Attacks on tenure leave college professors eyeing the exits

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College professors once regarded Wisconsin as one of the safest places to work, with the right to be tenured baked into state law. Then, in 2015, the state removed that right and sent dozens of instructors running toward the exits.

Karma Chávez was among those departures from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Like her, many of the people who left were people of color or queer. After the change, Chávez said she started looking for a new job in another state immediately and landed at the University of Texas, Austin, where she chairs the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies.

Now, as she watches Texas politicians chip away at tenure protections and academic freedom in that state, Chávez has realized “there’s nowhere to run.”

“When it comes to higher education, I don’t know if there are any safe places,” she said. “If they can come after Wisconsin, they can come after anywhere.” 

Texas, where a professor was suspended this year for criticizing the lieutenant governor in a lecture, is part of what many in the academic community say is an alarming, concerted attack on higher education spreading across the country.

Florida this year banned diversity programs and limited tenure, which, in part, protects college instructors from being fired for teaching controversial topics. In the past two years, universities or state legislatures in Georgia, Iowa, North Carolina, South Carolina, Ohio, West Virginia and other states have also enacted or proposed laws and policies that strike at the heart of academic freedom. Among them:

Instructors who attended a September meeting of the Texas Council of Faculty Senates said at least half a dozen colleagues from around the state shared examples of faculty job candidates who backed out because of the political climate, while others said they were having trouble finding candidates at all. 

Nobody seemed to know how to solve that problem, said Jim Klein, a history professor and faculty leader at Del Mar College, a community college in Corpus Christi, Texas.

“We’re kind of stumped by that,” he said. “On the one hand, I want to do right by the schools here in Texas. On the other hand, I want to do right by the job candidates and make sure their eyes are open.”

Earlier this year, a young scholar in a science field thought he had found the perfect spot for his first faculty job: a growing department at a University of Texas campus. He would have the chance to help hire colleagues in his department and to be close to his family.

But within a couple of weeks of accepting the job, the scholar — who asked to remain anonymous — watched with dismay as two bills gained steam in the state Legislature. One would ban diversity, equity and inclusion offices at Texas colleges and universities, while the other would water down faculty tenure.

Both bills, which eventually became law, gave the new assistant professor pause about his move.

“It made me pretty uneasy,” he said. “I emailed the chair of the department and asked, ‘What does this mean?’ Throughout the process they basically said, ‘These will never pass,’ and then, ‘This is nothing to worry about.’”

He did worry, though, about his ability to hire top-notch colleagues in a state that suddenly looked a lot less supportive of higher education. Anecdotes from friends at other Texas universities compounded his worry enough that he rescinded his decision and instead took a job at a university in New York.

“I felt like the terms of the contract I had signed had fundamentally changed,” he said, referring to his hiring duties. “The best people are going to avoid Texas.”

State Sen. Brandon Creighton, a Republican from the Houston suburbs who authored both the Texas laws, declined to answer questions about the bills or their potential effects.

Professors worry about what colleges and universities in these states will look like after an exodus of top instructors, and what that means for the economic, cultural and intellectual future of those states. Recent surveys and interviews of faculty members show that worries about an exodus of academic talent are hardly hypothetical.

According to surveys of 4,250 instructors in Texas, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina released in September by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), two-thirds would not recommend their state as a desirable place for academic work, while a third said they planned to interview for jobs in other states in the coming year. And another third said they did not plan to remain in academia long term.

While salary was the top reason cited for that dissatisfaction, more than half the respondents cited political climate and academic freedom.

Leaders of several states’ flagship public universities have been mostly unwilling to discuss those effects.

Administrators at the University of Texas, Austin, declined to answer questions. A spokesman referred the Center for Public Integrity to a June statement by President Jay Hartzell, who said he was pleased by the tenure change that worried faculty leaders — it will allow tenured professors to be fired for a variety of reasons — but understood the “uncertainty and anxiety” over the diversity office ban.

“Within the scope of the new law, we will remain focused on making sure the very best students want to come to UT,” Hartzell wrote. “And, when they arrive, they feel like they belong, they encounter world-class teachers and researchers, they are supported, and they know they can succeed.”

Officials at Georgia Institute of Technology, commonly known as Georgia Tech, did not respond to repeated interview requests. Leaders at the University of Florida declined to answer questions.

Chávez said Texans should prepare for serious workforce changes that could hurt the state’s economy.

Even a relatively small migration of top academics out of places such as Texas and Florida could have dire consequences for the economies of both the universities and the states. A university lab, usually run by one or two primary faculty members, can bring in millions of dollars in grants and attract private companies to a college town. Any decline in innovation can equate to job losses for that town.

