Tenure is More Under Threat Than Ever: What's Happening and What It Means for Your Career

If you've spent any time in a PhD program, you already know the academic job market is brutal. Tenure-track positions are scarce, the timeline from PhD to offer is long and uncertain, and landing a TT job doesn't guarantee tenure — that's a separate gauntlet with its own attrition. None of this is news to you.

What's worth paying attention to right now is a layer on top of all that: even departments that seemed stable are facing cuts, consolidations, and in some cases outright closure. And that changes the calculus a bit, depending on where you are in your career.

What's Been Happening on Campuses

The past several months have brought a wave of program eliminations and department restructurings that's harder to dismiss as isolated incidents. Portland State University entered formal retrenchment to address a $35 million deficit, identifying 19 departments for reduction or elimination — including History, Philosophy, and Economics. Southern Oregon University came close to payroll insolvency. Syracuse University, after cutting 84 programs and pausing enrollment in nine others, extended retirement buyouts to 175 professors in programs set to close or with low enrollment. And most visibly, Hampshire College — founded in 1965 as a progressive experiment in student-driven liberal arts education — announced it will close permanently at the end of fall 2026, unable to recover from years of enrollment decline and $21 million in bond debt it could not refinance.

Inside Higher Ed's "Tenure Under Threat" report documents how financial exigency declarations are increasingly being used to justify faculty cuts that tenure protections were specifically designed to prevent. And the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that legislatures in Alabama, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Tennessee are advancing bills that would let boards dismiss tenured faculty for "bona fide financial reasons" — a much lower bar than what's historically been required.

What's happening right now is a collision of forces that have been building for decades — stagnating wages that make families question the ROI of a degree, student debt burdens that have quietly suppressed enrollment, and sustained right-wing rhetorical attacks on higher education that have reshaped how some demographics think about college altogether. And on top of that longer arc, the Trump administration has been actively accelerating the damage: pulling research grants, targeting DEI programs, threatening universities' tax-exempt status, and slashing NIH funding by nearly $18 billion in its FY2026 budget proposal. The departments and programs being cut aren't random. Humanities, social sciences, ethnic studies, gender studies, American studies — these fields have been in the crosshairs specifically because the administration views them as threats. (Full disclosure: My lecturer position in Harvard's Studies in Women, Gender, and Sexuality program has been cut as part of larger cuts that the university has been making to address its deficit. The program, which disproportionately relies on lecturers, has had a significant portion of positions cut.) UT Austin's decision to shutter its American Studies department and consolidate gender and ethnic studies programs didn't happen in a vacuum. Texas A&M's board made it explicit: the university closed its women's and gender studies program in January 2026 to comply with a new system-wide policy restricting discussions of "race or gender ideology" on campus — after reviewing 5,400 course syllabi for compliance. Yale is weighing a 12 percent cut in humanities and social sciences graduate enrollment over the next three years, citing in part the endowment tax hike buried in the Trump administration's budget reconciliation bill.

When departments close or consolidate, tenured faculty aren't always simply let go — many get absorbed elsewhere. But that process is disruptive and, depending on your field and institution, may not result in a situation you'd want to stay in. For faculty who aren't yet tenured, or who are still working toward it, a department closure can be a much harder landing.

So, Who Actually Needs an Alternative Plan Right Now?

You've been banking entirely on a tenure-track job. If the TT path is your only plan, the current landscape is a good reason to develop a parallel one — not because you should give up on academia, but because having a real alternative actually makes you a more confident, less desperate job candidate. People who have options negotiate differently than people who don't.

You're in a department that feels precarious. If your program has had enrollment declines, budget conversations, or restructuring rumors — or if you're in a field that's been politically targeted, like ethnic studies, gender studies, area studies, or the humanities broadly — it's worth paying attention. You don't have to assume the worst, but waiting for an official announcement before you start thinking about next steps puts you behind. The faculty who land on their feet after a department closure are almost always the ones who had already started building relationships and visibility outside it.

What Should I Do Now?

1. Audit your transferable skills. "I can research and write" is a start, but it's not enough. Get specific. Can you design and execute a study? Manage a multi-year project with shifting stakeholders? Synthesize complex information for non-expert audiences? Train and mentor others? These map onto real roles in research, policy, consulting, UX, content strategy, and more.

2. Start building an external footprint. This doesn't mean abandoning your academic work. It means letting people outside academia know you exist. A LinkedIn profile that speaks to non-academic audiences. A piece of writing published somewhere beyond a journal. A conversation with someone who works in a field adjacent to yours. It's time to build new bridges for alternative paths.

3. Get specific about what non-academic jobs actually look like for someone with your background. The term "Alt-ac" gets thrown around a lot, but it covers genuinely different territory — research roles in industry, policy work, think tanks, government, nonprofits, publishing, higher ed administration, UX research, consulting, and more. The more concretely you can picture what those paths look like for your discipline and skill set, the less abstract and intimidating the whole thing gets.

4. Don't wait for a crisis to start exploring. The researchers and faculty members who navigate transitions most successfully aren't the ones who left in a panic — they're the ones who started paying attention early, built relationships outside their department, and had a sense of what they'd do if the academic path didn't work out. That groundwork takes time. Start now.

© 2026 Marya T. Mtshali. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the author.

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