UGA professor: In gutting tenure, Regents endanger reputation, research funding of colleges

In a guest column, a distinguished professor at the University of Georgia warns that the changes made to the tenure process by the Board of Regents will undermine the state’s ability to recruit and retain elite faculty.

Dr. Cas Mudde says the outcome of the Regents’ new post-tenure review process will be “less challenging research and teaching and with fewer excellent faculty and (even fewer) faculty from marginalized groups.”

Mudde is the Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF Professor of International Affairs and Distinguished University Professor at UGA.

By Cas Mudde

Last Wednesday the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia, which governs all 26 public universities in the state of Georgia, gutted tenure. Sure, formally tenure still exists, but in practice it is gone.

This is a major development for two reasons. First, it will have a serious negative impact on both the university system and the state of Georgia. Second, like many other rightwing state policies, it will be copied by other red states.

In the simplest terms, tenure means job security. It means that faculty that have received tenure, generally after a demanding process of five to six years, have a job for life. More specifically, it means that they can only be fired if their academic peers judge them to be structurally underperforming.

As a consequence of decision of the Georgia Board of Regents, “tenure” still exists in name, but tenured faculty can now be fired on the basis of the recommendation of university administrators (i.e. the chair and dean) with minimal input from faculty peers.

Credit: University of Georgia

Credit: University of Georgia

A minor detail, you might think, but as all policy changes, they must be placed in their broader political context. First and foremost, the Board of Regents initially tried to give itself the power to fire tenured faculty members “without cause.” While this amendment was later removed, it shows what the board thinks about faculty governance.

Second, the policy change is a solution to a non-existent, or at the very least not-proven, problem. The Regents has never shown that a significant part of tenured faculty is not performing adequately.

Third, the Republican governor(s) and state legislature(s), whose bidding the Board of Regents does, have implemented various policies against the will of the vast majority of universities and faculty in recent years, from allowing guns on campus to banning vaccine and mask mandates.

Fourth, and final, Georgia’s public universities have previously been targeted as part of the Republican “culture war”; the State Board of Education passed an anti-critical race rheory (CRT) resolution, “to prevent the promotion of any divisive ideologies based on race or sex,” and the previous USG chancellor ordered all universities to respond to a legislator’s conspiratorial inquiry into the teaching of white privilege or oppression at their schools.

In short, faculty have no reason to believe th Regents is truly concerned with them or that university administrators can, or even want to, protect them from political pressure.

Of course, within the notoriously volatile U.S. job market, tenure is an extreme privilege, benefitting only a very small group of people. In fact, even within academia, an ever-shrinking group of faculty has, or can achieve, tenure – universities are hiring more and more contingent faculty, who often work their whole lives on poorly paid and protected one-year contracts.

So, why was it introduced? Simply stated, tenure protects academic freedom, i.e. the freedom to study anything critically without having to worry about personal repercussions. Without that protection, political pressure could sway university administrators to get rid of “controversial” or “difficult” academics, because they endanger state support for the university, for example.

So, where does that leave Georgia’s tenured faculty? In the terms of the famous economist Albert Hirschman, they have three options: exit, voice, and loyalty. All have significant costs for the faculty members but also for the state.

In the case of loyalty, faculty members minimize the risk at being punished by playing it “safe” in their research and teaching. This means that the status quo, in whatever aspect of life, is not challenged, because powerful people and interests profit from the status quo. So, academics stay away from anything that is “controversial,” which in the post-Trumpian world is almost everything: climate change, COVID-19, drugs, elections, evolution, poverty, racism, religion, taxes, terrorism. This will seriously diminish the reputation and research funding of Georgia’s research universities.

But it will also decrease the quality of education of the 340,000 students in Georgia, many of them the future economic and political elites of the state, who will not be taught some of the most important issues and theories in the world.

The second option is voice, in which faculty openly criticize the tenure policies and continue to do “controversial” research and teach “divisive” topics. Here, the costs for society are relatively small, but the potential costs for the faculty member are very high. Let’s use the hypothetical case of a political scientist who studies the far right in Europe and the US and who is outspoken in academic and non-academic outlets. Over the several decades of his career, he has regularly annoyed higher-ups in the university administration and in local, national, and international politics. Moreover, he is now working in a political context that is increasingly far right but the powers-that-be reject that judgement and consider it “political” or even libelous. Why should this political scientist risk their job in Georgia, when they can do the same job at another university, private or public in a blue state, where they will find a supportive political and professional environment and will not have to worry about their job?

Which leads us to the third option, exit. As always, the most marketable people will be able to leave, which are also often the people who are considered the best at what they do – whether it is research or teaching. And academics will not just leave for the few academic positions out there, they will now also consider non-academic jobs. Most academics see academia as a calling, choosing (academic) freedom and (job) security over a significantly higher salary outside of academia. With the two main assets of academia weakened, and under further threat, academics will start to consider non-academic jobs too, which might have little freedom and security too, but at least you are much better compensated for it.

All these academics take not just their research and reputation with them, but in many cases – not the hypothetical political scientist –also their millions in current and future research grants. And given that universities are a financial multiplier – USG institutions had an economic impact of $18.5 billion in 2019 – this will severely hurt the local and regional economies.

Because the academic job market is so bad, Georgia universities will continue to be able to attract good faculty. But they will have problems attracting and retaining two particularly prized categories: so-called “top” faculty, who have the most options, and faculty from marginalized groups, who are the most vulnerable without tenure.

Unlike their white male colleagues, like the hypothetical political scientist, they often don’t have the choice to be controversial – they are the controvers. Both groups have things that cannot easily be replaced. The first group has reputations that are crucial for school rankings and large research grants, which impact the whole state, and the second group, already woefully underrepresented in the USG system, bring diverse perspectives and topics and (better) recognizability and understanding for students from marginalized students.

In short, the attack on tenure will lead to still fully staffed universities, but with less challenging research and teaching and with fewer excellent faculty and (even fewer) faculty from marginalized groups. While this is currently just affecting Georgia – although Tennessee and Wisconsin experienced earlier (but somewhat different) attacks – there is no doubt that Republicans in other states are watching. In fact, it has already being discussed or proposed in Republican circles in, among others, Florida, Iowa, Missouri, and Texas.

Academics are the perfect target in the Republican “culture wars.” They are a small, privileged group, the personification of the smug, out of touch elite, living off the taxes of the “working people.”

Even within progressive circles academics have few strong allies. But attacks on higher education do not only affect the privileged few that are the tenured faculty. A less well-educated population creates not just societal problems, such as more misinformation and prejudice, it also undermines the economic competitiveness of the country or state, particularly in the post-industrial era, in which knowledge has become the main commodity.

In other words, it is short-term political gain with high long-term economic and social costs.

The author of this guest column, Cas Mudde, is the Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF Professor of International Affairs and Distinguished University Professor at UGA.