“Obviously, institutions of higher education are massive economic engines,” said a former Georgia professor who recently moved to a university out of state — along with their cutting-edge research. The professor, who asked not to be identified, left as Georgia was discussing the tenure changes and other reforms. “That’s potentially a loss of competitive edge and also federal dollars.” 

Professors in Georgia said the 2021 policy making it easier to fire tenured faculty at the University System of Georgia has already altered the feel of the state’s campuses. Top talent has fled elsewhere, and some professors have avoided controversial topics, said Brian Magerko, a professor of digital media at Georgia Tech.

“I definitely have seen a lot of people leave in the past two years,” he said. “Faculty are afraid. And that’s part of the point here, to make people afraid to teach.”

‘Terrified’ faculty

Magerko admitted that, as a white, male, fully tenured professor, he feels less at risk than colleagues of other races or genders — those instructors are more likely to become right-wing targets, he said — as well as those who don’t have tenure. And that difference is a huge part of the problem for the vast majority of college instructors. 

More than 75% of college faculty are not tenured, according to the AAUP, compared with just over 60% in 1987. And women and underrepresented minorities are less likely to hold tenure-track positions. Those figures mean that most instructors can be fired easily, especially women and people of color, who are overrepresented among non-tenured faculty. In turn, that means more instructors than ever are at risk as states crack down on the teaching of what some lawmakers see as controversial topics.

Top research universities are more likely to have tenured faculty than other institutions. While half of instructors at those top schools are full-time, tenure-track faculty, the AAUP says, just 18% fit that description at community colleges and other associate degree schools.

Non-tenured instructors help keep universities running, Chávez said, but she fears many plan to leave the state.

“A lot of them are terrified,” she said. “It’s hard because you don’t know how things are going to be applied and you may not want to stick around to find out.”

Colleges of all types have relied more heavily on adjunct and part-time faculty in recent years, and some have started looking into ways to better protect those instructors from political attacks. But while some adjunct and part-time instructors have tried to protect themselves by unionizing, most plans from campus faculty senates involve issuing written statements or rewriting faculty rights pledges signaling support for those instructors rather than concrete actions.

“We need to be constantly vigilant about this,” said Klein, the Del Mar College professor. Politicians need to better understand the consequences of their actions, he said. “They’re harming higher education, and higher education exists for the public good.” 

While Klein says he has not considered leaving Del Mar — he’s also a local city council member — recent history suggests that a mass migration of instructors from states attacking academic freedom is not so far-fetched.

In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis this year overhauled the board of New College of Florida, a public liberal arts college with about 700 students and a progressive history, such as students receiving written evaluations rather than grades. DeSantis appointed six new conservative trustees, who then led a dramatic transformation of the school. Diversity initiatives were canceled, the president was fired, and several professors were denied tenure.

The political tampering has driven away dozens of instructors at New College — at least 40, according to news reports — and led to canceled classes that have made it more difficult for students to complete degrees. The exodus has been a stunning, rapidly developing lesson for those who thought state politics would not affect where college instructors choose to live and teach.

“If you would have asked me ahead of time, ‘Is New College going to lose a lot of faculty because of this?’ I would have said no,” said Keith Whittington, a politics professor at Princeton University who studies how politics affects college campuses. “Boy, I was wrong. People ought to take that seriously. That really is suggestive of how that could play out across the country.”

In addition to the organization’s survey of Florida faculty that revealed deep morale problems, an AAUP report earlier this year concluded that the state’s new laws “constitute a systematic effort to dictate and enforce conformity with a narrow and reactionary political and ideological agenda throughout the state’s higher education system.” 

In their interviews with Florida instructors, AAUP investigators were shocked by the strong emotional response.

“It’s not until you sit down with people working in this environment and see their faces that you understand how horrible it is for them,” said Afshan Jafar, a Connecticut College sociology professor who helped lead the AAUP team looking into what is happening in Florida. “It was not unusual for people to start crying in the middle of our interviews, and that is not typical.”

University of Wisconsin campuses also experienced anger and sadness on campus following the 2015 tenure changes, which repealed legal protections in favor of allowing politically appointed university regents to set tenure policies. And it holds other lessons about faculty migration that can’t be gleaned yet from states that made changes only recently.

By 2017, two years after the changes to tenure, the number of faculty members leaving the University of Wisconsin’s flagship campus in Madison had jumped by more than 50%.

Sara Goldrick-Rab had many reasons to stay at the University of Wisconsin. A fully tenured sociology professor who led a well-funded research center and had two children in Madison schools, Goldrick-Rab nevertheless decided she couldn’t stick around to see if the tenure system would dissolve.

By 2016 she had accepted a professorship at Temple University in Philadelphia and blasted Wisconsin leaders for their actions as she left.

