Should We Eliminate Academic Tenure?

An excerpt from Stanley Kurtz:

What would replace tenure? Probably long-term contracts. I believe a few schools have already experimented with this. As noted, the change would be grandfathered in, and at best would only happen piecemeal. So prospects of a catastrophe would be slight, while there would be plenty of time for experimentation with new arrangements. But I guarantee you, even the slightest prospect of change (i.e. one state legislature seriously debating the end of tenure in its public university system) would send the professorate into a mad rage, and would provoke a major national debate about the state of higher education as a whole. That debate would provide an opening for all sorts of academic reforms, not limited to tenure.

More than anything else, the conversion of tenure from a protector of academic freedom into an instrument of ideological exclusion is responsible for the destruction of the campus marketplace of ideas. Tenure is the cornerstone of the campus political-correctness problem, and even beginning a serious effort to remove it would almost certainly shake up the entire academic system. The time to consider a serious campaign to eliminate academic tenure has come.