“What makes professors so special?”
I study tenure as a labor protection, and this is the most common question I get. People understandably want to know why professors should enjoy things that are unavailable to most working Americans, like decent job security and significant expressive freedom. “What,” I get asked repeatedly, “makes working in the academy different?”
Increasingly, my answer is “nothing.” It’s a descriptive answer keyed to legal realities rather than a normative answer based on the academy’s mission or value. Despite widespread perceptions to the contrary, workplace conditions inside higher education are now quite similar to those outside of it. Charlie Kirk helps me explain why.
After Kirk was assassinated on September 10, people across the country used social media to react to the news. There were eulogies for his political activism, anodyne expressions of sympathy for his widow and children, and a lot of snide remarks. A sports journalist was fired for posting that “Refusing to mourn a life devoted to that cause is not the same thing as celebrating gun violence” and “Truly don’t care if you think it’s insensitive or poor timing to decline to respect an evil man who died.” A Nasdaq strategist was terminated for similar statements, as was a “Big Law” attorney, and even a staffer for the Carolina Panthers. In Atlanta, where I live, Matthew Palmer, a longtime Delta flight attendant and trained brand ambassador, was dismissed for a Facebook post declaring that “Charlie Kirk is dead. Good riddance.” Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta fired someone, too.
So did Emory University, Clemson University, the University of Arkansas, and several other colleges and universities. At least three universities in Tennessee fired faculty members, and a fourth is working on it. By some accounts, over 50 professors have lost their jobs or been disciplined in the Kirk fallout — and many of them had tenure or were eligible for it. For all those terminated faculty, where was that envied job security?
Social-media statements like the ones at issue in the Kirk fallout are a type of extramural speech, which has long been a source of contention between the academy and society. Extramural speech triggered the event — the termination, in 1900, of Stanford University economist Edward A. Ross — that is usually credited with spurring the creation of the American Association of University Professors and its academic-freedom doctrines.
Despite widespread perceptions to the contrary, workplace conditions inside higher education are now quite similar to those outside of it.
Extramural speech was also behind another early 20th-century controversy — one that bears an even stronger resemblance to current events. In 1913, Wesleyan University professor Willard C. Fisher was forced to resign because of his commentary about Connecticut’s strict blue laws, which prohibited certain activities on Sundays. During a closed-door speech at a private social club, Willard “wondered aloud how society might benefit if churches instead of businesses were ordered closed on Sundays.” Even though the speech was private and unrecorded, a scandalized listener relayed Willard’s comments to a journalist. Wesleyan’s president soon bowed to external pressure and demanded Willard’s resignation.
More recently, plenty of individual academics have been criticized, disciplined, and occasionally fired for their off-duty speech.
In 2024, Maura Finkelstein became the first tenured professor to be dismissed for legal speech that criticized Zionism — for “one anti-Zionist repost on Instagram,” according to the AAUP. Also in 2024, Millsaps College tenured professor James Bowley was fired for using his college email account to share personal commentary about the outcome of the federal elections. Bowley emailed his students to cancel that day’s session, saying that he knew that the three students in his tiny class would need the day to “mourn and process this racist fascist country.” We’ve also seen the likes of Steven Salaita and Nikole Hannah-Jones have their offers of tenured employment revoked or downgraded.
In these pre-Kirk cases, public commentary was often unsympathetic to the plight of the disciplined or fired professors. One New York Times reader commenting on Finkelstein’s termination wrote, “I want to insert the ‘boo hoo’ sign here, for all the professors who are upset over the clampdown on activism. … Speak on your subject, fine, but don’t impart opinions, and more importantly, stay off social media with wider audiences that just amplify the hate.” Professors wanted to say anything and get away with it, critics implied. Professors wanted special privileges. Professors didn’t know their place. It’s a script that academics have gotten used to.
The post-Kirk terminations have unfolded differently. They’ve shown that academics aren’t unique when it comes to their workplace expectations. On the contrary, something that professors have long opposed — being treated like a mouthpiece for their employer 24/7 — is also objectionable to most working Americans.
“You did not show due restraint or respect, and you made no effort when you reposted to state that your views did not represent the views of Clemson University,” argued Clemson, against its former professor Joshua Bregy. This was despite the fact that Bregy’s reposting of someone else’s comment was done from his personal Facebook account, which he did not use to interact with current students or colleagues. Would you issue a disclaimer every time you spoke to your aunt, your college classmate, or your hiking group? Neither did Bregy.
The Clemson provost’s admonition was almost identical to one issued by Delta Air Lines chief executive Ed Bastian, who cautioned his work force to “remember that we represent Delta, at all times, in any forum.” In fact, Delta’s 15-page social-media policy even warns retirees about “private posts [that] can be shared and traced back to Delta.” (Now there’s a real “job for life.”)
The Kirk fallout made it obvious that nobody wants to live under those restrictions. But it also made clear that we cannot escape these restrictions, whether we work inside or outside the academy. Our laws and our culture make it so. In this, as in so much else, academics are more like other employees than they might like to admit.
Consider tenure itself. Tenure-stream faculty, as Chronicle readers well know, now account for less than 30 percent of the professoriate. A few years ago, Leonard Cassuto and Robert Weisbuch observed that around 25 percent of newly matriculated doctoral students in the arts and sciences have a chance of getting “full-time teaching jobs, most likely at teaching-intensive institutions” — and that only half as many will be employed by the kind of research institutions that trained them.
