While the past academic year did not end in the same dramatic controversy as 2024’s did with clashes between protestors and campus police, the UNC community entered this summer with questions once again swirling around its leadership.
Chair of the Faculty Beth Moracco shared an open letter with the Board of Trustees on May 23 questioning the lack of personnel actions in 2025 after only a limited number of faculty from its health-related professional schools saw tenure approval. Pressure mounted further after national advocacy groups weighed in — and while the trustees unceremoniously approved 33 tenure cases during a specially-scheduled June 4 meeting, questions from campus and beyond still remain about what the board’s strategy is and why there was a deviation from standard practices.
Among those who criticized UNC is the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), with its president saying the delay “calls into question the state of academic freedom and faculty governance at North Carolina’s flagship school.” Communications professor Michael Palm is the president of UNC’s chapter of the AAUP and joined 97.9 The Hill’s Aaron Keck to talk about the group’s local and national response, as well as the importance of tenure writ-large and concern generated by the Board of Trustees.
Below is a transcript of Palm’s conversation with Keck, which has been shortened from the full segment and lightly edited for clarity.
Aaron Keck: Before we get into the specifics of this saga, for people who don’t know, what is tenure and why does it matter?
Michael Palm: Tenure is a form of job security for professors [and] academic instructors — and I appreciate this question, because I think it’s important to clarify what tenure is not as well as what tenure is. Tenure is not a lifetime appointment like some judges and other positions receive, as it has been mischaracterized systematically and for years by right-wing opponents of higher education. It does provide job security for professors. But what I think it’s important to emphasize is that most professors in the United States, as well as at UNC-Chapel Hill, do not have tenure and have very precarious employment situations. They can be fired arbitrarily for budget changes or reasons unrelated to their job performance. What tenure does provide is protection from that arbitrary termination for reasons unrelated to job performance.
It’s also worth pointing out that receiving tenure takes many years. In the case of most professors at UNC, myself included, it’s a six-year process that involves extensive review from colleagues within your department, from administrators at UNC and experts in your field from other peer institutions. So, by the time those decisions have reached the Board of Trustees, they’ve literally been vetted for years. And the Board of Trustees’ job is to not review the professor’s individual cases, but to review the procedure — make sure all the i’s have been dotted, the t’s have been crossed — and to literally rubber-stamp those approvals.
Keck: Now the Board of Trustees’ members will come back and say, ‘It’s not just our job to rubber-stamp.’ So, when it comes to the board’s actual role, what should it be? What does ‘just making sure the i’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed’ entail, exactly?
Palm: The Board of Trustees are political appointees. They are not academics, they are not higher education professionals, they are not even higher education administrators. The point of the tenure review is that people who are knowledgeable experts in the fields of the individual faculty members being considered for tenure are doing that review. The Board of Trustees has no business being involved in the actual review itself. They are responsible for the policies of UNC-Chapel Hill, and it is their role to make sure that those policies and procedures they approve — and reapprove and update and revise — are being followed and being met. And so if there is some procedural irregularity, that is something [where] the Board of Trustees might step in and rightly say, ‘This needs to be corrected,’ or, ‘This procedure wasn’t followed.’
But to say, ‘This professor doesn’t deserve tenure,’ or, ‘I don’t like tenure, so we should do away with it,’ as some of the board of trustees have been saying… that’s entirely inappropriate and does lasting damage to UNCs reputation and to our ability to attract and retain the most qualified students and faculty.
UNC Communications professor and Chapter President of the AAUP Michael Palm (right) joined 97.9 The Hill’s Aaron Keck in studio. (Photo by Aaron Keck/Chapel Hill Media Group.)
Keck: And that’s an important point too, because I think people — not just on the Board of Trustees, but just people outside of the profession — might not be fully aware of like what would happen to the profession if tenure goes away. What would happen?
Palm: I think there are a few likely effects that we’ve already started to see some of in states like Florida, where tenure has been also attacked for several years, and we see the Board of Trustees and the General Assembly here in North Carolina following that right-wing playbook. I think at the individual level, there is unquestionably a chilling effect where faculty will be less confident in their ability to freely research and teach the subjects of their choosing — if they feel like their research and teaching is going to be subject to political review as opposed to professional review. At the institutional level, there are very real, reputational repercussions here as well. And I think that in the immediate case of the faculty members who were denied tenure for several months this spring, it’s unavoidable that they’re going to be reconsidering their decisions to come to or remain at UNC. Faculty who are able to secure tenure at a very reputable research university like UNC are likely to be in high demand at peer institutions. And we have seen an exodus of very qualified faculty — frankly, primarily faculty of color — from UNC because of these political attacks and incursions into the governance of the university.
