The real problem with academia: Tenure

California Gov. Gavin Newsom just signed a law banning legacy and donor considerations in admissions at all private colleges and universities in the state. California is the fifth state to do so, following Colorado, Illinois, Maryland and Virginia. Newsom praised the law, saying, “The California Dream shouldn’t be accessible to just a lucky few.”

According to the Stanford Daily, 13.6% of admits to Stanford University in 2023 were children of alumni or donors. Inside Higher Ed reports that it was 14.4% at the University of Southern California in 2022, and 13.3% at the University of Santa Clara. Pepperdine University’s is around 9%.

Last year, 2.5 million students were enrolled in California’s colleges or universities. Even at USC – with the highest percentage of legacy or donor admits – nearly 87% of the student population of more than 45,000 were not the children of alumni or donors.

This hardly sounds like college in California is available only to “a lucky few.”

But whatever. The truth is that giving spots to children of alumni isn’t the big problem with academia. Saving a few seats for relatives of megadonors isn’t the big problem with academia. It isn’t even preferential treatment for athlete applicants that’s the big problem with academia.

The problem is tenure.

There. I said it.

Tenure was originally intended to protect faculty from retaliatory action for pursuing meaningful, if controversial, research. But what it was intended to do and what it’s doing are different things entirely. The scandals and headlines coming out of higher education provide plenty of evidence.

Last year’s ugly anti-Semitic protests, threats and violence on college campuses shocked the nation. But when three Ivy League presidents from Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania testified before Congress and none was willing to condemn calls for violence against Jewish students, that shock turned to outrage.

Liz Magill, then-president of the University of Pennsylvania, resigned after the congressional hearings. The university’s announcement stated that Magill would “remain a tenured faculty member” at the law school.

Claudine Gay, then-president of Harvard University, initially refused to resign – until it was discovered that she had plagiarized parts of her dissertation and other research. Gay then stepped down from the presidency. She kept her tenured chaired professorship and her approximately $900,000 annual salary.

The standards for publication in the social sciences and humanities have become theater of the absurd. In 2018, scholars James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian exposed this by writing, as The Atlantic described it, “20 fake papers using fashionable jargon to argue for ridiculous conclusions,” including homophobia in dog parks and Hitlerian feminism. A significant number were accepted for publication.

Then there’s the serious scholarship that gets condemned by the academic community because it skewers sacred cows. Brown professor Lisa Littman coined the term “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” in a 2018 paper; Littman’s research revealed the explosion of self-identification as “transgender” among pre-teen and young teen girls with diagnosed disabilities (like autism) who spent large amounts of time on social media. Littman was viciously attacked as being “transphobic,” and the journal that published her findings was cowed into retracting her paper (which was later republished). A later article by researchers Suzanna Diaz and Michael Bailey that supported Littman’s theories was similarly attacked and forced to be retracted.

Critical race theorist Ibram X. Kendi was awarded tenure and a chaired professorship at Boston University for promoting a worldview that espouses retaliatory discrimination “to remedy past discrimination.” He has plenty of company on college campuses across the country.

And then there are the countless lesser-known tenured faculty members at American colleges and universities who defend Marxism, communism and socialism, despite a death toll of more than 100 million people, as well as widespread economic devastation, poverty, starvation, government oppression, incarceration and torture.

Those economic and political philosophies should have been condemned to the “dustbin of history” decades ago. But they weren’t. Why? Because tenured faculty keep them alive. In what other profession – besides perhaps government – do you get to espouse catastrophically detrimental views and not only remain utterly unaccountable for the consequences but have guaranteed employment from which to do it?

It isn’t just the social sciences. The processes associated with obtaining research funding, and those for hiring, promotion and tenure within universities, enable tenured faculty in the hard sciences to block the research of applicants to doctoral programs, Ph.D. candidates and untenured faculty members whose work might call into question, contradict or even disprove that of senior faculty members. This has had profound (and negative) consequences for Alzheimer’s research, as author Sharon Begley explained in her 2019 article in the medial research journal Stat. These same structures have also prevented researchers whose work refutes the prevailing claims about anthropogenic climate change from making their work more visible and well-known to the general public.

The appalling state of our press is another consequence of bad theories espoused by tenured faculty. Journalism schools used to teach that the profession required the pursuit of truth and holding powerful people accountable. Now a popular approach is that the role of journalists is to manipulate the public into believing what they’re told and behaving the way you want them to.

It should not surprise us, therefore, that our media has been working with government to censor truthful speech and characterize it as “misinformation.”

And when opponents of those who want to increase their power point to the constitutional prohibitions against those encroachments, here come the “scholars,” prepared to argue that the limitations of presidential power in Articles 1 and 2 are the problem. The Electoral College is the problem. The composition of the United States Senate is the problem. The First Amendment is the problem. The Second Amendment is the problem. The Due Process and Equal Protection clauses are the problem.

The Constitution is the problem.

Recent polls show declining public confidence in higher education. As more Americans realize that some of the country’s most grievous problems have their origin in academia, enrollment, confidence and donations will continue to dwindle. At least until academia acknowledges the problems and takes steps to address them.

Elsewhere in the private sector, employment is not guaranteed. But employees can be protected from retaliation, unlawful or unethical termination of their employment by well-drafted contracts and properly crafted human resources policies and procedures. There’s no reason academic employment cannot operate the same way.