Chapter 5 explains what tenure legally entails in order to temper the claim that tenure is exceptional in the landscape of employment contracts. It argues that tenure is merely a variation on the “just cause” contracts applied to many workers and that the protections of just cause are necessitated by a uniquely American default rule, namely, that most employment relationships are terminable “at-will.”

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 18 introduces the Tenured-Terminations Study data with a detailed explanation of the design choices that inform it. The chapter also revisits and critiques the notion that tenure confers a “job for life” and clarifies why the analogy drawn between faculty tenure and judicial tenure is inapt and dangerous.

Chapter 13 addresses a second myth regarding tenure’s effects on individual faculty incentives, namely, that tenure facilitates predatory behavior. The chapter focuses on sexual misconduct and draws on available research regarding its prevalence inside and outside academia – as well as inside and outside the United States – to show that severe power disparities, rather than tenure itself, are most likely responsible for high misconduct rates in academia.