ABSTRACT
Eventually a department is called on to decide whether an individual to whom it offered a term appointment should be granted a tenured position. Academic tenure is not as singular as often supposed. Even the mechanics of the tenure system are hardly unique. Despite such analogies, however, tenure undoubtedly provides professors an unusual degree of latitude and security. Although academic freedom is widely seen as valuable, it is threatened whenever anyone seeks to stifle free inquiry in the name of some cause that supposedly demands everyone's unthinking allegiance. A key feature of the tenure system is that those who hold tenure decide whether it should be granted to others. To defend the tenure system in principle, however, is not to applaud the ways it has been implemented. Even a single ill-advised decision may lead to years of disruption, bringing tenure itself into disrepute and thereby threatening that academic freedom the system is intended to preserve.
