The Tenure Sprint with the Invisible Finish Line

How vague promotion standards extract maximum labor and accelerate burnout

Jonathan Chng on Upslash

Dr. Sarah Chen sits in her department chair’s office at the end of her first year on the tenure track, notepad open and pen ready. She asks the question that’s been keeping her up at night: “What exactly do I need to do to get tenure?”

Her chair leans back and considers. “Well, you’re very bright and capable. You’ll want to be publishing in good journals. Stay engaged with service. Keep your teaching evaluations strong.”

This canned response does not inspire confidence, so Sarah continues to push for more. “How many publications?” “Which journals count as good?” Her chair smiles warmly but offers little clarity. He instead says,

It is holistic; we will consider the big picture, but every tenure case is unique.

Over the following weeks, Sarah asks the same question to different colleagues. A senior faculty member says teaching matters more than she thinks and she needs several articles beyond her book project. Another warns her that committee service won’t count much and promptly invites her to join a committee a month later. Her advisor from grad school tells her she’s overthinking it—just keep her head down and produce.

Different advice. Contradictory priorities. An invisible finish line.

So Sarah does what so many of us do in this situation; she does everything. She says yes to every committee, takes on extra advising, reviews manuscripts, organizes panels, and mentors students who aren’t officially hers. She attends multiple conferences a year and gets several papers in the pipeline, all while trying to turn her dissertation into a book.

Nights blur into weekends, weekends dissolve into summers, and through it all runs this persistent undercurrent of anxiety—the gnawing sense that she can never quite slow down because she simply does not know what will constitute “enough.”

Sarah isn’t a real person, but I suspect many of you recognize her—maybe you’ve lived some version of her story, or you’re living it right now. This relentless pace isn’t merely the product of individual ambition or insecurity.

The truth is far more troubling: this pattern is structural. It’s baked directly into the architecture of how tenure and promotion systems are designed and, more critically, into how strategically vague those systems often remain in practice.

As conservative forces attack academia from without, this internal dysfunction ensures we’re quietly collapsing from within.

Photo by Vadim Sherbakov on Unsplash

Tenure was not originally designed to extract maximum output from scholars.

The origin story of tenure in the United States stresses that it emerged primarily as a protection for academic freedom, not as some elaborate mechanism for maximizing scholarly productivity. The AAUP’s 1915 Declaration of Principles emphasizes tenure as a critical safeguard against dismissal for controversial research, teaching, or speech—a way to insulate scholars from political pressures, donor influence, and administrative caprice.

In other words, tenure was meant to protect intellectual risk-taking and the pursuit of knowledge wherever it might lead, not to function as a prolonged audition in which scholars must demonstrate an apparently limitless capacity for labor.

Over time, however, tenure became increasingly entangled with institutional performance metrics: publication counts, citation indices, grant dollars, student credit hours, and service contributions.

By the mid-twentieth century, the “probationary period” had been formalized through the AAUP’s 1940 Statement, establishing a relatively standardized timeframe—often up to seven years—before a decision about “continuous appointment” would be rendered.

Importantly, this tenure system developed in a publishing economy where research evaluation became increasingly tied to journal impact scores, allowing major for-profit publishers to consolidate high-status journals, turn scholarly prestige into commercial power, and establish these metrics as the dominant measure of research impact.

This led to a peculiar and deeply consequential situation: the 7-year clock became standardized, while the criteria for success remained frustratingly opaque and governed by a capitalist logic in which productivity is endlessly demanded and “enough” is structurally impossible.

The tenure timeline is fixed, but the finish line is not.

This gap between a rigid timeline and ambiguous expectations creates a remarkably powerful incentive structure.

When you don’t know exactly how many publications will be deemed “enough,” what level of teaching excellence will satisfy the committee, or precisely how much service will be weighed against your research productivity, the rational response is to always do more because more is safer than the terrifying possibility of “not enough.”

In their illuminating article “Strategic Ambiguity: How Pre-Tenure Faculty Negotiate the Hidden Rules of Academia,” scholars Leandra Cate, LaWanda M. Ward, and Karly S. Ford demonstrate how tenure criteria are often communicated not through formal documents or transparent conversations, but through informal channels, inconsistent messages, and sometimes outright contradictory signals that leave faculty scrambling to decode the “real” expectations.

