Tenure: Endangered or Evolutionary Species

This article will review some of the challenges to the system of academic tenure: the efforts to reform, curtail, or eliminate it. It will discuss exogenous factors undermining the institution and then suggest some areas where tenure should evolve, particularly focusing upon academic tenure in legal education. The author argues that the hierarchical structure of traditionally tenured faculty and other faculty, clinicians, and legal writing professors, employed on short or long-term contracts, has undermined academic freedom and tenure.