The Challenge to Tenure

In his essay “Tenure Trouble” (Dissent, Winter 1998), Jon Wiener presents much too narrow a view of the rising opposition to academic tenure, its rationale, and causes. Following Wiener’s precedent, let me disclose that I was a tenured faculty member for over thirty years at three private universities—Brown, the New School for Social Research, and New York University. Although currently retired, I still teach as an adjunct. I served on NYU’s promotion and tenure committee for the arts and sciences faculty in the 1980s.

Wiener is certainly right that the cost-benefit concerns of university administrations and boards of trustees have led them to trim faculty salaries by reducing the proportions of tenured and even so-called tenure-track faculty, who can be replaced by adjunct, part-time, and nontenured full-time teachers at considerably less expense. Trustees and elected state legislators with control over the budgets of public institutions are often conservati...