As Wisconsin heads into another governor’s race, we can expect that faculty tenure will once again be dragged into the political arena. It’s an easy target—often caricatured as a cushy system that protects “lazy professors” with lifetime job security. That talking point gets applause, but it gets the issue completely wrong.

            Tenure isn’t about protecting people who don’t work hard.  It’s about protecting the integrity of research itself.

What Tenure Actually Does

            True, research is produced by people, and so protecting research means protecting the people who conduct it. That’s the heart of tenure. But here’s the part that rarely enters the public conversation: academic disciplines are global communities. A physicist or economist or Shakespeare scholar isn’t judged primarily by colleagues on their own campus. Their work is evaluated by experts around the world.  Hiring, promotion, and salary decisions depend heavily on outside reviewers—people who aren’t part of the university, the state, or   political system. That global peer‑review process is what guides quality and credibility.

            University administrators—department chairs, provosts, chancellors, system presidents, and boards of regents—play important roles, but they are not the ones who determine whether a piece of research is groundbreaking or trivial. They can’t. No single campus contains the expertise to evaluate every field.  Weakening tenure would shift that authority away from worldwide experts and toward politicians, political appointees, and administrators. That’s a dangerous concentration of power in the hands of people who are not equipped to judge scholarly work.

Academic Freedom Strengthens Research Quality

            Academic freedom is another concept that gets tossed around without much understanding. It means the freedom to choose research topics, decide how much time to devote to them, and—especially in the STEM fields —determine how to pursue and fund that work. Without academic freedom, research becomes vulnerable to political pressure. The topics that would survive would be the ones politicians approve of, not the ones that advance knowledge within a discipline.

Teaching and Research Strengthen Each Other

            Critics often claim that research distracts from teaching.   The opposite is often true. The best teachers are frequently active researchers. Their enthusiasm for and knowledge of their subject spills into the classroom. Students feel that energy.  Moreover, working with research professors creates hands‑on learning opportunities; undergraduate and graduate students work as research assistants, gaining experience that greatly enhances what they get from classes and textbooks.

What’s at Stake for Wisconsin

            Some candidates have proposed eliminating or significantly weakening tenure. If that happens, the UW System—already strained by years of tight budgets—will struggle even more to hire and retain top faculty. Talented scholars have options, and they will choose institutions where their work is protected and valued.

            And here’s the irony: if tenure supposedly encourages laziness, how has Wisconsin produced not one but two top‑tier research universities as classified by the Carnegie Foundation?

• UW–Madison ranks among the top five universities in the nation for federally funded research.
• UW–Milwaukee, though much smaller, is recognized by the Carnegie Foundation as an R1 research university—a distinction reserved for institutions with the highest quality research activity.

These achievements don’t come from a system that rewards complacency. They come from a system that protects rigorous, world‑class research.

            In the upcoming gubernatorial race, voters should recognize that tenure is a safeguard—one that keeps research independent, protects academic freedom, and helps Wisconsin compete for the most productive faculty.   Weakening it would not make our universities stronger or more accountable. It would make them less competitive, less innovative, and less capable of serving the state.