Chapter 6 tells the pre-history of tenure beginning with the colonial era and proceeding until the AAUP’s 1940 Statement, which is widely credited with defining what faculty tenure means in the United States. The chapter shows that many key legal elements of tenure have existed since the seventeenth century, and that employment concerns like job security played a much larger role in shaping academic employment than is commonly acknowledged.

Chapter 22 discusses the phenomenon of reductions-in-force, which are not included in the TTS but which account for a majority of tenured faculty terminations. The chapter explains patterns in RIFs as well as their scale and uses specific examples to show how the impact of RIFs extends beyond the job loss they directly cause.

Chapter 12 tackles the first of several myths regarding tenure’s effects on individual faculty incentives, namely, that tenure promotes undesirable iconoclasm. The chapter uses available research linking tenure with intellectual and pedagogical risk-taking as well as industry knowledge regarding how newly tenured professors actually behave to show that the “post-tenure renegade” is more assumption than fact.