In other words, tenure is only relevant to a privileged and shrinking minority of the American academy. But it’s extremely relevant to the academy’s critics, who tend to fixate on how tenure distorts faculty incentives and gets in the way of appropriately punitive disciplinary measures.
Critics have long claimed that tenure transforms otherwise valuable and well-behaving professors into slackers. Red-state politicians like Florida’s Ron DeSantis and North Dakota’s Mike Lefor have argued that “productivity really declines” after tenure. Similarly, journalists like Christopher Beam, in Slate, and Susan Adams, in Forbes, have piled on — Adams by labeling tenured professors as having among the “Least Stressful Jobs,” and Beam by asking, “if you can’t be fired, what’s to stop you from refusing to teach an extra course?”
Tenure is only relevant to a privileged and shrinking minority of the American academy. But it’s extremely relevant to the academy’s critics.
Sometimes, the same arguments have even come from internal critics who are presumably annoyed by that colleague down the hall whose last article was published during the administration of Bush père. The economist Steven D. Levitt, for instance, famously suggested that we “just get rid of tenure” — including his.
Let’s set aside, for now, the absence of consistent, empirical proof for the claim that tenure disincentivizes productivity. And let’s also ignore the fact that both discipline-specific studies and pan-disciplinary studies tend to show that, as Robert Blackburn and Janet Lawrence put it, “there are publishers and there are non-publishers.” In other words, highly productive faculty tend to be highly productive both before and after tenure, while less productive pre-tenure faculty tend to stay less productive.
Let’s focus instead on the solution that critics prescribe. Dismantling tenure, according to critics, will allow colleges to fire underperforming faculty — which, those critics argue, colleges cannot currently do because tenure gets in the way. To make this argument, we’ll once again need to overlook a few key facts.
For starters, there’s the fact that tenure is a type of “just cause” contract, which allows employers to terminate employees for just cause. Just-cause contracts add a splash of job security to a landscape that is otherwise defined by the bleak cruelty of the “at-will rule.” According to that rule — which experts estimate covers around 80 percent of employees — either party may terminate the relationship, with no notice and no payment in lieu of notice, for good reason, bad reason, or no reason at all.
There’s also the fact that professors are hardly the only employees in this country to enjoy the relative security of just-cause contracts. Orchestra musicians have just-cause contracts (actually, they have “tenure”). Anyone covered by a union’s collective bargaining agreement has a just-cause contract. And, perhaps most famously, post-probationary federal employees have just-cause contracts.
Basic employment law says that none of these workers should be terminable “with no notice and no payment in lieu of notice, for good reason, bad reason, or no reason at all” — just like tenured professors.
We all know how this story is unfolding: Employees, regardless of their designation as at-will or just cause, are being fired for reasons that many Americans seem to think are bad or even nonexistent. My point is that it’s unfolding similarly inside and outside the “ivory tower.” The erosion of job security in higher education isn’t a bellwether for the general workforce — it’s the final frontier.
Consider the White House-led assault on federal employees. During the first half of 2025, the second Trump administration fired over 50,000 federal employees, and pursued more terminations that were predicted to ultimately “affect at least 12 percent of the 2.4 million civilian federal workers.” In October, the government announced an intention to fire another 4,000 federal employees.
In many ways, the job security afforded to federal employees is the closest analog for the protections offered by tenure. Both federal employees and tenure-stream professors must pass through a probationary period during which they may be fired with relative ease. Once they survive probation, both types of workers can be fired only for cause. Although there is no exhaustive list of what adequate “cause” might entail in either context, both federal employees and tenured faculty usually have access to some definitional language, which is often quite standardized. (Phrases like “moral delinquency, neglect of academic duty, [and] incompetence” commonly appear in faculty handbooks, while “theft” and “insubordination” are more typically used by the federal government.)
Finally, both federal employees and tenured faculty members are entitled to be notified of impending adverse employment actions, and to receive some kind of hearing where they can contest the evidence against them.
The erosion of job security in higher education isn’t a bellwether for the general workforce — it’s the final frontier.
The fact that their employment terms provide similar levels of substantive and procedural detail is one reason why federal employees, and not federal judges, are the best comparator for tenured professors — notwithstanding the tendency, and maybe the preference, among professors for the judicial analogy.
But what the purging of the federal work force tells us is that substantive and procedural protections mean nothing in the face of an employer who ignores both law and industry norms — aided by the courts’ eagerness to validate employer decision-making.
This is not news to faculty, tenured or otherwise.
Joshua Bregy might not have earned tenure before he was fired by Clemson, but he was on track to do so when he was terminated for his Kirk-related speech. That likely made him a just-cause employee. Accordingly, the termination letter he received stated that his “blatantly unprofessional conduct” had “irretrievably jeopardized [his] ability to serve as an intellectual guide and counselor to students” and damaged both his “professional fitness to continue to serve as a faculty member” as well as his “ability to be effective in the classroom.”
This determination was made five days after Bregy’s post and less than one day after Clemson announced he was under investigation. Although Bregy appears to have had formal and informal exchanges with students, faculty colleagues, and administrators at Clemson during the intervening period, he does not seem to have been asked — or allowed — to participate in anything resembling a hearing.
The American Civil Liberties Union is fighting Bregy’s termination in the courts. But some experts estimate that employees likely prevail in less than one-sixth of most wrongful-termination suits. On top of that, courts are known to be “highly deferential to academic decision-making,” particularly when the decision concerns faculty performance or qualifications. This means that Bregy has long — but not impossible — odds to overcome. What it also means is that the academy is, increasingly, becoming a workplace like any other. That is good news for no one.