Keck: That’s people leaving UNC — are you also hearing from people who might otherwise apply to teach at UNC who are now not considering that?
Palm: Absolutely. I think the number of applications for incoming students may be slightly up, but the national — as well as racial and ethnic and income — diversity among those students has to be down… and informally, yes, there is widespread reluctance at best, and refusal at worst, to even consider coming to UNC given the current state of political interference at the university.
Keck: Getting back to the importance of tenure, I recently read Holden Thorpe’s book with Buck Goldstein, “Our Higher Calling” in which they make the very trenchant point that if you’re concerned about the high cost of paying for college, tenure is a really cost-efficient way to attract really good faculty members. Because most faculty members at a university, even the ones making a really decent salary, are going to make less at the university than they would out in some other profession. If that’s the case, you’ve got to have something to attract good people to teach…and if you don’t have something like tenure, you’re not going to attract good people to teach.
Palm: Yes, it is an absolutely essential recruiting tool for faculty. I think there’s another misconception… and again, this is a decades-long, concerted misinformation campaign about tenure taken on by right-wing politicians and opponents of higher education — like those that, unfortunately, populate the General Assembly in North Carolina and the Board of Trustees at UNC. Tenure does not mean that your performance review stops. Every faculty member I know at UNC continues to have annual performance reviews in their department or in their academic unit. In my case, at least every five years, I have to go up for post-tenure review and demonstrate continued productivity. [I have to prove] the fact that I’m making an impact and contributing into my field.
On top of that… tenure actually brings more work for faculty, not less. Because once you have tenure, you’ve demonstrated that you can do the type of research, do the type of teaching that is required to be a contributing member of your profession. Now, you’re also asked to take on more work at the administrative level to help run the university — serving in departmental positions, like chairperson of a department or director of undergraduate studies, and also serving on university committees like the committees that review tenure and promotion cases. It’s not like tenure brings some kind of semi-retirement for faculty. It’s actually a step up into the next phase of your career, which does bring additional responsibilities.
UNC Chancellor Lee Roberts (left) speaks with Chair of the Board of Trustees (right) and Vinay Patel (standing) at a full board meeting held at The Spangler Center on May 22, 2025. While the trustees approved tenure requests for faculty in the schools of Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy and Public Health, many other requests were left without an answer until June 4 — and were some of the only tenure approvals made in 2025. (Photo via Jon Gardiner/UNC-Chapel Hill.)
Keck: That said…I do remember when I was in grad school, there was one guy in my political science department who taught nothing, had no students, and we have no idea what he was doing there.
Palm: Honestly, in my experience, when people approached their jobs post-tenure like that…their jobs are terminated! It’s not unheard of, and I have former colleagues who were tenured and lost their jobs for not doing the type of research and teaching that is required of tenured — or for that matter, non-tenured — instructors at a university like UNC.
Keck: That letter from the AAUP to the board was sent out a few weeks ago now, at the beginning of June. What, if any, response have you gotten?
Palm: No response. [For context,] the AAUP is an organization that is over a hundred years old and has defended academic freedom for faculty across the country. And I think it’s worth noting that academic freedom is both an individual right — for professors to teach and study what they are trained in, what their expertise is in, and to be able to do their research and teaching free from political interference. But that protection from political interference extends to the faculty as a body at a university like UNC, and that the governance of the university — the academic decisions — should be made by faculty free of political interference from bodies like the Board of Trustees or the General Assembly.
We were part of the pressure campaign once the tenure delays were made public. And then once the tenures were conferred, we sent a follow-up letter asking for two very simple things: accountability and transparency. What happened, who’s responsible, why did it happen? And, yeah, that letter has not even been dignified with the acknowledgement of receipt.
Keck: What happens next on the assumption that you don’t get a response or a satisfactory response? What’s the next move for you?
Palm: Well, I think that there is a lot of repair that needs to be done to UNCs reputation. I think at the level of individual faculty members who were up for tenure this year, who are going up for tenure in the next year or two…[they] are obviously rethinking their career paths and where they might want to continue their careers. And I think the damage done to UNCs reputation because of this kind of political meddling is also something that we’re going to need to work on with UNC administrators as well as faculty groups like the AAUP and the Faculty Council. I think there’s a real role to play here for Chancellor [Lee] Roberts to step up and join us in our call for accountability and transparency from the Board of Trustees. I hope he’ll do that.
Featured photo via Johnny Andrews/UNC-Chapel Hill.
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