In practice, how secure is a tenured position in the US?

Question

Coming from France, where any official academic position (i.e. ass. professor or full professor, or equivalent positions at public research institutes) is a civil-servant one, and therefore automatically for life, I've been always intrigued by the "tenure" system in the US.

While reading the Wikipedia article, I spotted the following paragraph:

While tenure protects the occupant of an academic position, it does not protect against the elimination of that position. For example, a university that is under financial stress may take the drastic step of eliminating or downsizing some departments.

Does this kind of elimination/downsizing occur a lot in practice? Is it possible to "cheat" and to pretend to cut a position in order to save money just to get rid of a tenured professor? Are there some laws stating that if a position is cut, then another equivalent one cannot be created right after?

Answer 1

I haven't seen any statistics on how many tenure professors have been fired, but most articles on the topic treat tenure as though it's a lifetime position (e.g., this Science article, "Tenure and the Future of the University"). Anecdotally, you will likely never meet someone who knows someone else who was fired from a tenure position; it simply doesn't happen.

Note, however, that the number of tenure track positions made available over the past decade been trending downward fairly significantly (see the same article, and simply do a google search on the topic to see more).

Answer 2

It does happen occasionally that entire departments are shut down. An example I remember being in the news a lot was several language departments at SUNY Albany. But it's an extreme measure and even with the current severe economic situation it did not happen very often.

Answer 3

In practice, a tenured appointment is one of the safest job positions out there. Essentially, the number of things which can get a tenured professor "sacked" are exceedingly small, and most of these involve criminal actions. (Even in such cases, the university tends to pressure resignations rather than try to fire them, as has happened, for instance, in high-profile cases at Harvard and Yale.)

Outside of that, you need the aforementioned budget catastrophes that lead to elimination of entire departments. Even then, sometimes departments are allowed to "decay" rather than get eliminated—current staff stays as the department gets wound down, without new hires and additional support.

Answer 4

Even if you don't get fired, the department can still make you miserable enough to want to leave. Tenure contracts often only guarantee a small salary, say 50% of the base salary when you were originally hired. Years later, that could be a pittance due to inflation.

Your department could tell you that your research isn't important or significant, and they could require you to do more teaching and service on committees, leaving you very little time to do any research. You could lose your lab space or access to shared equipment. You might not be allowed to take on new students or to hire technicians.

So you'll want to leave, even if they can't officially fire you. You can read some horror stories on this website.