Tenure for college and university professors could be coming to an end in Texas if State Sen. Brandon Creighton (R-Conroe) gets his way following his filing of a bill that would do away with “any type of permanent employment status” at higher education institutions.
SB 18, if enacted, would end a roughly 80-year-old practice in the Lone Star State intended to “safeguard academic freedom,” according to the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).
“When faculty members can lose their positions because of their speech, publications, or research findings, they cannot properly fulfill their core responsibilities to advance and transmit knowledge,” reads the trade association’s website.
Creighton criticized the practice in a press release back in March when he first filed the bill:
“SB 18 eliminates the costly, unnecessary and antiquated burden of tenure at Texas public colleges and universities … [O]ver the years, the practice has devolved into a costly perk that is detrimental to innovative research and quality instruction and if abused, used as an attack against the brand of the university itself.
“At a time when colleges and universities have unprecedented endowments, bloated administrative costs and ballooning tuition it is time for lawmakers to reevaluate an outdated practice that guarantees lifetime employment at taxpayer expense.”
Texas is not the only state where lawmakers are considering reforming tenure practices or banning them outright. Florida, Louisiana, and Ohio have all either enacted laws or are considering legislation to institute post-tenure reviews, which allow for the firing of professors who are deemed “unsatisfactory” in their performance, USA Today reported.
An analysis of SB 18 by the AAUP argued that the legislation was a bid by Republicans in the state to squelch, stating, “[T]his can be seen as the latest development in a decades-long effort by the right to assert control over higher education. Efforts to end tenure are also efforts to eliminate academic freedom and therefore represent a threat not only to higher education but to democratic society.”
Some of this sentiment was echoed by Andrea Gore, a neuroscientist and professor of psychiatry at the University of Texas at Austin. In an opinion piece authored for the Houston Chronicle, she wrote:
“Without tenure, and with restrictions on what content is or is not allowed to be taught and discussed on our campuses, the best and the brightest faculty — the research groundbreakers — will go to other states. Is that what we want for research in our state, and for Texas’s students?”
It is unclear whether SB 18 has enough support at the Capitol to become law, but other bills have also been filed that would transform or eliminate tenure, signaling the appetite for some in Austin to reform the state’s higher education system.