Some individuals and institutions eschew tenure.

Columbia University in New York City has been trying to give David Helfand tenure for nearly four decades. Each time, the astronomer has refused.

Tenure “does more to suppress academic freedom of those who don’t have it”, because its protections aren’t available to the bulk of academics today, who hold adjunct or non-tenure track positions, he explains. “It just seemed like a system that was in desperate need of reform and that I didn’t want to participate in.”

So, when he came up for tenure at Columbia, he said no thanks. It took two years of negotiation to convince the university’s provost to put him on five-year contracts. As each term expires, Helfand writes up his accomplishments and intentions, an exercise that he finds useful.

His process is similar to what happens at Olin College of Engineering in Needham, Massachusetts, which was founded in 1997 with a no-tenure policy as one of its precepts. However, the college still had to come up with a way to evaluate faculty and promote their development, says emeritus associate provost Vincent Manno.

Each year, the Olin system assesses professors on activities that support three key purposes: development of students, support of the institution and impact beyond Olin. Biases and other problems that pop up in tenure reviews can happen in Olin’s reviews, too. But more than half of the current faculty members have been at Olin for more than a decade, and several are approaching the 20-year mark, says Manno, suggesting that professors can thrive without tenure.

As for Helfand, he’s thrived, too. But in July 2022, the provost refused to give him a new limited-term contract, so he has de facto tenure after all.