University professors are granted tenure essentially for the freedom to carry their research wherever it leads. But the share of tenured and tenure-track faculty has been falling. According to AAUP (see below), it fell from 53.1% in 1987 to 31.8% in 2023 (below). There are reasons to expect the decline to continue:
(1) Financial difficulties incentivize universities to hire part-time adjuncts, who are much cheaper and easily terminated,
(2) In recent years, most tenured faculty have failed to push back against woke censorship, thus failing to fulfill their end of the implicit bargain: speaking honestly even when its inconvenient to do so. Even worse, tenured faculty have participated in censorship and cancellation campaigns inimical to core university functions.
(3) Partly because of (2), the university has lost legitimacy in the eyes of the public, and legislators are less willing than in the past to subsidize universities and the professoriate.
(4) As fertility declines and population falls, universities will prefer short-term contracts to indefinitely lasting tenure contracts that commit them to decades of employment.
I haven’t even mentioned AI. That’s for another day.
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