Their research reveals patterns that will feel achingly familiar: expectations are frequently implicit rather than explicit. Faculty must learn the “real rules” through observation, rumor, and trial and error. This ambiguity encourages what the researchers describe as “self-directed overproduction.” When the standards are unclear, doing more feels like the only defensible strategy.

When tenure standards remain deliberately imprecise, institutions reap substantial benefits while individual faculty absorb the costs.

They receive extraordinary output because faculty produce more research, take on more service, and invest heavily in teaching, all because they cannot risk being perceived as insufficient. When someone fails to achieve tenure, the narrative easily becomes one of personal inadequacy rather than an indictment of structural opacity. And strategic ambiguity provides institutions with both flexibility and deniability. Decisions can be justified after the fact, framed as holistic judgments, and insulated from scrutiny.

In other words, unclear standards function as a management tool that extracts maximum labor while minimizing institutional accountability.

And to be very clear, this system doesn’t impact everyone equally.

Cate, Ward, and Ford argue that strategic ambiguity disproportionately disadvantages faculty of color. Access to tacit knowledge remains profoundly unequal. Tenured ranks continue to be disproportionately white in many universities, which means the informal mentoring networks where the “real rules” get shared are significantly less accessible to scholars of color.

When expectations remain hidden, evaluators rely more heavily on subjective judgments that are well-documented to be shaped by racialized and gendered assumptions. And service burdens are uneven because scholars of color are asked far more frequently to take on diversity labor and mentoring work, which is consistently undervalued in tenure evaluations.

In an ambiguous system operating within an unequal social structure, those who already occupy marginalized positions are far more likely to overwork and still be evaluated as falling somehow short of expectations that were never clearly articulated in the first place.

And of course, US-based scholars are now facing an additional crisis.

The very protections that tenure was designed to provide are being systematically eroded across American higher education. Academic freedom is under direct assault from state legislatures, governing boards, and administrators who increasingly view faculty expertise and intellectual independence as threats rather than assets.

Photo by Natilyn Hicks Photography on Unsplash

We’re watching as states pass laws restricting what can be taught about race, gender, and American history. We’re seeing tenured faculty investigated or pushed out for scholarship that challenges powerful interests. We’re witnessing the dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs without faculty support. The promise of tenure, that achieving this milestone would provide genuine protection for intellectual risk-taking, is revealed as increasingly hollow.

The situation borders on the absurd: the metrics and unclear expectations required to achieve tenure will remain firmly in place, extracting maximum labor from vulnerable workers, but tenure’s protections—the entire justification for this grueling process—are being systematically dismantled.

This should enrage us. It should make us question whether we’re asking scholars to sacrifice so much for protections that may prove illusory precisely when they’re needed most.

Most conversations about tenure focus on how individual faculty can become more strategic, more productive, and more resilient.

I do believe that those conversations matter. One of the reasons Publish Not Perish exists is to support individuals navigating these unfair systems. But framing everything as an individual challenge obscures the structural problems that need addressing.

• What would academic work look like if tenure criteria were genuinely clear, transparent, and equitable?

• What if tenure primarily protected intellectual freedom, as originally intended, rather than extracting maximal output during prolonged insecurity?

• What if saying no were interpreted as healthy boundaries rather than a career risk?

I understand the impulse to defend tenure as it currently exists, especially when academic freedom faces unprecedented threats. To be clear, I believe academic freedom remains essential to the entire enterprise of higher education. But defending academic freedom and defending the current tenure system are not the same thing. We can fight to preserve the protections tenure was designed to provide while simultaneously demanding radical transformation of how we earn those protections in the first place.

Until we grapple with these structural questions and demand genuine transparency from institutions that benefit from this system, the sprint continues.

Sarah Chen and thousands of scholars like her will keep running until something breaks—their health, their relationships, and their love for work they once approached with joy. The cost of this system extends far beyond individual exhaustion. It determines whether higher education can continue to produce the knowledge and critical thinking our democracy depends on.

Regressive forces attacking academic freedom are destroying higher education from the outside in—but our insistence on tying academic freedom protections to unclear metrics and opaque evaluation processes is destroying us from the inside out. We cannot afford to lose on both fronts.

If we want to preserve what tenure was meant to protect, we need to radically transform how we decide who deserves those protections in the first place.