Academic freedom is not a gift. It is a structure long protected by tenure, a contract with no expiration date that guarantees procedural protections to faculty.
Tenure has granted faculty at U.S. colleges and universities the rights to peer review, committee deliberation and presentation of evidence and witnesses before being fired. These protections, including the right to appeal, exist not as a bureaucratic formality, but as the architecture that makes free inquiry possible in practice.
These hard-earned protections are now at risk in several states. Dismantle them, and declarations of academic freedom become language without substance.
Under a proposed bill now awaiting Tennessee Governor Bill Lee’s signature, tenured professors in the state’s public colleges and universities may lose their jobs due to a single official’s decision, with no contractual protections. If signed, the tenure changes would take effect July 1.
Oklahoma’s Republican Governor Kevin Stitt signed an executive order eliminating tenure at regional universities and community colleges across the state in February. And Oklahoma legislators are now advancing a bill to extend that ban to research universities.
North Dakota’s tenure protections have been under sustained legislative assault for years, with lawmakers repeatedly advancing bills to concentrate termination authority in administrators and strip committee review from the process.
In late March, the Kentucky Senate passed a bill that would allow university governing boards to terminate tenured faculty for low enrollment or “misalignment of revenue and costs” with just 30 days’ notice.
Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter.
This is not a coincidence. This is a coordinated assault on the foundations of academic freedom.
Tenure allows professors freedom to follow evidence, challenge prevailing assumptions and teach without carefully aligning every conclusion with those that people in power have decided to permit.
Tennessee’s bill has an unusually explicit mechanism: A faculty member facing termination is only entitled to written notice and a hearing before the terminating administrator.
That word “only” is not a procedural floor establishing minimum protections. It is a statutory ceiling, actively stripping away peer review and any other institutional policy, contractual provision or professional standard that would otherwise apply.
The bill’s sponsor, State Senator Adam Lowe, said the legislation “addresses those who might use tenure as insulation from actions that are detrimental to the brand and code of conduct for the college.”
That word “brand” does a lot of work. Academic freedom was built specifically to protect faculty from institutional pressure to align scholarship, teaching and public speech with what administrators find convenient or comfortable.
A misconduct process that can be triggered to protect brand reputation is not a neutral accountability mechanism.
The faculty senate at Tennessee’s Pellissippi State Community College, where I teach, voted to oppose the bill — not along partisan lines, but unanimously — as faculty unified around a shared understanding of what peer review protects.
This matters for reasons that go well beyond job security.
Tennessee’s Divisive Concepts Act expanded to higher education in 2023; faculty across the state began to assess their syllabi, seminar discussions and public statements against a law threatening complaint, investigation and unspecified corrective action.
No terminations were necessary. The threat was enough. Now, faculty across the nation who cannot rely on due process may calibrate their professional conduct the same way.
A professor who knows that a single administrator can end their career based on undefined “misconduct,” with no obligation to meet an evidentiary standard, may hesitate before publishing research, challenging institutional direction or speaking plainly on matters of public concern.
This is the structural logic of the chilling effect. The possibility does the work.
Tennessee’s own record makes its contradiction vivid. A state that championed free speech is now stripping the protections that make it possible. The Campus Free Speech Act of 2017 established that the free exchange of ideas, “offensive, unwise, immoral, indecent, disagreeable, conservative, liberal, traditional, radical, or wrong-headed,” is the essential purpose of its public campuses. The new bill ensures that a professor’s exercise of that free exchange can be grounds for termination at an executive’s discretion, with no meaningful procedural check on whether the motivation was ideological.
Academic freedom that exists at the sufferance of those in power is not academic freedom at all.
What the legislation moving across these states shares is a common direction: executive power concentrated, peer accountability removed, institutional structures that distribute authority and require deliberation steadily eroded.
However, faculty governance leaders should know that the fight does not end when a bill is signed.
In Tennessee, the bill’s own text offers unexpected leverage to combat its effort to strip procedural protections. Its preamble states that “academic tenure serves as an important safeguard for academic freedom, the advancement of knowledge, and the protection of intellectual independence.” It codifies that tenure must remain categorically separate from disciplinary proceedings. The bill also leaves the key terms “cause,” “misconduct” and “professional standards” undefined. Governing boards across Tennessee are now drafting policy with a July 1 deadline. The definitions they write will determine how far the law reaches.
Related: Behind the turmoil of federal attacks on colleges, some states are going after tenure
And the bill’s own constitutional guardrails — the due process, free speech protections for public employees and academic speech protections courts have long recognized — can be used as leverage at the policy table.
The students who fill our classrooms are building their future. They are owed professors who can follow evidence, ask honest questions and teach without measuring every conclusion against what the state has decided to permit.
That classroom is worth defending. The policy table is where our defense happens now.
Grant A. Mincy is an associate professor at Pellissippi State Community College in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he serves as faculty senate president-elect. He writes on ecology, Appalachian place and faculty governance.
This story about tenure in higher education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.
Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.
Read More
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
