I don't think we (academics) realize how vulnerable we are. I'm not sure how much longer tenure will last in an era when a) we've lost the public trust (for a lot of reasons, b) college/academia is a partisan political issue, and c) college-educated white-collar workers are losing their jobs to AI. We are in an incredibly privileged position relative to others, but that privilege also makes us far more precarious than most academics realize bc it makes us a target--and the threat is not just conservative politicians gunning for us but the much larger group of regular people who don't mind if we get put in our place or start losing our jobs like similar others or being asked to do tasks we don't want to do.
Because this wasn't clear in the original: it is not clear to me we can make the case persuasively that we deserve tenure or academic freedom. I think these protections are vital for knowledge production and are generally social goods, but we have also completely shit the bed in a lot of different ways. We're going to have to earn these privileges back. But the idea that we are uniquely knowledgeable or that we deserve job protection when so many others don't have it (and are even more vulnerable to job loss) is no longer convincing. We need to make a more compelling case, which will also require a clear structure in place to keep us in check so that people don't have to just take our word for it that they should trust us. Until we acknowledge our contribution to the lack of trust, the abuse of these privileges by faculty, and make the case of what we offer in the era of AI, our arguments to defend tenure and academic freedom sound hollow.
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