https://www.chronicle.com/article/want-to-kill-tenure-be-careful-what-you-wish-for/
Tenure came about to protect the ideal of free inquiry, but it soon found a role in the labor dynamics of academe, too. Up through the 19th century, many academics taught for decades without tenure and without incident, according to John R. Thelin, professor of education at the University of Kentucky and a historian of higher education. But college presidents and boards could, and sometimes did, fire those who displeased them, or those who displeased other powerful people.
For example, the economist Edwin A. Ross was fired by Stanford University in 1900 over his outspoken views. Jane Stanford, the widow of the railroad tycoon and university founder Leland Stanford, took exception to Ross’s advocacy of Democratic politics, his anti-capitalist rhetoric, and his public denunciation of immigrants from Asia. David Starr Jordan, president of the university, deflected repeated requests from Stanford to not renew Ross’s one-year employment contracts, knowing that the institution’s reputation among its peers would suffer if he did. The president eventually capitulated, and several Stanford professors resigned in protest.
But by the dawn of the 20th century, elite institutions such as Harvard and the University of Chicago had recognized the value to their reputations of protecting scholars from the whims of displeased patrons. Tenure also helped them recruit top scholars. In its founding documents, in 1915, the AAUP argued for the importance of academic freedom and tenure. By 1940, the organization had codified many of the practices and expectations of tenure that still apply today.
Wide adoption of the practice was gradual, until the post-World War II boom in higher education precipitated an explosion in tenured jobs. Colleges clamored for faculty to educate the flood of soldiers-turned-students, especially in the burgeoning public higher-education sector. “Each state wanted to have a reasonably good state university,” Thelin says, and that meant offering tenure to compete with rivals in hiring. As colleges of all types strove for prestige, and, ultimately, for students, a standard practice was born.
Tenure is now deeply embedded in American higher education, and has provided benefits beyond job security for professors. Tenure protects academic freedom, and both have served colleges, and the country, well, according to Rudy Fichtenbaum, a professor of economics at Wright State University and president of the AAUP. “The American system of higher education has been among the best, if not the best, and a model for the rest of the world,” he says, “and the reason for that is largely because of academic freedom.”
