undergraduates complaining about kung pao chicken being appropriative, faculty who are too woke and so on has flourished in American public culture. Conor Friedersdorf, Yascha Mounk, Jonathan Haidt and many other public writers remained focused with laser-like intensity on the looming menace of undergraduates critical of Halloween costumes and so on, while remaining largely indifferent to the withering of tenure protections and unperturbed by the thought that the government is the major source of threat to speech rights and intellectual autonomy.
I don’t discount that there have been cases where students—or faculty and staff—have pushed an orthodox view of some form of progressive politics into territory where they’ve compressed or constrained the productive, generative intellectual and pedagogical autonomy of students, faculty and staff at their institution, where there has been intimidation and bullying. Most of the time, if that’s had real teeth in the last two decades, it’s been because administrative leaders decline to take a real stand or passively license that kind of behavior and because the tenured faculty decide to duck their heads and wait for it to pass over. But the absolute worst-case scenario of that kind of thing is nothing compared to what’s happening now in states where the executive and legislature are united in an all-out assault on the autonomy of universities, starting with the public universities they have authority over, but not ending there.
The wave that is crashing down now began with Scott Walker’s contemptuous attack on Wisconsin’s university system, but has moved far beyond what Walker did in scope and intensity. The latest example is the cowardly, lickspittle affirmation from the chancellor of the Texas A&M system to a request from the Lieutenant Governor of Texas that an assistant professor of clinical pharmacology be fired for making a negative remark about the Lieutenant Governor’s approach to the opoid crisis during a lecture. The chancellor responded that the professor, Joy Alonzo, “has been placed on administrative leave pending investigation re firing her. shud [sic] be finished by end of week”.
She wasn’t fired, but the message has been received. It’s being received all over the country. If you study elections and voting, you’ve been explicitly targeted by the Republican Party at the federal and state level. If you study climate change or environmental policy in a state where fossil fuel production is important, you’ve been targeted. If you study a subject that the GOP thinks is too close to “DEI” or “woke”, you’re being targeted. If you say anything critical about a fragile, weak, sensitive snowflake GOP official, you’re targeted.
And targeted here is not “criticized in the public sphere”, it’s “bombarded by death threats and hate mail” and “suspended, fired or threatened with firing, tenured or not”.
The people who think of themselves as free speech maximalists when it comes to colleges and universities almost always have a truncated historical sense of the threat to speech. Their historical narrative often begins with the protests against William Shockley at Yale in 1974 and the subsequent report of the Committee on the Freedom of Expression at Yale and Kenneth Barnes’ eloquent and thoughtful minority dissent to the majority opinion in that report. Barnes sought to qualify speech rights within universities both against their responsibility to justice and equity within their institutions and in terms of the purpose of speech within the work and mission of universities.
It’s true that this is a good origin point for a long-running debate that has unfolded since. It’s also a good origin point for how provocateurs on the right have sought to use liberal-progressive commitments to speech rights as a way to keep them tied up in knots and arguing with each other, since Shockley was invited precisely to set off that particular reaction. And, as Sam Tanenhaus has observed, it’s an origin point for targeting individual professors not because of their formal ideological commitments (say, being members of the Communist Party) but because of specific things the professor said in a lecture or discussion that one student found objectionable and then leveraging a report (usually out of context) to coordinate an attack on that professor and force an administrative response. That kind of “cancel culture” didn’t begin with progressives, and has since the 1970s been much more a staple part of right-wing attention to universities.
But what this historical narrative always leaves out is the era before the Shockley event where the three major threats to faculty and student speech came from governments, where the consequences weren’t just harassment from activists or insidious pressure from administrative leaders, but were instead the loss of your job or were outright explicit commands to censor what was taught or said.
In the 1950s and 1960s, in most states, faculty who were identified as members of the Communist Party (or former members) were fired and blacklisted. That’s a familiar story, only not really to the Friedersdorf-types. What’s less familiar but maybe even more relevant, many universities, especially in the South, actively prohibited inviting speakers associated with the civil rights movement and actively disciplined or targeted faculty who spoke sympathetically about the movement. In both cases, these were initiatives that came from government and were expressly backed up by government authority. In the case of civil rights, there was a parallel project in the South to add explicitly pro-Southern, pro-Lost Cause faculty. Anti-Communism mostly took care of itself, given the predilections of a lot of mainstream liberal intellectuals in the 1950s and 1960s.
