Academic tenure in the United States and Canada is a contractual right that grants a teacher or professor a permanent position of employment at an academic institution such as a university or school. Tenure is intended to protect educators from dismissal without just cause, and to allow development of thoughts or ideas considered unpopular or controversial among the community. In North America, tenure is granted only to educators whose work is considered to be exceptionally productive and beneficial in their careers.
Academic tenure became a standard for education institutions in North America with the introduction of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)'s 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure. In this statement, the AAUP provides a definition of academic tenure: "a means to certain ends, specifically: (1) freedom of teaching and research and of extramural activities, and (2) a sufficient degree of economic security to make the profession attractive to men and women of ability."
Academic tenure at colleges and universities Under the tenure systems adopted by many universities and colleges in the United States and Canada, some faculty positions have tenure and some do not. Typical systems, such as the widely adopted "1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure" of the American Association of University Professors,http://aaup.org/report/1940-statement-principles-academic-freedom-and-tenure; this statement has been adopted by more than 200 scholarly and academic groups (http://aaup.org/endorsers-1940-statement). The American Association of University Professors also publishes "Recommended Institutional Regulations on Academic Freedom and Tenure". allow only a limited period to establish a record of published research, ability to attract grant funding, academic visibility, teaching excellence, and administrative or community service. They limit the number of years that any employee can remain employed as a non-tenured instructor or professor, compelling the institution to grant tenure to or terminate an individual, with significant advance notice, at the end of a specified time period. Some institutions require promotion to Associate Professor as a condition of tenure. An institution may also offer other academic positions that are not time-limited, with titles such as lecturer, adjunct professor, or research professor, but these positions do not carry the possibility of tenure and are said to be not "tenure track".
Academic tenure's original purpose was to guarantee the right to academic freedom: it protects teachers and researchers when they dissent from prevailing opinion, openly disagree with authorities of any sort, or spend time on unfashionable topics. Thus academic tenure is similar to the lifetime tenure that protects some judges from external pressure. Without job security, the scholarly community as a whole may experience pressure to favor noncontroversial lines of academic inquiry. The intent of tenure is to allow original ideas to be more likely to arise, by giving scholars the intellectual autonomy to investigate the problems and solutions as they see fit and to report their honest conclusions.Reis, Richard. (1997) Tomorrow's Professor: Preparing for Academic Careers in Science and Engineering. Wiley-IEEE Press. However, it has also become a type of job security for professors.
In North American universities and colleges, the tenure track has long been a defining feature of professorial employment, although it is less than universal."White Paper #1 - Tenure" Illinois State University's AAUP."Transient professors: How important is tenure?" Evelyn Shih (2003) The Yale Herald. In North American universities, positions that carry tenure, or the opportunity to attain tenure, have grown more slowly than non-tenure-track positions, leading to a large "academic underclass"."Tenure in the new millennium: Still a valuable concept" James T. Richardson (1999) National Forum (see section on "Split labour theory in academe"). For example, most US universities supplement the work of tenured professors with the services of non-tenured adjunct professors, academics who teach classes for lower wages and fewer employment benefits under relatively short-term contracts. For those that are tenure track, it generally takes seven years to earn tenure while working as an assistant professor. Tenure is determined by a combination of research, teaching, and service, with each factor weighted according to the values of a particular university, college or department. There is some evidence that professors that share more (e.g. via open access publications, open data, or open source hardware development) gain an advantage in obtaining tenure because they are cited more and can thus develop a higher h-index.Joshua M. Pearce, "Open Source Hardware in Academia" in Alicia Gibb (Ed.) Building Open Source Hardware: DIY Manufacturing for Hackers and Makers, Addison-Wesley: New York, pp. 253-277 (2015). This competition for limited resources could lead to ethically questionable behaviour.
History in the United States 19th century In the 19th century, university professors largely served at the pleasure of the board of trustees of the university. Sometimes, major donors could successfully remove professors or prohibit the hiring of certain individuals; nonetheless, a de facto tenure system existed. Usually professors were only fired for interfering with the religious principles of a college, and most boards were reluctant to discipline professors. The courts rarely intervened in dismissals.
