Universities are long overdue for a robust debate about what they stand for and what they offer students and society. Despite professorial claims that ending tenure is an assault against universities and the republic, it will benefit professors and students.
Harvard University and its president, Alan Garber, are caught between an angry Donald Trump and a harder place—namely, the university’s sense of itself as the nation’s leading research and teaching university. In the face of Trump’s cutoff of more than $2 billion in federal funding as a consequence of the university’s ostensible failure to obey U.S. Civil Rights law, Harvard has decided not to “surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” as Garber proclaimed on April 11. But Trump’s bullying is often hard to resist because he picks well-deserved, unpopular targets. Harvard’s embrace of the Academic Intifada, rife with Jew hatred and educational malpractice through professorial propagandizing, combined with a decades-long drift from merit-based hiring, is at the root of both the university’s problems and the low public standing of elite universities. As the United States’ leading college president, while working to preserve his institution’s autonomy, Garber should kick-start creative educational reform from within—by ending tenure.
Garber’s predecessor, Claudine Gay, miserably failed to acknowledge how deep the rot ran on her campus. Her infamous congressional testimony misfired not only because she was tone-deaf about the antisemitism on campus. She and her two presidential colleagues looked foolish by suddenly defending free speech after years of assaults they helped lead on “microaggressors,” which created an Ivy-covered cancel culture. It is almost funny to hear Harvard administrators, faculty, and students suddenly defending “free speech” against Trump when the university is ranked dead last in freedom of speech by the respected campus organization Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Dead last is not a place that Harvard generally likes to be. Nor does it inspire any confidence in the university’s attachment to free speech and free inquiry. While Trump’s remedy may be destructive, it is hard for the university’s defenders and alumni like myself to mount much of a defense of an institution that has lost its way and showed itself to be totally incapable of meaningful reform.
University presidents will only succeed morally and practically in defying Trump’s unprecedented governmental intrusiveness if they put tone-deaf posing aside and facilitate changes that are desperately needed. Looking ahead, Garber should strike a committee to prepare for Harvard’s 400th year in 2036 by reimagining higher education boldly and broadly, recognizing the opportunities and pitfalls of living in a global technologically mediated society. A second committee, on a much tighter timetable, should evaluate the admissions process, the hiring process, first-year orientations, codes of student conduct, and the range of course offerings in each department, to protect all students from harassment while escaping the grip of DEI and Woke U—which are not protected “free speech,” but rather ideological impositions by small cadres of administrators and activists, distorting the university’s broader mission.
As these committees explore, debate, and dither—being filled with academics—Garber should outmaneuver Trump by striking hard and fast to eliminate tenure. Such a move, especially combined with breaking the administrative hold of DEI hiring mandates and committees, would prove the sincerity of Harvard’s desire to return to its former excellence. American students and taxpayers alike deserve that, no matter who is president.
Why should tenure be the target?
Tenure is the foundation stone of academic arrogance—and torpor. If, once upon a time, tenure guaranteed creativity, now it imposes groupthink. If tenure once facilitated a sense of scholarly responsibility in one’s writing and teaching, it now frees professors from accountability in the classroom or on campus. If tenure once encouraged independence, it now demands fealty to woke ideology for novitiates to be welcomed into the professoriat’s lifetime club. If tenure once helped academics serve society, now it helps society serve academics—by granting them the privilege of lifetime employment enjoyed by no other professional or craft cohort, at the expense of ordinary taxpayers. As Francis Fukuyama put it in 2009, tenure “has turned the academy into one of the most conservative and costly institutions in the country.”
The tenure system was developed a century ago during the Progressive Era to avoid the narrow-mindedness, heavy-handedness, and unoriginality that students increasingly endure today. Abolishing tenure will foster the robust academic freedom and quality educational experience that the institution was supposed to protect, and bring American academia in line with the way university appointments work in many other parts of the world.
