There is a war raging against tenure in the academy as many state legislatures are aiming to reduce tenure protections for academics. The classical defense is that tenure is needed to protect academic freedom. It’s a vital argument, but one that can lead to a stalemate.

But what if we thought about tenure differently? What if academic freedom wasn’t the sole justification for tenure?

I recently spoke with HxA member Deepa Das Acevedo of Emory Law about her new book, The War on Tenure. She reframes tenure through labor and employment law. Seen this way, tenure isn’t necessarily an exceptional privilege; it’s a specific kind of just-cause employment that protects a uniquely demanding profession from the instability of the United States’ default (and unique) at-will employment law.

Plenty of jobs have just-cause protections, so professors aren’t necessarily special in that sense. But what is special is the nature of the work that professors do, the training and credentialing process to qualify for a small number of jobs, the relatively low wages, and the need to relocate (often several times) for jobs. “Very few professions… combine extended periods of postgraduate training… low odds of actually getting the job… multiple successive involuntary relocations… and then low wages once you get that job,” Das Acevedo explains. “No one element is absolutely unique to academia, but the combination is relatively unusual… I haven’t really found any profession that combines all of these challenges in one place.”

Thinking of tenure from an employment and labor dynamic perspective has been around since the early days of Harvard—long before the U.S. was even founded. Since its founding in 1650, Harvard has moved through various versions of just-cause employment contracts to employ and retain faculty, as Das Acevedo also explains in a recent article. Despite the AAUP 1940 statement on tenure being a significant milestone in tenure’s storied history, it’s not the beginning or end of the story.

From the early days of the U.S. university system all the way through the post-war boom in university expansion, tenure (or just-cause job protection) was less about the lofty ideals of academic freedom and more about pragmatism: it was a job perk that university administrators used to recruit and retain faculty. Administrators realized that if you want the people who generate and transmit knowledge to choose campus roles over (more highly paid) industry positions, you need to offer stability. That logic still holds, even if the politics have changed.

Tenure is also often critiqued in two related, yet seemingly contradictory ways, Das Acevedo explains. “Tenure is often critiqued either for promoting conformity or for promoting renegade-ism… and it’s never anything in between. I think the answer is somewhere in between” she argues.

On the one hand, yes, achieving tenure requires some degree of conformity. Afterall, tenure-track academics are hired to work within a small departmental community for (presumably) decades. “I think most workplaces, whether they’re academic or not, encourage conformity to a certain degree. This is how we tolerate being around people who are otherwise strangers for eight to ten hours a day.”

On the other hand, tenure is also critiqued as (over) protecting “renegade” scholars. But what tenure affords, Das Acevedo argues, is not so much protecting or promoting renegade-ism (even if it does do that) and more so protecting “the freedom to fail.” Her point is that tenure doesn’t make the job “cushy” as much as it makes it possible to do the work demanded of the profession. Professors are hired along three primary dimensions of work: sustained, impactful research; effective teaching and course development; and professional service within their university and field. “The timeline on which academics do their jobs… is measured in years and decades, and consequently, you need jobs that can last years and decades—and that’s what tenure allows.” In other words, the job security tenure provides is the minimal infrastructure needed to actually do the work well.

None of this means the system can’t improve. It can and should.

But will reframing tenure as labor protection change minds in hostile statehouses? Das Acevedo doesn’t think so. “Is busting myths about tenure going to convince a Dan Patrick or Ron DeSantis about the worth of higher education and of tenure stream employment within it? No, look, I’m not delusional, but I think that explaining why the reasonable but misguided understandings a lot of us, including inside academia, have about how tenure works… has the potential to change the way constituents understand academia and view tenure… Because I think they need to see what actually goes on inside the so-called ivory tower.”

A deeper, heterodox understanding of tenure may not prevent the legislative attacks we’re currently seeing across the country, but explaining tenure as ordinary labor law applied to an extraordinary job may help non-academics grasp why the practice exists, and why gutting it won’t yield better teaching or research—a non-partisan goal we can all rally behind.