A major new study has found that when US-based academics obtain tenure, they become more likely to pursue novel and intellectually ambitious lines of inquiry. This is despite those projects being less likely to produce the highly cited papers so readily converted by the modern university into metric-based proxies for academic success. Beyond their immediate context, the findings raise uncomfortable questions for university leaders in the UK, where a growing share of teaching and research is undertaken by academics employed on fixed-term, fractional, hourly-paid, and zero-hours contracts.
Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the paper begins by surveying a longstanding debate about the purpose and consequences of tenure in higher education. As the authors point out, a common criticism of this lifetime labour contract is that it reduces incentives to perform. Once job security is guaranteed, so the logic goes, productivity should fall. With employment secured, the incentive to produce large quantities of research—or, put another way, to keep safely to well-traversed intellectual terrain likely to generate recognizable, quick-win outputs and citation returns—may weaken. Economists sometimes describe this as a “moral hazard” problem: remove the threat of dismissal and performance may decline.
A common criticism of this lifetime labour contract is that it reduces incentives to perform. Once job security is guaranteed, so the logic goes, productivity should fall.
Others, however, regard tenure less as a reward for past achievement than as an institutional safeguard for academic freedom. By providing long-term security, tenure allows researchers to pursue difficult questions in depth, invest in projects whose value may not become apparent for years, and take the kind of intellectual risks that require time to think, ponder and, as Nietzsche liked to say, “ruminate”—slowly digesting the material and attending to the different possibilities which a problem opens up. In this sense, as the authors observe, tenure may encourage scholars to take “bigger bets” in their research, pursuing novel ideas with uncertain outcomes in the hope of making important discoveries.
But what does the data actually say?
The PNAS paper analyzes the research trajectories of 12,611 faculty members across 15 disciplines, tracking their publications, citation impact, and research direction in the years before and after tenure.
On one level, the findings complicate the simplest “moral hazard” critique. Publication rates do indeed rise sharply during the tenure-track years and typically peak just before tenure. But after tenure, output does not simply collapse. In many lab-based fields, including biology and chemistry, productivity not only remains high but, in some cases, even increases. In non-lab-based fields, including mathematics, sociology and political science—where research is less easily multiplied through large teams or laboratory infrastructure, and may depend more heavily on theoretical, critical or interpretive work—publication rates are more likely to decline.
That disciplinary divergence is the first hint at the paper’s deeper finding, which concerns not the volume of output per se, but the kinds of questions researchers pursue. After tenure, faculty become more likely to pursue new research agendas and to produce work that is novel relative to the existing literature. Here the authors distinguish between research that is new to the individual scholar and research that is novel “for science as a whole”. On both measures, tenure is associated with a shift towards more exploratory work.
This shift comes with a trade-off. The share of highly cited “hit” papers—defined as papers in the top 5% of citations for their year and subfield—declines after tenure, while novelty rises. Post-tenure work appears less conventionally successful by citation-based measures, but more intellectually adventurous. As the authors put it, “faculty tend to undertake agendas that are both new to them and relatively novel in science, a potentially riskier behaviour that extends the reach of science as a whole but produces fewer hits”.
Put simply, where metric-driven university systems reward volume, grant capture, citation performance and the constant churn of measurable outputs, researchers have strong reasons to remain close to established paths, and projects with known fundability and predictable career returns become the rational choice. What the PNAS research suggests, however, is that, while tenure does not make those pressures vanish, it can loosen their hold enough for some scholars to pursue questions with uncertain outcomes, even when that exploration may look less successful in the short run.
Researchers have strong reasons to remain close to established paths, and projects with known fundability and predictable career returns become the rational choice.
All of which leaves us with a provocative question: is tenure’s most important function to ensure the continued productivity of the academic knowledge worker, or to protect the freedom to take intellectual risks on which scholarly innovation depends? Viewed in that light, the paper’s conclusion—that tenure matters not only for academics, but also for the discoveries that benefit society—has clear read-across to the UK higher education system.
Although formal tenure was abolished in the UK in the 1980s, employment security remains a live issue in an increasingly neoliberalized sector where “flexibility” too often functions as a polite euphemism for poorer working conditions, reduced bargaining power and the transfer of economic risk from institutions to individual academics—while self-professedly inclusive senior administrators acquiesce in the rebranding of self-exploitation and of the intensified extraction of surplus labour as “professional commitment”.
Indeed, in some ways, the link between job security and the practical conditions for exercising academic freedom is already suggested, albeit incompletely, by the UK’s own regulatory framework. Recent guidance from the Office for Students (OfS) states that academic freedom includes the freedom “to question and test received wisdom” and “to put forward new ideas and controversial or unpopular opinions” without risking adverse consequences such as job loss, damage to promotion prospects, or reduced chances of securing other jobs.
A permanent professor, a fixed-term research fellow, an hourly paid lecturer, and a postdoctoral researcher dependent on a principal investigator may all enjoy the same formal freedom to “question and test received wisdom”. But they do not all exercise that freedom from the same position of security.