In one debate of the Cornell University Board of Trustees in the 1870s, a businessman trustee argued against the prevailing system of de facto tenure, but lost the argument. Despite the power retained in the board, academic freedom prevailed. Another example is the 1894 case of Richard T. Ely, a University of Wisconsin–Madison professor who advocated for labor strikes and labor law reform. Though the Wisconsin legislature and business interests pressed for his dismissal, the board of trustees of the university passed a resolution committing itself to academic freedom, and to retaining him (without tenure):
From 1900 to 1940 In 1901, the president of the University of Chicago, Wiillam Rainey Harper asserted that no donor had the right to interfere with the teaching or appointment of faculty. p. 95 Likewise, Charles Eliot at Harvard University, and Nicholas Murray Butler at Columbia University expressed similar sentiments.
In 1915, this was followed by the American Association of University Professors' declaration of principles—the traditional justification for academic freedom and tenure.
The AAUP's declaration of principles recommended that: Trustees raise faculty salaries, but not bind their consciences with restrictions. Only committees of other faculty members can judge a member of the faculty. This would also insulate higher administration from external accountability decisions. Faculty appointments be made by other faculty and chairpersons, with three elements: Clear employment contracts formal academic tenure, and clearly stated grounds for dismissal.
While the AAUP pushed reform, tenure battles were a campus non-issue. In 1910, a survey of 22 universities showed that most professors held their positions with "presumptive permanence". At a third of colleges, assistant professor appointments were considered permanent, while at most colleges multi-year appointments were subject to renewal. Only at one university did a governing board ratify a president's decisions on granting tenure.
An important tenure case in this period was the 1936 denial of tenure for Jerome Davis, a professor of practical philanthropy at Yale Divinity School.
From 1940 to 1972 In 1940, the AAUP recommended that the academic tenure probationary period be seven years, which is still the norm. It also suggested that a tenured professor could not be dismissed without adequate cause, except "under extraordinary circumstances, because of financial emergencies." Also, the statement recommended that the professor be given the written reasons for dismissal and an opportunity to be heard in self-defense. Another purpose of the academic tenure probationary period was raising the performance standards of the faculty by pressing new professors to perform to the standard of the school's established faculty.
The most significant adoption of academic tenure occurred after 1945, when the influx of returning GIs returning to school led to quickly expanding universities with severe professorial faculty shortages. These shortages dogged the academy for ten years, and that is when the majority of universities started offering formal tenure as a side benefit. In fact, the demand for professors was so high in the 1950s that the American Council of Learned Societies held a conference in Cuba noting the too-few doctoral candidates to fill positions in English departments. During the McCarthy era, loyalty oaths were required of many state employees, and neither formal academic tenure nor the Constitutional principles of freedom of speech and association were protection from dismissal. Some professors were dismissed for their political affiliations. During the 1960s, many professors supported the anti-war movement against the Vietnam War, and more than 20 state legislatures passed resolutions calling for specific professorial dismissals and a change to the academic tenure system.
By 1969, the percentage of faculty that were tenured was 51 percent.
Since 1972 Two landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases changed tenure in 1972: (i) Board of Regents of State Colleges v. Roth, 408 US 564; and (ii) Perry v. Sindermann, 408 US 593. These two cases held that a professor's claim to entitlement must be more than a subjective expectancy of continued employment. Rather, there must be a contractual relationship or a reference in a contract to a specific tenure policy or agreement. Further, the court held that a tenured professor who is discharged from a public college has been deprived of a property interest, and so due process applies, requiring certain procedural safeguards (the right to personally appear in a hearing, the right to examine evidence and respond to accusations, the right to have advisory counsel).
Later cases specified other bases for dismissal: (i) if a professor's conduct were incompatible with his duties (Trotman v. Bd. of Trustees of Lincoln Univ., 635 F.2d 216 (2d Cir.1980)); (ii) if the discharge decision is based on an objective rule (Johnson v. Bd. of Regents of U. Wisc. Sys., 377 F. Supp 277, (W.D. Wisc. 1974)). After these cases were judged, the number of reported cases in the matter of academic tenure increased more than two-fold: from 36 cases filed during the decade 1965–1975, to 81 cases filed during the period 1980–1985.