Uniforum in Chicago:
Deepa Das Acevedo is a legal anthropologist and Associate Professor of Law at Emory University. She met with Uniforum at the University of Chicago in the fall of 2025 where she held the position Chicago Forum Fellow.
– Any excuse to come back to Chicago is always a pleasure, she says.
Das Acevedo received both her Doctor of Law (JD) and her PhD in Anthropology from The University of Chicago. At the Forum, she was invited to discuss her book War on Tenure as well as her ongoing research on tenure in higher education.
If you get this position, you're safe
Her book, on the employment contracts and working conditions of U.S. faculty, is also the topic of our interview.
Das Acevedo describes an American tenure system which is similar to the Norwegian system. You start with a Ph.D. If you are successful, you get to continue as a post doctor in a temporary position. Associate professor, in Norwegian called førsteamanuensis, is usually the step where you get secure employment.
– When you have your Ph.D., standard is five to seven years, before you would apply for tenure. If you get this position, you're safe. Tenure is supposed to give you really powerful job security which is even more striking in the United States because there's so little job security, she says.
For good reason, bad reason or no reason
At Emory Law Das Acevedo teaches labor and employment law.
– I don't know if you've come across the at-will rule of employment, she asks and elaborates:
– The at-will rule says that either party to the employment-relationship can end the relationship at will for good reason, bad reason or no reason at all.
Let's say we work together. You're my supervisor. You could walk into work this morning and say, Deepa, you're wearing black. I don't like the color black. You're fired. Or you could say, my sister needs a job, or I feel like firing somebody because it's Tuesday.
All those reasons are bad reasons to fire somebody, but they're not illegal reasons, she says.
According to Das Acevedo most workers in the U.S., abound 80 percent, are employed under this rule. She describes it as the default rule.
A subcategory of just-cause-contracts
Tenure she describes as a subcategory of just-cause-contracts, all of which provide more security, because your employer needs a reason to fire you and must follow certain procedures.
On the question who has just-cause-contracts, Das Acevedo points to government employees, especially federal employees, and most state employees.
In private sector just-cause-contracts are less common.
– You might ask for a just cause contract, but it depends on how desirable you are as an employee, right?
Das Acevedo also points to union members as examples of employees who have just-cause-contracts. But the number of unionized personnel is dwindling.
– Right now, it hovers between 10 and 12 percent, Das Acevedo remarks.
Out of personal curiosity
The book The War on Tenure rose out of an empirical project that began in 2020, on the individual terminations of tenured university faculty.
Das Acevedo admits she started the research, which has progressed far beyond the original data collection, out of personal curiosity.
– I am the child and the grandchild of professors. I have an uncle and three cousins who are professors. I grew up with this way of life, yet I had never really asked myself questions like, how often do professors who have tenure nevertheless get fired? And what are the rules on that?
The rules she says, are usually constructed on an institution-by-institution basis.
– It will usually be things like academic misconduct or harassing or discriminatory behavior, things like that, she comments.
– When did universities in the U.S. introduce tenure?
– The common story is that tenure was invented in 1940, Das Acevedo answers.
This was the year that the American Association of University Professors, the AAUP, released a statement of principles on academic freedom and tenure that created the framework that most universities largely follow, she says.
– But tenure started to become a familiar employment practice a little bit before, around 1930 to 1935, she adds.
According to Das Acevedo, tenure really ramped up in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. The main reason was not that professors convinced their universities to give them tenure, but because universities were faced with a huge influx of students and needed professors after the war. America Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 which funded higher education for returning veterans, did also play a part.
The system is disintegrating, for sure
– In many disciplines, you receive tenure and promotion to associate professor at the same time, but not always. In some disciplines, it's increasingly true that you might be promoted to associate professor before you receive tenure. So, they've been disaggregated to a certain degree.
– Does this mean that the whole system is disintegrating?
– It is disintegrating, for sure, Das Acevedo comments.
– 1940 to 1960 is when university leaders made tenure the standard practice. Then by the time we hit maybe the late 70s or 80s, we start to see a slow disintegration of tenure. It probably really took off in the 1990s and 2000s, but there was only a very short period, a couple of decades in the second half of the 20th century, when we can even pretend that everything was okay, she says.
In Norway the share of faculty in temporary positions is diminishing. By the fall of 2025, the share of temporary employees at universities and colleges was 8.8 percent according to the national Database for Higher Education (DB). This is far from the American reality.
– In the 1970s 70 to 80% of university instructors were employed in tenure eligible positions. So, either they were working towards receiving tenure, or they had received tenure, right?
Now, it's the opposite. 70 to 80 percent of university professors are hired off the tenure stream system.
You are kind of freelance
– They're still called professors, but they do not have the job security?
– Exactly. We can divide the non-tenure stream majority of faculty into a couple of different categories according to what kind of security they have, she says and adds:
– All of these will be called contract faculty because if you're in the tenure line, and especially after you receive tenure, you don't get any more contracts.
At the lowest end is what she would call adjunct or contingent faculty, who are usually hired to teach a specific course, maybe only for one term.
– It will come with a lump sum payment, probably no benefits, no health insurance, no retirement contributions, nothing like that. And you may not even be considered a contractor and not an employee of the university. That might mean in turn that you don't have access to the library. You are kind of freelance which accounts for a lot of instructors now in the U.S. Das Acevedo remarks.
Other are employed for a year or more.
