The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a staunch supporter of free speech, has on its site an essay that favors tenure.

Okay, tenure is with us. I’m not advocating elimination of tenure, but tenure is not the same as free speech; it merely assists free speech in some cases. It can also reduce free speech, as when tenured faculty hamper students’ freedom of speech or force faculty with unpopular views to be quiet. So I’m uncomfortable when FIRE supports the University of Wisconsin against its recently passed law that removes tenure protection from state statute (but does not remove tenure). Here’s how Peter Bonilla of FIRE sees the issue:

Terminating [tenured] faculty would no longer be solely a last resort to be taken only when finances are tapped or in response to serious academic misconduct or criminal activity. Instead, the Board of Regents could simply cite a vague desire for a program’s “redirection” or “modification”—whatever that may mean in practice—to justify firing an outspoken, dissenting, or simply inconvenient faculty member. The threat to academic freedom is obvious.

How much of a threat? As the Pope Center’s Jenna Robinson pointed out earlier, the change merely puts the University of Wisconsin faculty on the same footing as those at most other state universities. Tenure is typically a contract between a university and its employees, not the state and university employees.

Bonilla admits that tenure and academic freedom are not the same.

Many universities will claim that academic freedom is blind to whether one is tenured or not, and FIRE believes this should be the case. But that hasn’t been our experience on the ground. Instead, the less job security a professor has, the less academic freedom he or she tends to enjoy—which speaks both to the utility of tenure and the scandalously unstable conditions of adjunct faculty when it comes to academic freedom.

“The utility of tenure.” So tenure protects the jobs of faculty, which has good and bad effects, including some negative effects on free speech. In my view, FIRE is suffering from mission creep by supporting a particular means that may (or may not) protect speech.

Second, FIRE is in error about the Wisconsin changes, implying that they create a unique situation, when they make the University of Wisconsin similar to most universities.