The question of whether to maintain tenure is of critcal new importance in an era of university downsizing.
Tenure protects faculty jobs in colleges and universities.
University management is left with little flexibility to shift resources in order to meet changing market conditions. Cost escalation in higher education, rivaled only by the health care industry, can be attributed, at least in part, to the production inefficiencies engendered by the tenure system. But in reality academic freedom in its critical manifestation of free speech has been fought almost exclusively in the courts and not in, or by, the professorial union. As federal courts repeatedly have made clear, all First Amendment rights do not end at the schoolhouse door. The same laws respecting all kinds of discrimination and speech in all other activities are enhanced when applied to universities.