Brief Update on Texan Tenure

I blogged a few weeks ago about SB 18, a bill that would end tenure at Texas public universities, including UT Austin and Texas A&M. The bad news is that SB 18 passed the Texas Senate. The good news is that I’m told—I don’t know how reliably—that it has little chance of passing the House.

But it’s going to be discussed in the House tomorrow. Any Texas residents reading this can, and are strongly urged, to submit brief comments here. Please note that the deadline is tomorrow (Monday) morning.

I just submitted the comment below. Obviously, among the arguments that I genuinely believe, I made only those that I expect might have some purchase on a Texas Republican.

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I’m a professor of computer science at UT Austin, specializing in quantum computing.  I am however writing this statement strictly in my capacity as a private citizen and Texas resident, not in my professional capacity.

Like the supporters of SB 18, I too see leftist ideological indoctrination on college campuses as a serious problem.  It’s something that I and many other moderates and classical liberals in academia have been pushing back on for years.

But my purpose in this comment is to explain why eliminating tenure at UT Austin and Texas A&M is NOT the solution — indeed, it would be the equivalent of treating a tumor by murdering the patient.

I’ve seen firsthand how already, just the *threat* that SB 18 might pass has seriously hampered our ability to recruit the best scientists and engineers to become faculty at UT Austin.  If this bill were actually to pass, I expect that the impact on our recruiting would be total and catastrophic.  It would effectively mean the end of UT Austin as one of the top public universities in the country.  Hundreds of scientists who were lured to Texas by UT’s excellence, including me and my wife, would start looking for jobs elsewhere — even those whose own tenure was “grandfathered in.”  They’d leave en masse for California and Massachusetts and anywhere else they could continue the lives they’d planned.

The reality is this: the sorts of scientists and engineers we’re talking about could typically make vastly higher incomes, in the high six figures or even seven figures, by working in private industry or forming their own startups.  Yet they choose to accept much lower salaries to spend their careers in academia.  Why?  Because of the promise of a certain way of life: one where they can speak freely as scholars and individuals without worrying about how it will affect their employment.  Tenure is a central part of that promise.  Remove it, and the value proposition collapses.

In some sense, the state of Texas (like nearly every other state) actually gets a bargain through tenure.  It couldn’t possibly afford to retain top-caliber scientists and engineers — working on medical breakthroughs, revolutionary advances in AI, and all the other stuff — if it DIDN’T offer tenure.

For this reason, I hope that even conservatives in the Texas House will see that we have a common interest here, in ensuring SB 18 never even makes it out of committee — for the sake of the future of innovation in Texas.  I’m open to other possible responses to the problem of political indoctrination on campus.