Less familiar than that is a history that has run continuously alongside these very overtly public and political constraints, which is threats to faculty, tenured or otherwise, for anything that administrative leaders and their backers in government deemed to be disloyal to the institution, to the administrative leadership, or even to the government of the state.
There are three major interpretations of the value of tenure that persist even now into its waning. One is a classic negative-liberties kind of argument that the content of faculty research and teaching needs to be protected from government authority and administrative power both by a doctrine of academic freedom and by continuous tenure because research and teaching has to be able to extend into ideas that government or public opinion might find offensive or objectionable. There’s a huge mountain of examples justifying that proposition, a long list of important areas of knowledge and study that have been subject to such attacks.
The second is that tenure is an important incentive for faculty work that helps attract and retain highly skilled people who might otherwise choose higher-paying professions or jobs, either from the outset (e.g., by training in another profession from the beginning) or in direct competition with academic employers (e.g., in fields that are in high demand in other industries and workplaces). I think this is rarely stated as the primary justification for tenure but it is often offered as a secondary one. Where tenure still is the predominant form of faculty employment, I think this purpose is often acknowledged, if more informally.
The third is less acknowledged by administrators, in part because it runs so deeply counter to 21st Century managerial norms, but it is that tenure protects faculty so that they can participate effectively in the management and governance of academic institutions. (Administrators are generally happy to cite this point in one major way, which is that it is the basis of an old National Labor Relations Board ruling that tenure-track faculty cannot use a union to bargain collectively as they are managers, not employees.) The history of faculty governance is itself convoluted, but it has some deep roots that are visible here and there—for example, in how faculty sometimes formally vote to confer degrees on students, or are the point of institutional interaction with government authorities that confer licenses or authenticate credentials for particular kinds of expert labor.
Faculty without tenure are routinely threatened by job loss for crossing their leadership—or sometimes the leadership of the leadership, e.g., trustees and legislators. Faculty with tenure often are as well. But this use of tenure is as important as the others, maybe more so, and it’s no surprise that Republicans want to destroy this kind of autonomy, because they’re targeting similar forms of protections for civil servants overall. They don’t want whistleblowers, they don’t want people who protect the missions and values of an institution or an office.
All of these uses and meanings of tenure are under attack now, and in that respect (as in many others) there is a concerted attempt to return us to the 1950s, if not earlier—to allow political leaders to decide what can be said, thought and studied at all levels of education, to destroy any bridges between state power and civil society. Or any obstacles to the state extending its power into civil society. Now that we really need tenure as tiger repellant, we don’t have very much of it, and what little we have, the tigers are determined to wash away. People need to remember all the things that governments didn’t want studied, discussed or known, and why we tried to live more effectively towards being a free and open society in fulfillment of our basic founding commitments. I am sure that some of the people more scared of an Oberlin student’s opinion of the cafeteria burritos will keep up the focus on that kind of thing instead. In some cases, that’s because they’ve been feeding the tigers all along; in other cases, they’ve cultivated tiger blindness and only see moth holes in the clothes closet or mice in the pantry while bloody mayhem unfolds all around them.
Image credit: Photo by Wayne Chan on Unsplash
I think an important reason why people like the ones you mention care more about Oberlin students who think bad sushi is a microagression than Texas A&M firing people for criticizing the state government is that the former affects them more, in the following sense. If you work outside academia but in culture industries or other areas driven primarily by people with elite educations, then (a) you already work at-will, don't have tenure or anything like it, and have to negotiate your relationship with your bosses in ways familiar to most American workers, but (b) the culture around how you talk to your colleagues, what kinds of positions are acceptable or out of bounds, etc really can change and is influenced by new hires from prestigious colleges.
Yes--Pinker, Haidt, even Christakis etc. see themselves, I think accurately, being in a tier of untouchables in terms of academic employment, and thus not really needing or caring about tenure as such, but they do imagine that student activists could be a serious nuisance that would mess with their prerogatives.