AHA Advocacy Guide: Defending Faculty Tenure and Due Process

In December 2025, the South Dakota Board of Regents introduced a new, punitive post-tenure review process. On February 5, 2026, Oklahoma Governor J. Kevin Stitt issued Executive Order 2026-07, gutting tenure protections at research institutions and abolishing tenure completely for new hires at regional universities and community colleges. In recent years, at least five states (Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, North Dakota, and Ohio) have enacted legislation to weaken employment protections for tenured faculty at public institutions. Now, legislatures in Iowa, Kentucky, and Tennessee are considering similar proposals, and it is likely that more bills, system policies, and executive orders are in the works in other states. Model legislation from the Manhattan Institute and other conservative think tanks provides a blueprint for weakening faculty employment protections as part of an aggressive higher education reform agenda gaining purchase within some state governments.

Your voice matters. Input from constituents can make a substantial difference in the outcome of proposed bills. At a subcommittee hearing on February 18, 2026, for instance, a Tennessee legislator withdrew an antitenure bill (HB2581) in the face of public backlash, noting that he changed his mind after having “stumbled into a little bit of the history” of faculty employment.

The American Historical Association has argued forcefully for the value of tenure in letters to legislators in Nebraska and Texas and raised questions about the effects of post-tenure review in Florida and Indiana. AHA staff and elected leadership have also worked behind the scenes to inform policymakers of the potential consequences of these changes.

Enacted Legislation in 2025

  • Kentucky HB 424 imposes “performance and productivity” requirements on faculty at public universities, technical colleges, and community colleges, to be applied in an assessment every four years. Should a faculty member violate those requirements, their appointment can be terminated regardless of tenure status.
  • North Dakota HB 1437, governing state institutions of higher education, imposes a requirement of post-tenure review every five years, with the possibility of termination for an “unsatisfactory review.”
  • Ohio SB 1 imposes annual performance evaluations on faculty at state institutions of higher education based on factors including a demonstration of “intellectual diversity” (defined as “multiple, divergent, and varied perspectives on an extensive range of public policy issues”) and student evaluations regarding politics in the classroom. If a tenured faculty member receives a score of “does not meet performance expectations” in two of the last three years, they must undergo a post-tenure review, which could result in their termination.

Pending Legislation (2026 Cycle)

  • Kentucky HB 490 weakens tenure protections and allows dismissal of faculty for “financial exigency, low enrollment in a program or major misalignment of revenue and costs.”
  • Iowa HSB 534 would centralize state control of university governance and allow the State Board of Regents to initiate “a post-tenure review at any time of a tenured employee of an institution of higher education . . . by a majority vote.”
  • Tennessee HB 2581 / SB 1838 would stop awarding tenure and enable politically appointed boards of regents or trustees to fire tenured faculty “for financial or curricular reasons in the discretion of the board or its designee.” In February 2026, the sponsor of HB 2581 withdrew his proposal, but the status of the senate version remains unclear.

Why Protecting Tenure and Due Process Matters for Historians

American colleges and universities have long served as engines of innovation that power cultural, intellectual, and economic life. In history departments, tenure supports the arduous and inefficient search for truth. It exists to protect the pursuit of knowledge, guaranteeing the freedom of thought necessary to assure both integrity and creativity of historical inquiry on campus. Tenure protections enable faculty to develop further expertise in their field and become sources of institutional knowledge, so that they can better serve their higher education and wider communities. Through research, teaching, and service, tenure-track and tenured historians help fuel the intellectual ferment that can lead to original ideas, bold conclusions, and better-informed public discussions.

Universities have ample room to improve faculty employment practices. In 2020, the AHA Council approved a set of recommendations for Improving the Status of Non-Tenure-Track Faculty. Furthermore, the AHA’s Guidelines for Broadening the Definition of Historical Scholarship urge institutions to recognize the many ways historians produce new knowledge, and its Statement on Excellent Classroom Teaching of History highlights innovation and effectiveness in cultivating student learning. Undermining tenure and other due process protections will weaken the rights and standing of all faculty and negatively affect students’ educational experience.