President Garber and his colleagues can learn from three successful 20th-century revolutions that reshaped American higher education—including the revolution that turned Harvard into the United States’ most prestigious university. It was Garber’s distinguished predecessor as Harvard’s president, from 1933 to 1953, James Bryant Conant, who created the Harvard most fans and critics know today, by helping to transform his university and the Ivy League from a stodgy playground for America’s old-line aristocracy into a breeding ground for its meritocracy. Key to Conant’s reforms was his endorsement of both standardized testing as the basis of merit-based admissions and investment in financial aid to recruit academic superstars from all over the world. He, too, violated tradition by including lower-class “meatballs” in the student body, and then by welcoming GI Bill veterans after World War II (while keeping quotas on Jews intact until 1951).
Still, Conant understood that the key to reforming the institution was changing the faculty. He imposed a mandatory retirement age for most at 66. Whenever the faculty resisted his proposals, Conant sighed, “Behold the turtle. It makes progress only when it sticks its neck out.”
Clearly, leadership counts. Courageous presidents can trigger system-wide change by using their universities as laboratories. Conant, in large part, built on the new model of the American university inspired by Robert Maynard Hutchins, who at 29 began transforming what was then a relatively undistinguished school—the University of Chicago—into one of the country’s most productive and prestigious institutions of higher learning.
Universities were unpopular in those days, too. When he began his reform effort in the early 1930s, Hutchins acknowledged that the “popular misconceptions of the nature and purpose of universities originate in the fantastic misconduct of the universities.” Defining the “purpose of the university” as procuring “a moral, intellectual, and spiritual revolution throughout the world,” Hutchins assailed the status quo. Seeking to welcome students into “the great conversation,” he replaced specialized training for undergraduates with general education based on the great books. After all, the educational system was not developed “to produce hands for industry or to teach the young how to make a living. It is to produce responsible citizens.”
Defying alumni, Hutchins also eliminated varsity football, deeming it a distraction from the university’s mission.
During the 22 years following his 1929 appointment, Hutchins used his University of Chicago platform as a bully pulpit. He delivered 64 public addresses in his first year alone, supplemented by radio appearances and popular Saturday Evening Post articles. Transforming the University of Chicago from a regional school into an international force, Hutchins inspired imitators throughout North America.
Our current crisis, however, is more the product of a faculty-driven ideological revolution with roots in the 1960s. “While the Right has been busy taking the White House,” Todd Gitlin lamented in The Twilight of Common Dreams in 1995, “the Left has been marching on the English department.” The former ‘60s protester and radical sociologist thought his comrades failed. But they revolutionized the university, then Blue America—creating a parallel society with its own set of values, which have become largely synonymous with higher social class and wealth, while exacerbating social divisions and fracturing mainstream political consensus.
Over the past 50 years, waves of scholar-activists, whose approach is guided by Brazilian educational guru Paulo Freire, have changed the university far beyond what Hutchins and Conant would recognize. Although written in 1968, Freire’s popular Pedagogy of the Oppressed describes too many classrooms today. “Problem-posing education, as a humanist and liberating praxis, posits as fundamental that the people subjected to domination must fight for their emancipation,” Freire wrote. Foreshadowing the jargon of today’s “revolutionary” academics in American universities, he added, “Problem-posing education does not and cannot serve the interests of the oppressor.”
Traditionally, universities have always conned parents, convincing them that they were paying for their children to be taught by the best teachers, as universities in fact promoted the best researchers. Today, parents risk bankruptcy thinking they’re buying knowledge and credentials that will help their kids master the very system many of their kids’ professors actively seek to destroy.
In an article on “The roles of the scholar/activist in education,” Michael Apple, a leading education professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, defines the critical educator’s “task” as “keeping traditions of radical and progressive work alive.” This commitment to “see the world through the eyes of the dispossessed and act against the ideological and institutional processes and forms that reproduce oppressive conditions,” Apple explains elsewhere, restructures the teacher’s “role.” Ultimately, education, from kindergarten through graduate school, became “a site of resistance … an arena of ideological conflict” essential to the “long-term struggles to build a more just society.”
