You might not get tenure
I have worked in three worlds. The military, where I spent years as a special agent. Business, where I crossed over between careers. And the academy, where I have spent more than two decades. Each one taught me something different about what job security actually means, and none of them agree.
In the military, security was a contract you renewed with your performance and your willingness to keep showing up. I was a special agent. Nobody handed me anything. Three years at a time, I made a deliberate decision to stay or go. That discipline shaped everything that came after.
In the business world, the math was simpler and colder. You produce, or the market corrects you. No sentiment, no tenure, no union card. Results or exit. I respected that clarity even when it was uncomfortable.
When I moved into higher education, the non-tenure track felt familiar. Annual or multi-year contracts, performance reviews, institutional politics, and the quiet understanding that your position was never guaranteed. I did that for most of my academic career. It kept me sharp and honest about my value to the institution.
Tenure is different. And if you are in corporate America, I need to explain what it actually is, because the version you have in your head is probably wrong.
Tenure is not a guarantee that mediocrity gets a paycheck forever. It is a structural protection that allows a faculty member to follow research wherever it leads, even when that destination makes administrators, donors, or politicians uncomfortable. Without it, scholars manage risk the same way anyone on a short-term contract does. They calculate. They soften. They avoid. That is not cowardice. That is rational behavior under institutional pressure. And when that pressure shapes scholarship, the entire enterprise loses credibility.
The AAUP documents exactly this pattern. As tenure erodes and contingent appointments replace permanent faculty lines, the shift is not just economic. Governance changes. Institutional independence shrinks. The article is direct about what replaces shared faculty authority when tenure disappears: administrative consolidation and market-driven priorities that have little to do with the integrity of academic work.
But I will say this plainly to colleagues who have tenure: do not mistake that protection for immunity. I have seen it abused. Faculty who stopped producing, stopped engaging, and started treating the institution like it owed them a comfortable pillow. That behavior undermines the entire argument for tenure and hands ammunition to every administrator and politician who wants to dismantle it. You were given academic freedom to do harder work, not less of it.
I earned my place at three-year intervals for most of my career. I know what accountability without permanence looks like. Tenure is a tool for protecting truth, not protecting comfort. Use it accordingly.