Vasily Stokes
Editor In Chief
Over the past couple of months in Tennessee, multiple bills have been introduced by Republican state senators and House representatives that specifically target public universities and state community colleges’ ability to grant tenure to professors. The bills have proposed both an outright ban on tenure as well as the ability to fire tenured faculty for the expression of their First Amendment rights. It is believed that the reason for this attack on Tenure was potentially stemming from the situation involving Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn, Austin Peay State University, and Associate Professor Darran Micheal. Darran Micheal an Associate Professor at Austin Peay State University created a post on his personal social media account about the death of right-wing agitator Charlie Kirk. The post itself was a video of Charlie Kirk from 2023 saying that some gun deaths, “unfortunately,” are “worth it” to protect access to guns. Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn saw this and pressured Austin Peay State University to fire tenured Associate Professor Darren Michael and to do it without the formal tenure termination process of notice and reviews. Austin Peay did fire Professor Michael and as a result a lawsuit was filed, and Austin Peay was forced into a settlement that reinstated him and gave him $500,000. This conclusion has since sparked outrage among Republican officeholders who are now seeking to punish or hinder the existence of tenure in Tennessee, a “right-to-work” and “employment-at-will” state, which results in tenure for state universities professors, something that essentially supports the entire academic industry and community in Tennessee.
“What is tenure?” Tenure is best classified as “permanent employment.” Tenure is employment security for college and university faculty members. Tenure is most often a private contract between a faculty member and their employer (the college or university) that states that if the faculty member works a specified number of years to the best of their ability, the school will never lay them off without a proper identification of cause like major violation of school policy or a crime, a formal investigation, proper written notification by the school, a hearing by a committee of peers or arbitrator, and a final decision made by a governing body like a board of trustees. A tenure contract requires the school to go through a trusted process before terminating a faculty member, ensuring a termination be not just at the discretion of the institution.
What does “at-will employment” mean? Employment at will is a legal practice where an employer can terminate an employee for any reason, and not tell them why they were terminated, as long as the reason does not violate the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as well as other state laws which state that an employee cannot be fired for their race, sex, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, or disabilities. Half of the states in the US have “Crown Acts” which ban employment discrimination based on hair, and Montana is the only one of the fifty states that does not have employment at will.
“What is right-to-work?” Right to work is an anti-labor union policy established by most states in the United States. In non-right-to-work states and in the pre-right-to-work era in the US, when a person joins a company that has a labor union, they also immediately join the labor union as part of the labor union’scontract with the company. The reason for this is so that the company cannot specifically hire people that will not join the union then freeload off the unionized workers’ work, draining the union of funding and pushing the union out, so worker conditions return to pre-union levels.
The purpose of unions is collective bargaining; every worker is bargaining with the company as a whole group to set up a contract with the company that usually entails standardized salary and salary increases, a union pension fund, healthcare plans, and a trusted termination process. But to do all this, labor unions have to fight for it, mainly through legal battles and going on strike, for which union dues (payments to the unions from the workers) are divided among the union to pay for legal fees and create funds to help its workers during strikes. By participating in unions and paying union dues, workers allow themselves democratic participation at the place of their employment and many benefits as a unionized worker. According to the U.S. Department of the Treasury, “Simple comparisons of the wages of union workers and nonunion workers find that union workers typically make about 20 percent more than nonunion workers” (Feiveson, 2023). Tenure is a private contract between one employee and the employer; labor unions create one big contract with all the workers and bosses.
The first bill that targeted tenure across Tennessee was signed in April 2011, which extended the probationary period for tenure from three years to five years. This also tied access to tenure and the ability to lose it to evaluation scores. However, in the year 2026, several bills have been created, initially to abolish and now to simply weaken tenure in Tennessee. HB 2581 / SB 1838 was introduced, which sought to fully stop all future tenure positions from being created, as it specifically prohibits the board of regents and each state university board of trustees from conferring all tenure positions after July 1, 2026. This bill was taken off the agenda, as the bill’s primary sponsor for Tennessee, House Representative Justin Lafferty, said that he did more research on the existence of tenure in American history, from early America with low education rates, up through the Vietnam War/Civil Rights Movement, concluding, “In a controversial time, I kind of understand you want those protections (tenure) in place to not lose the talent that you’ve been able to acquire.”
However, HB 2194 was passed and is on its way to the governor’s desk. What HB 2194 does is separate disciplinary action from tenure, with its sponsor, Senator Adam Lowe, saying, “This bill addresses those who might use tenure as insulation from actions that are detrimental to the brand and code of conduct for the college.” The point of the bill, as stated, is a non-existent problem because tenure doesn’t mean you cannot be fired, it means that the causation for termination and the performance of the professor is peer reviewed, and there is open communication and arbitration among the people involved with the institution to figure out the correct course of action.
The furthering of these attacks on tenure will endanger the state’s entire education system, as over half of the state’s college students go to state universities. Ashton Beatty, an organizer for the United Campus Workers (UCW-CWA), a campus worker union, has been organizing college and university campus workers (both student and faculty) and has recently been lobbying against these recent tenure laws, writing that “If the legislature were to remove tenure, the state university system would collapse,” which would leave half of the college students in Tennessee without an education or forced to pay significantly more for their education.
Ultimately, further revisioning and hindering of tenure laws will drastically affect our education system and educators, and even though these laws mainly affect state universities, these are attacks on the academic community as a whole. Many educators move to Tennessee for tenure-track positions, yet if tenure stops existing, or if everything that makes tenure desirable disappears, there will be no reason for these educators to stay in Tennessee, especially considering that positions at private universities are so few and far between. Truly, there are few ways as effective as this to destroy state universities in Tennessee, as well as attack the rights of American citizens.
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