As the hundreds of scholars who signed the “Palestine and Praxis” petition in May 2021 postulated, “We believe that the critical theory we generate in our literature and in our classrooms must be backed in deed.” Treating anti-Zionism as a foundation of their activism, they insisted, “Scholarship without action normalizes the status quo and reinforces Israel’s impunity.”
The best of the older scholars, now in their seventies and eighties, who grew up in the world of scholarly excellence that Hutchins and Conant helped to make, may eschew shallow and politically motivated platitudes as having nothing to do with knowing more about the Renaissance or the Middle Ages or exploring the contradictions of string theory. However, younger scholars, seeking tenure—or simply an extra semester of being a vagabond adjunct—have little choice but to join their professional societies and unions dominated by tenured radical elders and sign whatever petitions they are expected to sign, proving their adherence to “critical theory” and “the struggle for justice.” Calling this kind of forced intellectual conformity “free speech” is the kind of perverted wordplay these self-styled “critical theorists” so often employ. But they are honest, at least, in proclaiming their belief that traditional notions of scholarship are a sham and announcing that their goal is social revolution.
These differing models illustrate why the path away from the academic intifada toward academic salvation begins with tenure reform from above—meaning, driven by university presidents and boards of trustees, who retain the power to shape their institutions along different lines than those imagined by Freire and Judith Butler.
To tackle tenure, reformers must curtail the power of the academic societies, which facilitate today’s tenure corruption; eliminate the self-perpetuating internal lobbies for DEI among university administrators and staff who were hired for that purpose, often without any meaningful academic credentials; stop the enforced politicization of academic life by self-proclaimed political activists who use their control of the hiring process as a device to enforce a uniformity of viewpoints within the classroom; and end the perverse denigration of merit as “racist.” By reclaiming their power over the institutions they are supposed to lead, reformers can meet the revolution from below with a revolution from above that will renew the educational purpose of American universities, as well as their public standing.
University leaders must learn from another critical moment in the history of higher education: the ascent of McCarthyism. Today, we tell the story of the Red Scare of the 1950s by portraying that snarling demagogue, Sen. Joe McCarthy, as the embodiment of all that was wrong with the critique and the times. But then, as now, the United States’ universities suffered great reputational damage from the faculty’s knee-jerk Marxism in the 1950s, followed by the campus upheavals of the 1960s.
The way that America’s universities vindicated themselves in the 1970s and 1980s, and even into the 1990s, was through the pursuit of excellence that both Hutchins and Conant had originally believed in. Fueled by federal money, attracting the smartest students and empowering high-powered faculty, America’s universities became powerhouses of excellence. These living laboratories spawned the modern, color-blind American meritocracy—and created a Jew-friendly Harvard filled with Jewish professors and others who regretted the university’s traditional antisemitism while keeping its best scholarly traditions alive. The books, theories, inventions, innovations and, most important, the superstar American teachers and scholars and researchers that the universities produced made American higher education the foundation stone of the United States’ postwar success and the envy of the entire world.
In that world of rigor, a scientist who leaned right, or a social scientist who wasn’t partisan, could thrive based on smarts alone—because the leaders of those universities were honestly committed to finding and retaining the best scholars in the world and tasked their deans and department chairs with that mission. That contrasts with the DEI regimes, which discarded many a potential future luminary who failed to convince hiring committees that their research advanced today’s political agenda—or that they were worth hiring despite lacking the right skin tone, gender, or sexual preference. “The most compelling diversity statements offer your definitions of equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging (EDIB) and demonstrate how your research, teaching, and service actualize your EDIB goals,” Harvard’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning recently advised in a statement no longer accessible on its website. As scholarship became subordinate to politics, excellence became incidental, not institutional.
