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Most if not all large-scale organizations resist reform. Colleges’ and universities’ institutional structure enables them to resist better than most.

At most if not all large-scale organizations, management and labor incline to maintain established practices. Ingrained habits, stable and predictable procedures, and the accumulation of experience equip those working in and out of the C-suite to accomplish the organization’s official goals. Yet valuable habits, procedures, and experience can also function to deflect fresh ideas, suppress new methods, and undercut innovative arrangements – particularly those that threaten to redistribute power, downgrade roles, and take jobs. In commercial enterprises the discipline imposed by market imperatives mitigates management’s and workers’ temptation to put private interest in preserving the old and comfortable ahead of the organization’s interest in renewal and reform.

The forces favoring inertia, if not dereliction of duty, at large-scale organizations operate at most if not all colleges and universities. However, higher education lacks the discipline imposed by the profit motive. And at colleges and universities, tenure exacerbates the forces securing the status quo.

Academic tenure provides a vivid example of the law of unintended consequences. Created to safeguard academic freedom, tenure aims to empower scholars to follow the evidence and argument where they lead without fear that administrators and colleagues will fire them for vexing findings, unorthodox interpretations, and disagreeable speculations. In practice, however, tenure fosters a culture of conformity. It creates a clubby atmosphere – for the tenured professors – in departments, faculties, and disciplines. With substantial deference from the university administration, tenured professors confer tenure. Being human, they often expand and consolidate their career-making and career-breaking power by promoting candidates who can be counted on to share the tenured professors’ scholarly priorities, carry forward their research paradigms, and uphold their political opinions.

Tenure may be the least bad option for promoting academic freedom, but bad it has proved to be. Over the last several decades tenured faculty have contributed to the production and reproduction of an educational establishment, particularly in the humanities and humanities-adjacent social sciences, that has obscured, set aside, or forgotten the basic imperatives of liberal education.

Faculties have curtailed free speech, for the most part to silence deviation from progressive orthodoxy. They have stifled viewpoint diversity, rendering conservative opinions inherently suspect on campus........

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