Tenure is earned. Across STEM, the humanities, and the social sciences, faculty earn their credentials through years of intensive graduate training. This is followed by a highly competitive national job search. Candidates are unlikely to accept offers from institutions that do not protect the academic freedom guaranteed through tenure. Once hired, tenure-track faculty undergo several stages of rigorous review during a probationary period, often six years for new assistant professors. Applications for tenure in history departments are often hundreds or thousands of pages documenting the candidate’s excellence in research, teaching, and professional service both within and beyond the institution where they teach. These dossiers are scrutinized by departmental colleagues, external experts, and university administrators. Decisions about tenure must also be approved by a complicated system of governance that includes university administrators and, in many cases, boards of regents. Faculty work hard to earn the freedom to think and speak freely granted by tenure, by demonstrating their value within and beyond the higher education community.

Tenure rewards academic rigor. Its protections enable faculty to challenge themselves and their students, pushing beyond easy answers and politically convenient ideas in pursuit of new perspectives. Simplistic metrics for return-on-investment rely on faulty logic and short-term thinking that discourages research and devalues teaching. In doing so, this approach risks depriving students and taxpayers of the long-term strategic guidance that tenured faculty provide. It is a common misconception that achieving tenure ends any expectations for research productivity or oversight. In fact, institutions continue to evaluate tenured faculty for the entirety of their careers and enforce clear standards of conduct, violation of which is grounds for dismissal. These existing safeguards render many recent bills unnecessary to their stated purposes.

Tenure provides a measure of economic security, but its central purpose is to prevent the termination of faculty for political or ideological reasons. As such, it protects faculty—but only because doing so is necessary to ensure the freedom to take risks, challenge assumptions, and pursue questions whose value may not be immediately clear. In turn, tenure safeguards students’ freedom to learn and innovate. And in this way historians, too, help drive economic growth, inspire future leaders, and deepen our understanding of the world and our place in it.

Explaining the Importance of Faculty Tenure to Policymakers and Other Publics

Few policymakers understand how faculty tenure works or why these protections matter. Even defenders of faculty and public universities may struggle to articulate the rationale for tenure and the consequences of undermining it.

Language of academic freedom does not always resonate outside of academic circles. But the general public broadly agrees with what this freedom enables.

  • Tenure is designed to promote freedom of thought and freedom of speech on campus. Students are freer to learn, think, and innovate when faculty can ask controversial questions and discuss challenging ideas without fear of reprisal.
  • Tenure prioritizes intellectual merit over political expediency. With basic job security, historians are free to forge innovative pathways grounded in creativity, expertise, and evidence without limitations from state mandates or pressure.
  • History faculty are not political appointees, nor should they be. Historians should be evaluated on the quality of their work and not where they stand on matters of public policy.
  • Legislation that weakens tenure often puts more power in the hands of political appointees, leading to further politicization of higher education, not less.
  • Tenure defines a system of higher education that is the envy of the world. America’s colleges and universities draw faculty and students from around the world because of the research and educational advantages that follow from these principles of academic freedom.
  • Colleges and universities are only successful when they support an entrepreneurial spirit in which students and faculty feel free to ask daring questions, question the status quo, and take risks.

Critics mischaracterize tenure to justify attacks on public higher education, potentially controversial research, and faculty speech. Scapegoating tenured faculty can provide cover for weakening employment protections for all university employees, including both contingent and full-time instructional faculty.

  • Tenure guarantees due process for faculty. It does not guarantee cushy employment for life. Universities can already dismiss faculty for cause when individuals are found to have violated institutional codes of conduct. Antitenure proposals make it far easier to fire them for their ideas or political views.
  • Antitenure bills authorize boards of regents and elected officials to overrule the evidence-based professional judgment of qualified scholars, to reject foundational beliefs of our discipline, and to censure or terminate faculty (regardless of tenure) on a whim. Public colleges and universities should not be forced to promote discredited theories or ignore evidence to create space for certain ideas just because doing so is politically expedient.
  • There is little evidence to suggest that abolishing tenure would make college more affordable for students. Tenure and faculty pay are not responsible for higher education’s budgetary woes. Steep declines in public funding for higher education are largely to blame for the soaring costs of an undergraduate degree. Tuition at both public and private institutions of higher education has increased at a much higher rate than instructional expenses, only some of which are related to faculty salaries and wages. In fact, in the national and international markets to recruit and retain the most talented faculty, institutions without tenure will have to pay more to compete.

Ending tenure would erode the value of public higher education and severely reduce the return on investment for both public funds and tuition dollars. Employers rely on well-trained graduates with the skills and knowledge to succeed in the 21st-century workforce. Our nation needs graduates who can assess new ideas, learn new material, and understand the context of their world. Learning to assess and respond to new evidence is part of learning with experts. Antitenure proposals instantly and irrevocably depreciate the value of these investments in higher learning.