Some university critics follow the Qatari money, charting how this little dictatorship’s $4.7 billion in donations since 2001 poisoned higher education. But follow the scholarly associations instead. They pursue what higher-education expert Isaac Gottesman calls “scholarship espousing social justice,” and they have set the tone, especially in the elite schools. The American Sociological Association (ASA), one of many learned societies that a century ago demanded tenure to protect scholarly objectivity, proclaims in its diversity statement, “As a national association, we place value on dismantling power inequalities.” Declaring racism “systemic,” the ASA claims that “anti-racism education lays bare these systemic inequities, which is a critical step in understanding how to move toward a more just society.”
Professors hoping colleagues will honor their humanities monograph or social science journal article know what to do: Bash America, or Europe, without explaining how the West advanced or what aspects of liberalism or Americanism improved the United States and the world.
One by one, led from within, institutions can change by taking out the trash of ideologically driven pseudo-scholarship—and inspiring others to do the same. Although change could come faster if the Harvards and Stanfords set the pace, Hutchins proved that this revolution need not be Ivy-covered. Universities with middling reputations, dwindling student bodies, and flagging endowments may be desperate enough to hire without political and identity-obsessed bias, improve teaching quality, and teach students to think critically rather than recite political catechisms. Administrators could bolster their case for change with surveys assessing students’ classroom experience to determine whether professors effectively define the goals, methodologies, intellectual components, workloads, and evaluation standards in the course—from the syllabus through grading the final assignments.
In consultation with professors, students, and outside educators, each university should develop a code of classroom conduct. It should define the teaching mission and the professors’ commitment to providing a high-quality, nonpartisan educational experience that respects students’ intellectual independence. It should also articulate a vision of professorial accountability, rejecting the arrogance that has thickened over the decades.
To make such reforms stick, university leaders will have to grow spines and bypass the learned societies. Currently, tenure cases require as many as six “outside reviewers.” Despite that moniker, most evaluators are the ultimate insiders. They usually derive their status from the learned societies that have shaped the generation now treating classrooms as revolutionary cells. Tenure evaluations should not just rely on those deemed to be experts by the ASA or the American Historical Association. Master teachers and expert alumni should be consulted—going beyond the academic clique.
To be fair, cultivating good teaching and fostering pathbreaking research takes time. Some insulation from the rush of modern society is justified. Senior professors should receive five-year contracts that are automatically renewable unless vetoed by colleagues, administrators, or students questioning teaching quality, academic productivity, or scholarly integrity. Universities should not judge professors by the political positions they take—or don’t take—but by the quality of their teaching, carefully defined, and their research.
Such procedures will make academics more accountable and reflective. Periodically contemplating accomplishments and goals, short- and long-term, can produce better professors. Moreover, with society, culture, technology, and knowledge changing so rapidly, locking in employees for three or four decades is a guarantee of obsolescence that seems radically unfair to students and to institutions as a whole.
Freeing the university from its tenure shackles will not be easy. Academics, who merrily assault everyone else’s “privilege”—real or imagined—go postal if you question their prerogatives. These tattooed Marxists in tweed with perpetual employment and rich pensions assail Americanism cushioned by middle-class entitlements they guard jealously.
Faculty unions will also go ballistic. Advocates for tenure will gaslight, claiming, as Henry Reichman, first vice president of the American Association of University Professors, recently argued, that “tenure is essentially a guarantee of academic due process and presumption of innocence.” Making tenure sound benign doesn’t make it OK; it proves its irrelevance. Standard employment contracts and labor laws guarantee basic fairness too.
Universities are long overdue for a robust debate about what they stand for and what they offer students and society. Despite professorial claims that ending tenure is an assault against universities and the republic, it will benefit professors and students. Students might start getting the teaching they, their parents, and the state have long been paying for. And professors might discover the joys of capitalism. Fostering competition and incentivizing excellence bring out the best in us, while lifetime guarantees produce torpor.