Chapter 24 concludes the book with several suggestions for how to improve tenure without vitiating or abandoning it. The chapter suggests, as potential lines of reform: reframing tenure as a labor protection, revising evaluation procedures, recruiting more diverse faculty, implementing teaching tenure, and avoiding punitive post-tenure review.

Chapter 9 explores the challenges faced by dual-academic couples who must both navigate the difficult job market described in Chapter 8. This chapter explains why the “two-body problem” is particularly acute in academia, illustrates the toll it can take on mental and physical well-being, and discusses both university and faculty responses to the phenomenon.

Chapter 3 explains the material sacrifices required to gain a PhD, which is the threshold credential for most faculty positions. The chapter uses doctoral debt statistics, media coverage, and social science literature to show that aspiring academics do not enjoy privileged lives during either graduate school or the “post-doc queue” that often follows it.

Chapter 16 picks up where Chapter 6 left off in the history of tenure by explaining how tenure became a dominant industry practice. It draws on educational history to show that, even if tenure’s now-familiar form was articulated by faculty via the AAUP, tenure’s adoption across American academia was largely spurred by university leaders who saw it as a valuable recruitment and retention tool for an increasingly professionalized workforce.

Chapter 23 synthesizes the information presented in the book to explain why tenure matters not only for the current and aspiring faculty who are directly impacted by it, but for the students, parents, administrators, politicians, and citizens who may think that tenure is the peculiar concern of professors. The chapter also draws on higher education expenditure statistics to show why arguments sounding in budgetary shortfalls are inadequate justifications for reductions in tenure-stream employment.

Chapter 5 explains what tenure legally entails in order to temper the claim that tenure is exceptional in the landscape of employment contracts. It argues that tenure is merely a variation on the “just cause” contracts applied to many workers and that the protections of just cause are necessitated by a uniquely American default rule, namely, that most employment relationships are terminable “at-will.”

Chapter 1 situates the book within recent battles over higher education and scholarship on academia, and provides an introduction to the volume.

Chapter 6 tells the pre-history of tenure beginning with the colonial era and proceeding until the AAUP’s 1940 Statement, which is widely credited with defining what faculty tenure means in the United States. The chapter shows that many key legal elements of tenure have existed since the seventeenth century, and that employment concerns like job security played a much larger role in shaping academic employment than is commonly acknowledged.

Chapter 14 dismantles a third myth regarding tenure’s effects on individual faculty incentives, namely, that tenure dampens academic productivity. The chapter shows there is little empirical proof supporting this assumption but some proof against it, and argues that claims about declining productivity reflect a simplistic and unwarranted belief that faculty are rational maximizers whose sole motivation is employment security.

Chapter 21 slices TTS data from yet another angle, this time according to whether terminated faculty voluntarily quit or were involuntarily fired. The chapter shows that academia is not merely a refuge for workers who cannot succeed in the general labor force because, among other things, faculty whose disciplinary backgrounds give them better exit options do not seem to relinquish their positions more easily.

Chapter 17 considers the relationship between tenure-stream academia and unionization – a relationship that is often incorrectly believed to be nonexistent. The chapter argues that self-perception isn’t all that stands between tenure-stream faculty and collective action because multiple legal frameworks as well as the daily rhythms and realities of tenure-stream life discourage rootedness and community-building.

Chapter 15 considers a fourth prominent worry about tenure, namely, that its reliance on peer evaluation allows faculty to undeservedly protect or reward themselves and their colleagues. The chapter considers this “self-dealing” concern from various angles, showing how it both overestimates the uniqueness of peer evaluation systems and also misunderstands the organizational dynamics of university life.

Chapter 7 discusses the phenomenon of “multihyphenation” as it applies to university faculty. It shows how the traditional tripartite description of faculty duties (“teaching, research, and service”) not only fails to capture the range and the intensity of the demands made of professors but also overlooks the unequal distribution of this work and the degree to which it is demanded but not rewarded.