Faculty members at regional public and community colleges in Oklahoma can no longer be granted tenure.
Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt decreed the end of tenure in an executive order, effective Thursday. The state has a “constitutional and statutory responsibility to steward taxpayer dollars wisely and ensure public institutions of higher education operate with accountability, transparency, and measurable outcomes,” the order states.
Public regional universities, which educate more than 54,000 students in the state combined, “shall not grant new lifetime tenure appointments,” the order states. Instead, they may hire faculty under fixed-term, renewable contracts, and the renewals are dependent on professors’ performance, student outcomes, “alignment with workforce and Oklahoma economic needs” and “institutional service.” Faculty members at these institutions who already have tenure may retain it. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 761 faculty members at Oklahoma regional colleges had tenure in 2024, and 412 faculty members were on the tenure track.
The same tenure ban applies to Oklahoma’s 13 community colleges.
Faculty at public research universities—which includes the University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State University and their health sciences institutions—may still receive tenure or tenure-track appointments, but will be subject to post-tenure review every five years or fewer and may be fired for “sustained failure to meet established performance standards.”
Stitt’s office did not return Inside Higher Ed’s request for comment Thursday, but Stitt told the conservative think tank Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs (OCPA) that “no job funded by taxpayers should be exempt from regular, meaningful performance reviews, whether you’re the governor or you are a university professor.”
“Don’t let someone teach no classes and bring no research dollars in, right? … That’s pretty silly,” Stitt told OCPA. “We hear, ‘Well, if we terminate this person, we’ll get sued. It’s not worth it. We’ll just let them do nothing for the next 10 years until hopefully they leave … most Oklahomans think that’s weird, that’s dumb, it shouldn’t happen. Oklahomans will always back excellent faculty, but we should not subsidize systems that put privilege over performance.”
The governor’s assumption that tenure encourages lazy academics is a fallacy, said Deepa Das Acevedo, a legal anthropologist and tenure researcher at Emory University.
“The governor, like many other observers, has fallen prey to assumptions about how incentives operate in academia, specifically the assumption that job insecurity incentivizes productivity,” Das Acevedo said. “But we know from studies that are internal to specific disciplines, as well as a very few that are pan-discipline, that that assumption just does not hold. … Tenure does not measurably impact productivity, at least as far as publication and research is concerned.”
Republican-controlled state legislatures like those in Texas and Florida have taken up efforts to eliminate tenure, but those proposals are often watered down into laws that weaken, but don’t outright end, tenure. That said, it’s unlikely that Oklahoma will be the last state to erode tenure this way, according to Tim Cain, professor of higher education and associate director of the University of Georgia’s Louise McBee Institute of Higher Education.
“Other states don’t need the encouragement of Oklahoma to try to pass significant legislation that will undermine tenure—those efforts will take place in a number of states regardless of this,” he said. “But this could embolden [them].”
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) president Todd Wolfson condemned the executive order in a statement Thursday.
“With this Order, the State of Oklahoma has proclaimed to the academic community that they do not view academic freedom as important for public higher education in the state. The removal of protections for academic freedom will have a devastating effect on the quality of education in Oklahoma, and on recruitment and retention of faculty and students,” Wolfson said. “Governor Stitt has instantly made Oklahoma less competitive for hiring the best qualified faculty members to the institutions that educate so many of its residents.”
Competitive hiring may be one reason that Stitt didn’t fully eliminate tenure at research institutions, Cain said.
“I would speculate that there might have been a sense that tenure was needed at those institutions to recruit the type of research-oriented faculty that a research university would have, and that teaching-oriented faculty might not be as difficult, in their mind, to recruit,” Cain said. “I don’t know that that’s actually true, but I think that the University of Oklahoma is competing with [other] research universities in a different way than other institutions are.”
Even without anti-tenure legislation and executive orders, tenure is dying, Cain said. Already, most faculty members in the United States are on fixed-term contracts. A 2023 study from the AAUP showed that, in the fall of that year, 23 percent of faculty held full-time tenured positions, down from 39 percent in fall 1987. Between fall 2002 and fall 2023, the number of contingent appointments increased by 65 percent, while tenured appointments increased by only 6 percent and tenure-track appointments fell by 7 percent.
“This is a particularly pernicious way of undermining faculty and undermining tenure,” Cain said, “but that work is already being done in a lot of other ways as well.”
One thing the executive order is nearly guaranteed to do is increase the workload for staff and administrators at the research universities, Das Acevedo said.
“Five-year post-tenure review with a meaningful chance of termination is scary for the people who are going to be going through it, which means they are going to throw everything and the kitchen sink, in terms of documentation, at each one of those reviews,” she said. “While that might superficially sound like a good thing … the granular, everyday administrative aspect of that new normal is that people have to put these files together. So we’re going to have a lot of staff, a lot of university leaders and a lot of faculty who are sitting on these committees and spending a lot of their time reading files for five-year post-tenure review.”
In a second executive order Thursday, Stitt instructed the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education to develop a plan for performance-based funding for public colleges and universities to “maximize the state’s return on investment for funds appropriated to higher education.” The plan should be completed by Oct. 1 and implemented at or before the start of the following academic year, Stitt ordered.
The governor also asked the regents to conduct a “feasibility study” that looks at the “academic, fiscal, workforce, and accreditation implications” of an accelerated, 90-credit bachelor’s degree.
Johanna Alonso contributed to this report.