“What kicked me over the edge was that the university didn’t fight” the changes to tenure, said Goldrick-Rab, who has since left Temple and now is a consultant. “I would have people at the university saying, ‘You’re making too much of this. It’s not a big deal.’ That was the worst part, that they didn’t seem to get it or care.”

Despite the departures of Goldrick-Rab and Karma Chávez, University of Wisconsin English professor Russ Castronovo said the effects of the state’s tenure reform have been more philosophical than practical. College instructors in Texas and Florida should be much more worried about their states because new laws make it easier to fire faculty members, he said.

“I don’t think Wisconsin can be a bellwether for what’s happening at other universities,” Castronovo said. “I think it’s exponentially worse at other universities than what happened at the University of Wisconsin.”

The recent AAUP survey revealed that Texas may see severe consequences from its reforms. 

Of the more than 1,900 Texas instructors polled, more than one-quarter said they plan to interview elsewhere in the next year and nearly one in five said they already had interviewed for other jobs since 2021. California, New York and Colorado — all states without tenure limits or laws restricting academic freedom — were listed as top destinations.

Those figures were nearly the same in the survey’s other three states: Florida, North Carolina and Georgia. 

But Texas respondents noted that they already had seen major effects on hiring due to the tenure bill and other changes. About half said that they had noticed job candidates expressing hesitation about coming to Texas and that they had fewer — and lower-quality — candidates than usual.

Those effects will ripple through colleges and universities of all sizes and types, instructors at both two-year and four-year schools said, and in turn hurt communities of all kinds.

“I think it is going to be difficult for us to attract top talent here in Texas,” said Klein, from Del Mar College. “It’s going to hurt the reputation of the University of Texas and smaller schools like ours.”

Most administrators and instructors at Texas community colleges appear unwilling to speak publicly about the issue. About a dozen faculty leaders and college presidents did not respond to repeated interview requests, as did leaders of the Texas Association of Community Colleges.

The American Association of Community Colleges, which represents more than 1,000 schools, declined to answer questions about laws limiting academic freedom. A spokeswoman for the organization said its leaders had not discussed the issue.

Although the Texas laws do not apply to private colleges and universities, AAUP survey respondents from those schools reported nearly identical phenomena as those from public institutions.

A Texas professor at a major private university who asked not to be identified said administrators initially thought they would be able to attract a flood of disgruntled professors from public institutions. But that has not panned out, he said.

“Right now, it’s just all the bad press that Texas is anti-DEI, anti-critical race theory,” the professor said. “If you have a job offer from Colorado or New York or California, why would you come to Texas?”

Shortchanging students

The Texas laws also have already affected students, even if they don’t realize it. Several Texas instructors said they or other faculty members have restructured their classes to avoid complaints from students who object to the discussion of controversial topics in the classroom. 

At the University of Texas, Austin, student leaders have discussed the anti-diversity law daily, said Dana Sheinhaus, president of the Graduate Student Assembly. The body, elected by campus graduate students, is trying to gauge the possible effects of the new law, which takes effect Jan. 1.

The diversity and tenure laws “definitely instill fear in people,” said Sheinhaus, a doctoral student in the pharmacology and toxicology department, and the university needs to find ways to keep that fear from scaring away top professors.

“I definitely think it will have an effect on recruitment,” she said. “If UT is one of the best research and teaching institutions, and I think we are, then we need to act like it.

“I would hope it wouldn’t get to that point where the reputation would be tarnished.”

Drew Hynes, a classmate of Sheinhaus in the pharmacology and toxicology department, recalled that the anti-diversity law passed the day he interviewed for the graduate program. Hynes, who plans to become a professor, said he asked about the law and felt reassured by the answers.

“It was really encouraging to hear some people on campus be so opposed to it,” he said, adding that he was convinced the university would find other ways to protect diversity initiatives. “That helped quell any concerns I had.”

But any student at a public college in Texas can drive fear among professors by invoking the new state laws and political climate and complaining about how professors teach about race, said Dale Rice, who teaches journalism at Texas A&M University and serves on the Faculty Senate. He is not tenured.

“They’ve dropped their discussions of those types of topics,” he said. “They don’t want the hassle of dealing with that.”

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That self-censorship is “shortchanging students,” said Andrew Klein, a Texas A&M geography professor and the former speaker of the campus Faculty Senate.

“In my view, that’s kind of antithetical to everything a university is,” he said. “A university should be a free flow of ideas. Students shouldn’t not be presented with material just because they might feel it’s offensive or disagreeable.” 

But recent experience shows instructors’ fears may be well-founded.

A Texas A&M assistant professor, Joy Alonzo, was suspended last spring after a student accused her of insulting Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick in a routine lecture. The politically charged suspension, nearly unheard of in higher education, shocked academics across the country.

