Whether tenure is good or bad for the ideological climate of the campus, it certainly costs a lot when you compare a tenure-track or tenured post to an adjunct post. An assistant prof in a humanities department teaching a 2-2 or 2-3 load at a research institution can run around $40,000 salary and $10,000 in benefits, while an adjunct costs only $3,000-$4,000 per course, with no benefits.

If you’re a dean with a tight budget, when you look at the English department, whose marginal status increases by the year (except for the teaching of freshman comp), the decision is easy. This is why tenure is on the way out; administrators are letting it die by slow attrition. A tenured French prof retires and the department gets a small allotment for adjuncts to replace him. As the trend continues, the tenured professorate may look more and more like an outdated guild, with some of its biggest critics coming from the non-tenured and never-to-be-tenured teachers.