Professorships targeted by conservatives for race, gender doctrines

Patrick said he took it as a message to “go to hell.”

For his part, Patrick, a Republican, said it’s time to think about holding faculty accountable by targeting one of the top perks of their jobs.

“Maybe we need to look at tenure,” Patrick said at a news conference in November.

It’s a sentiment echoed by conservative officials in red states across the country. The permanent academic appointments that come with tenure — the holy grail of university employment — have been scrutinized by legislators or state regulators in at least half a dozen states, often presented as an attempt to rein in academics with liberal views.

Tenure advocates brace for the possibility of new threats as lawmakers return to state buildings across the country.

The trend reflects how conservative scrutiny of instruction related to race, gender and sexuality has spread from schools to higher education. But budget considerations also play a role. Even in more liberal states, the number of permanent faculty is declining. Universities are hiring more part-time teachers as funding from state governments declines.

Traditionally, tenured professors can only be terminated in extreme circumstances such as professional misconduct or financial hardship. Advocates of tenure say it’s a crucial part of academic freedom — especially amid rising controversy over scholarly discussions of history and identity.

Without tenure, faculty “have a duty to play it safe when it comes time to have a classroom discussion of a difficult topic,” said Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors.

But in economically and politically difficult times, it can happen that even tenured professors are not guaranteed a position.

“I could be fired for writing this”

In Kansas this fall, Emporia State University cut 33 faculty — most of them indefinitely — with an emergency pandemic measure that allowed universities to bypass policies on firing employees to balance budgets.

Max McCoy, Emporia State’s sole journalism professor, wrote a column that began, “I could be fired for writing this” — before learning that this would be his final year at the school.

“It’s a purge,” he said. He said all the professors who were fired are “democrats or liberals in our thinking.”

University spokeswoman Gwen Larson said individual professors were not specifically fired. She said the cuts follow a review of how demand for academic programs is changing and “where we need to move going forward.

Attacks on higher education have been fueled by a changing conservative view of colleges and universities, said Jeremy Young of freedom of expression group PEN America. The proportion of Republicans and independently oriented Republicans who said higher education was having a negative impact on the country rose from 37% to 59% from 2015 to 2019, in Pew Research Center polls.

In Texas, university administrators are working behind the scenes to quash anticipated term-targeting legislation for fear it could hurt recruitment, said Jeff Blodgett, president of the Texas Conference of AAUP.

Some people are already stopping applying for college jobs because of the discussions, said Pat Heintzelman, president of the Texas Faculty Association.

In Florida, a federal judge in November blocked the “stop-WOKE” law, a law pushed by Gov. Ron DeSantis that restricts certain racial talk and analysis in colleges. The district office is appealing against the preliminary injunction. Compliance with the law would be part of the criteria for evaluating full professors under a review process considered by the university system’s Board of Governors.

“You’ve gotten used to the idea that many totalitarian regimes have made over the years, that if you can prevent students from learning about ideas that a political party in power disagrees with, that’s a way preventing those ideas from existing in society at all,” said Andrew Gothard, President of the United Faculty of Florida.

An “intellectual orthodoxy”

However, DeSantis has challenged the argument that tenure provides academic freedom.

“If anything, it has created more of an intellectual orthodoxy where people with dissenting views have a harder time getting any employment at all,” he said at a news conference in April.

In Louisiana, lawmakers established a task force to study tenure with the Republican-backed resolution, which noted that students should have confidence that courses are free of “political, ideological, religious or anti-religious indoctrination.” Professors raised concerns until learning that task force members were mostly term supporters.

In Georgia, the state Board of Regents approved a policy that made it easier to remove tenured faculty who had a negative performance review. Elsewhere, laws prohibiting or restricting ownership have been introduced in recent years in Iowa, South Carolina, and Mississippi, but have failed to gain traction.

The pushback follows decades of declining rates of tenured faculty. According to the AAUP, as of the fall of 2020, 24% of faculty members were employed full-time, compared to 39% in the fall of 1987, the first year for which directly comparable information is available.

Part-time college teachers rarely receive credit. They often have to travel from campus to campus to earn a living.

“It’s a nightmare,” said Caprice Lawless, who wrote The Adjunct Cookbook, replete with recipes that low-paid graduate students can cobble together with pantry staples.

“I’ve taken graduate students to chalkboards and seen them cry because they can’t get enough food for their families,” said Lawless, who says she served as a sort of social worker before retiring from Front Range Community College two years ago went to Westminster, Colorado.

Opposition to tenure has united conservatives for different reasons: Not all share the same concerns about “woke higher education,” said Marc Stein, a history professor at San Francisco State University who has written about the move to part-time teaching.

“But,” he said, “if you attack the ‘awakeness’ of higher education and that leads to declining funding for higher education, then business conservatives are happy.”

Tenure exploded after World War II when she helped recruit as the GI bill sent enrollments soaring, said Sol Gittleman, a former Tufts University provost who has written on the subject. Recently, the country has been overproducing PhDs, said Gittleman, who predicts tenure outside of the top 100 colleges and universities will largely disappear in the coming decades.

“Critical race theory – that’s an excuse,” he said. “If there were faculty shortages, you wouldn’t hear that.”