Nor do they all face the same risks if they choose to pursue an unfashionable research agenda unlikely to attract grant funding; submit a research ethics proposal for work premised on the brute reality of biological sex to a panel known to be supportive of gender-identity ideology; challenge a departmental consensus around critical-race-theory-inflected conduct policies; criticize institutional statements on political matters; resist a managerial request to use preferred pronouns in e-mail signatures; or spend years on a project whose value may not be immediately legible to—or considered politically tasteful by —funders, REF panels or promotion committees. Not for nothing does one recent study observe, in terms capacious enough to cover a considerable amount of institutional mischief, that fixed-term academics, with their jobs permanently at risk, are acutely “vulnerable to top-down mandated redefinitions of faculty responsibilities”.
In that sense, academic freedom surely depends, at least in part, on whether academics have enough security to take intellectual and professional risks long before the question of formal sanction ever arises. For those whose next contract, teaching hours, or research post depends on the goodwill of a principal investigator, head of department, or hiring panel, the pressure to remain agreeable and generally #BeKind is built into the employment relationship itself.
Academic freedom surely depends, at least in part, on whether academics have enough security to take intellectual and professional risks long before the question of formal sanction ever arises.
This is where the UK’s academic labour market becomes difficult to ignore. The latest figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) show that 29% of UK academic staff—69,875 people—were employed on fixed-term contracts. Among part-time academic staff, the proportion was higher still, at 43%. At the most precarious end of the spectrum, HESA-linked analysis records 3,440 non-atypical academic staff on zero-hours contracts in 2024/25, of whom 3,180 were hourly paid.
The problem is particularly acute among research-only academics. A 2023 study commissioned by the Higher Education Policy Institute, using 2020-21 HESA data, found that 68% of research-only academics were employed on fixed-term contracts, far above the sector average. The same report also suggests that insecurity is concentrated at precisely the career stages at which these academics are trying to establish themselves. Of those aged 25-34, 2.2% were employed on zero-hours contracts, up 15% since 2020, while the figure for those aged 35–49 was 1.9%, up 12% over the same period.
Although the UK is hardly overrun with studies exploring the academic-freedom dimension of casualization, as opposed to its economic, cultural and psychological costs, what evidence we do have points in the same direction. As long ago as 2014, Ana Lopes and Indra Angeli Dewan published a qualitative study of how the experience of hourly paid and zero-hours lecturers and tutors working in higher education institutions in England and Scotland affected their “pedagogical practices”. Their concern was not simply that casualized academics were poorly paid, but that contractual insecurity shaped their ability to teach well, speak up and build an academic career.
Interviewees described a bleak world in which teaching hours were often confirmed only shortly before the start of term, work was fragmented across institutions, and large amounts of preparation, student support and administration went unpaid. That insecurity took its toll on what staff felt able to say and do. As one respondent put it, “Basically, you keep quiet and then it works, but you feel forced into doing that”. Another explained that she didn’t “put her head above the parapet” as she approached the point at which she might become eligible for a more secure contract, for fear of being seen as a “troublemaker”. “Your status shapes the kind of strategies you can use”, she said, “and how you’re so limited in what you can do about your situation”.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Lopes and Dewan found that hourly-paid academics had little or no time for their own research. Nor did they have the support available to permanent colleagues to develop a research portfolio, secure internal grants, attend conferences, or build a publication record.
More recently, a 2026 peer-reviewed study of fixed-term academics in the UK examined the same problem in explicitly academic-freedom terms. Based on interviews with 21 fixed-term academics, the study found that participants did not experience academic freedom as some grand abstraction, but as something frequently absent amidst the grim, day-to-day reality of their working conditions.
Participants spoke of “shitty, temporary contracts” and described a lack of autonomy over the choice, organization and pursuit of their research and teaching. One said his “hands are tied” and that, without freedom, he could not “work in an innovative way”. Another was more explicit still: “I would prefer [researching] something more heterodox. But obviously, I’m not doing it because if I do, I won’t get any job”. Others described the need to “suck up some stuff”, become “very people-pleasing”, and make sure that senior colleagues liked them in order to keep alive the possibility of future employment.
Across these studies, a clear pattern emerges: casualization is not merely an employment-rights issue—important though that is—but also a phenomenon that alters the conditions under which academic freedom is exercised, changing what academics feel able to research, teach, challenge and pursue over the long term.
In an era when the “values” of institutions and funding bodies increasingly signal what kinds of work are welcome, fundable, REF-legible and career-enhancing, the pressure to remain normatively aligned, intellectually docile and ideologically clubbable is already strong. Add fixed-term contracts, fractional work, hourly-paid teaching, zero-hours arrangements and postdoctoral churn, and the incentives become clearer still: stay close to established paths; think shallow, not deep; produce what can be measured; steer clear of distastefully heterodox issues; avoid thorny or intractable questions that can’t be resolved in those fleeting moments between marking, teaching, staff meetings, student-support e-mails, module administration, updating the “Virtual Learning Environment”, applying for full-time jobs, crying in the gender-neutral toilets, completing whatever mandatory online EDI training module has just landed in your inbox—and don’t take too long about any of it, since in the neoliberal academy the race is very much to the swift.
