As states like Florida and Texas gut tenure protections for university faculty, many assume the greatest loss is to academic freedom. But tenure is not just about academic freedom. It also is, and has always been, about labor protection.
The idea of tenure may have emerged from academic freedom disputes, but it became an industry practice because it was used to recruit and retain skilled knowledge workers. Leaving this out of the story of tenure prevents scholars from effectively withstanding attacks that seek to remake how academic labor is performed today.
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The common story of how tenure came to be the norm in American universities begins in 1900 when Stanford University forced the resignation of economist Edward A. Ross, whose public activism angered the university’s sole trustee, Jane Stanford. The Ross affair is usually credited with inspiring Ross’ colleague Arthur Lovejoy to quit Stanford, move to Johns Hopkins, and co-found the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).
For several decades afterward, the AAUP worked to establish itself and develop best practices for faculty employment.
Then, in 1940, the organization released its Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, which argued for the importance of its two headline concepts. This short document—under 10 pages altogether—remains the definitive guide for university tenure practices today.
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The 1940 Statement is undoubtedly an important reason why tenure became an industry norm in the decades after World War II. But tenure did not just appear in 1940, and it did not become an industry standard solely due to the AAUP’s Statement.
To begin with, the 1940 Statement merely built on the direction in which higher education was already moving. Indefinite employment terminable only for cause had existed as early as the founding of Harvard College in 1650. Academic employment practices would change considerably over the next two and half centuries, first moving away from this concept, and then back toward it. In the decade before the AAUP statement, universities had begun to adopt something resembling modern tenure.
In 1935, President Edgar Lovett of Rice University had contacted dozens of his fellow leaders to ask how their institutions approached the issue of job security for professors. Among the 78 universities that responded to Lovett’s inquiry, 48% had already instituted formal tenure policies and another 37% had an informal “custom of tenure.”
The 1940 Statement formalized this system after a period of fluctuation and gave it teeth by requiring universities to give faculty due process before termination.
Not only does the traditional narrative of tenure skew the timeline, it also oversimplifies the causes of the change.
Academic freedom wasn’t the only thing pushing universities in the direction of tenure. Most of the university presidents who replied to Lovett justified tenure on economic, not academic, grounds. The chancellor of NYU “pointed specifically to the volatility of the economy and the meager financial rewards received by faculty members as justifications for tenure.” President James Conant of Harvard wrote that “our only hope of recruiting men for this important service is to guarantee the permanency of their tenure when they have reached a certain age and attained to a certain eminence.” In short, tenure made good sense to these administrators because it was necessary to recruit and retain accomplished faculty.
Even those involved in drafting the AAUP’s 1940 Statement recognized the labor value of tenure. During the drafting process, the AAUP’s general secretary, Ralph E. Himstead, emphasized employment security over expressive safeguards. Walter Metzger, the famed historian of higher education, later wrote “[t]he fixed star in Himstead’s constellation of beliefs was that the welfare of the academic profession as well as the peace of mind of the persons in it required vigilance against the evil of permanent transience.”
Accordingly, the 1940 Statement declared that tenure mattered in part because it provided “a sufficient degree of economic security to make the profession attractive to men and women of ability.”
There were other labor-based factors that helped to popularize tenure throughout academia.
First, in 1944, Congress passed The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act. More commonly called the “GI Bill,” this law guaranteed that the government would fund the tuition of veterans as World War II was nearing its end, causing an explosion in the number of students seeking postsecondary education.
American colleges and universities were eager to reap the guaranteed tuition benefits of the GI Bill and sought to recruit and retain faculty to teach these new students.
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Simultaneously, beginning in the late 1940s, the American government’s Cold War national security interests began to transform the higher education landscape. Some fields expanded rapidly: the scientific and mathematical research done at universities ballooned during this period. Others, including area studies and international studies, were essentially invented or crystallized at this time. Universities now needed faculty to teach these subjects. Then, as now, tenure provided a measure of labor protection that could justify the lower wages that academia offered despite the lengthy and expensive credentialing processes required of faculty.
At the same time, scholarly knowledge was becoming more specialized and professionalized. By 1945, there were 86 scholarly journals in the field of history alone, and by 1948 there were 35 university presses (compared to just three in 1900). The maintenance of this expertise took dedicated chunks of time that had to be spread over lengthy and secure careers.
By 1959, a survey of 170 universities in California, Illinois, and Pennsylvania found that 86% of them had articulated tenure policies. Today, most universities offer tenure — and a couple that tried eliminating the practice in the early 2000s, like Chatham University in Pittsburgh, later brought it back. But even as faculty point to the rising percentage of professors who are employed off the tenure-track (around 70%) and argue that contingency leads to more daunting course loads that impede teaching and research, they have continued to defend tenure primarily on academic freedom grounds.
A deeper, more nuanced understanding of the history, however, shows that tenure also matters because it provides labor protections to workers who need it. In fact, tenure has always mattered for this reason — to both the university-employers who offer tenure, and to the faculty-employees who receive it. Losing sight of this has meant that faculty haven’t been using all of the tools at their disposal to fight the disintegration of tenure-stream employment.
Attacks on academia are fundamentally about remaking the labor practices that define higher education. Recent federal cuts to research funding and the punishment of Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies seek to reshape academic labor on the back end, by dictating what scholars can teach and research after they’ve been hired to perform those tasks. Meanwhile, for years, state legislatures have been passing laws that seek to reshape academic labor on the front end, by gutting funding for hires and imposing new criteria for appointment and retention.
Tenure is a common thread in these attacks — and the war on tenure is a war on the infrastructure that makes the production and preservation of knowledge possible. It’s the final frontier in the decades-long assault on unions and labor protections. If we lose that war, we risk losing the university as we know it.
Deepa Das Acevedo is an associate professor at Emory Law School and author of The War on Tenure (Cambridge, 2025).
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.