“If a professor in Texas can be suspended for saying something in class about the lieutenant governor, that means there are no protections for anybody,” said Matthew Boedy, an associate professor of rhetoric and composition at the University of North Georgia and president of the state AAUP chapter. “The national reputation of higher education is tanking.”

Texas A&M also paid a $1 million settlement to a Black journalism professor, Kathleen McElroy, last summer after offering her a job and then altering the offer to remove tenure protections because of her past work to diversify newsrooms. According to news reports, university trustees pressured administrators to roll back the offer after receiving complaints from alumni and students.

McElroy rejected the revised offer, and the university’s president resigned soon after.

Some A&M student complaints have come via the university’s “Tell Somebody” website, instructors said. The site encourages reporting of “threats to the safety and security of the University community,” it notes.

The university is developing a five-point scale to measure complaints about faculty, essentially a triage system to help decide the difference between routine grumbling from students upset about a poor grade, bad decisions by teachers and, potentially, criminal misconduct. Faculty leaders hope the system will help protect instructors — both from minor complaints and from themselves, said Heather Lench, senior vice president for faculty affairs at Texas A&M.

“If a faculty member is spending 15 minutes at the beginning of class speaking about something that has nothing to do with the subject matter,” she said, “whether that’s their favorite plant or feelings on gun control, then that probably is an issue of teaching effectiveness.”

Those most at risk of running afoul of sensitive students are non-tenured instructors such as Rice, faculty leaders said. Although Rice, at 72, said he’s not worried about offending students, younger faculty members near the start of their careers might.

“Oftentimes we put those faculty members in difficult teaching situations,” said Andrew Klein. Non-tenured instructors are more likely to teach large introductory courses with a broad range of students, he said. “When you teach lots of students in areas that are outside their areas of interest, there’s a lot of opportunity for conflict.”

While some professors at top universities have options if they want to move to a state friendlier to academia — one Georgia Tech professor said multiple universities reached out to him the week the state proposed its tenure changes — that path is harder for the vast majority of instructors. Many have family ties near their campus, and the academic job market is notoriously tight.

Colleges and universities in several states have cut back on humanities offerings, such as English and history, and instead focused on science and engineering fields. That trend has made life difficult for the humanities instructors who are most affected by laws limiting controversial topics in the classroom but have fewer options for new locations.

The relative lack of jobs elsewhere hasn’t stopped some from looking. At Iowa State University in Ames, for instance, instructors were dismayed by a 2021 state law that banned the discussion of a number of “divisive concepts” in some campus programs. While other public universities in the state said the law didn’t apply to classroom instruction, Iowa State cautioned instructors to be careful when teaching.

The law and the administration’s response didn’t sit well with some, including history professor Kathleen Hilliard, who said she wouldn’t be surprised to see co-workers depart the state.

“Many of us have our eyes open, let’s put it that way,” Hilliard said. “Ames is a nice place to live and I like my colleagues, but it’s hard to reconcile being in an environment like this with the work we want to do.”

Eyes are open even in states where laws have been proposed but not passed. 

In South Carolina, a 2021 bill that would have ended the tenure system at public colleges and universities failed to pass, but faculty members worry that future efforts will succeed. Subsequent proposals, some of which are pending in the state Legislature, would limit what professors can teach.

“One of the things this kind of legislation does is it causes people to look around,” said Carol Harrison, a history professor at the University of South Carolina and president of the state AAUP branch. “And once your colleagues start looking, so do you.”

The next few months could reveal how the higher education landscape might look in the future. Faculty members usually apply for jobs in the fall and are interviewed in the spring for the following school year, so institutions across the country will soon learn how the recent spate of new laws and policies will influence faculty migration.

It could be a rude awakening for top universities that have traditionally been destinations for star professors rather than a place to escape.

“If you are not competing nationally, you are at a disadvantage,” said Brian Evans, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Texas, Austin, and interim president of the state AAUP chapter. “That’s my concern five to 10 years down the road, that we’re not competitive to recruit faculty.”

Several professors said they’re open to tinkering with the tenure system, but not in a way that makes it easier to fire instructors for pushing students to think. Political attacks on academics are due to a misunderstanding of the profession, they said.

“There are actually a lot of problems with the tenure system overall, but they’re trying to create an implicit threat,” said Yanni Loukissas, an associate professor of digital media at Georgia Tech. “We’re being told, ‘We don’t really trust you even though you’ve gone through this very elaborate vetting process.’ It’s insulting.”

That implicit threat stems from some lawmakers’ feelings of weakness in the face of facts, said Chávez, the University of Texas professor.

“The hard thing is they’re afraid of us for good reason,” she said. “We tell the truth about American society, we tell the truth about power. And we do it in factual ways that are hard to argue against.

“That’s not what people who come after higher education want to hear.”