– You might be employed up to five years. In that case, you will certainly have an email address, library privileges, probably some kind of health insurance payment, you know, things like that. You have a considerably greater degree of security. But it's still hard if you have a five-year-contract, to buy a house, start a family, she concludes.
– And the four- or- five-years-contracts are not the most common form of contract employment in the Academia. Most people will either be employed on an adjunct basis, course by course, kind of, or one or two years-contracts, Das Acevedo comments.
– Research is slow and risky
– How does the lack of job security affect academic freedom?
– This is an important topic, she comments.
– Research is slow and risky. You don't know whether an experiment will produce any interesting results, let alone the results that you were hoping it would. And that might also be important. A null result is not a valueless result. But you know whether it's experimental science or archival research or field research, these things take time. They do not have guaranteed products. So, there is a lot of risk in having your employment dependent on your ability to produce, she says.
– If you add in the current attacks on academic freedom, that just makes it even more difficult and even riskier. Because in addition to worrying about whether I will get funding and support and whether experiments or field work will produce interesting results, now you must constrain what it is that you even think about researching, based on political dictates.
– The research suggests that it is not true
In the third part of her book Das Acevedo discusses the stereotypical criticism of tenured professors.
– I think a lot of academics react to those accusations very negatively. But that doesn't help us have a conversation. It doesn't help us explain, Das Acevedo comments
She has tried to consider each of those criticisms to see whether they hold up.
– And frankly, almost none of them do, she concludes and gives an example.
– If you you're not familiar with academia, you might think that having job security means you have no incentive to work. It's an understandable criticism. We don't have a lot of research examining whether it's true, but the research we do have, suggests that it is not true, she states.
– In many humanities and social science fields, you begin writing journal articles. Then as you go further along, you write books. So instead of writing one or two articles per year, you might write one book in three years. That means that your productivity in a numerical sense has gone down. But does it mean that you have contributed less? Not necessarily, right?
– The standards for productivity were lower
There's one study in particular that looks across disciplines, which in Das Acevedos opinion makes a very good point:
– It is difficult to measure particular people over the course of 20-, 30-, 40-year careers, which is what you would need to do to answer this question about tenure and productivity. The persons doing that study needs immense job security. They also need a lot of research funding because it takes time to track people over such a long period.
– Instead, most of the studies that ask does tenure reduce productivity, are point in time studies. So, they might take all the faculty in a specific department and compare the junior faculty to the senior faculty in the year 2025.
But there's a problem with this approach too. People who are senior faculty now, say who are 20 or 30 years into their careers, entered the profession at a time when the standards for productivity were lower. We can talk about whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, but the fact is, the junior faculties who entered in the last five to 10 years, have much higher productivity expectations.
– That is not a common way of thinking
- If you work like crazy to get tenure, when you finally get it, and you decide to build a family, should you not be allowed to relax a little bit?
– That is not a common way of thinking in the United States, Das Acevedo remarks.
– Life is tough. One of the things that I mentioned in the chapter on this, on productivity, in part three, is that I worked seven-day weeks, from the moment I began graduate school here in Chicago until two years into my first tenure stream job, she tells
As an associate professor, and despite having a six-year old son, Deepa Das Acevedo works six to six and a half day every week.
– We would like to have a second child, but we waited so long to have our first child because we were insecure in terms of our employment, that by the time we had him we were pretty old, she says.
In her words childbearing among tenured female professors in the U.S. is extraordinarily low.
– The few studies we have, do not in any way suggest that professors get that letter saying, congratulations, now you have tenure, then decide, OK, now I can sit back, she says and adds:
– Whether or not we think they should be able to sit back just a little bit, is a different issue.
– The state of Kentucky has passed a bill requiring post-tenure review policies at public universities. Is this happening all over the United States?
– I'm not familiar with Kentucky's post-tenure review policy in particular, but a lot of Southern and Midwestern states have passed bills that allow universities to fire tenured faculty, Das Acevedo confirms.
– Post-tenure review has been bubbling up for several years. It's not a new thing. I would say the last 10 to 12 years, state legislatures have been pursuing this war on tenure, long before the Trump administration.
– It is such a huge investment
What do you see as the main reasons for the attacks on tenure?
I think there are a lot of reasons, but at least two big reasons, Das Acevedo answers.
One of the reasons she believes, is that universities and colleges have lost public trust.
Academia in the US is an ivory tower not just because professors use fancy language or talk about ideas that maybe don't seem to make sense to the average person. It is also linked to the financial accessibility.
– It is such a huge investment simply to go to university, she says and refers to the situation at Emory University where she teaches. Emory University in 2025 announced that it would make undergraduate tuition free for children whose families earned two hundred thousand dollars or less.
– I think the federal poverty line for a family of four is somewhere around forty or fifty thousand dollars. Basically, what I'm saying, is that university is so expensive that even for a family with this income, university is a financial strain, Das Acevedo explains.
– The only people who talk about tenure
The second problem related to tenure, in her opinion, is that professors have not really articulated the message.
– I don't think we have tried to explain why tenure is important in a language that is accessible and for reasons that can make sense to people outside academia, she says.
Das Acevedo links this to the lack of public trust.
– Ultimately people like me, who have tenure at relatively rich, stable universities, we're the most privileged among professors. Anytime you begin to say something that sounds like a complaint, even if it's a description of the fact that I worked seven days a week for 10 years, you know it sounds like a complaint, and that complaint is hard to take from somebody who is so privileged, she says and adds:
– I think that this unfortunately has meant that the only people who talk about what tenure is like, and what incentive effects it has, are Republican politicians who are out to destroy the system.
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