This professor thinks tenure is bad for higher education and he’s taking his case to court.

Susan Svrluga of the Washington Post reported.

A professor hates tenure so much that he’s making a federal case of it

James Wetherbe, a professor of information technology at Texas Tech University, used to hear this kind of comment all the time when he gave speeches to business leaders about innovation and how changes could eliminate jobs while ensuring more production: “Easy for you to say — you’ve got tenure!”

Tenure didn’t square with his principles, even though it benefited him personally. He believes it creates a system that makes it difficult to fire even the laziest and most incompetent of professors. Serving on corporate boards and working with business people made him more acutely aware of the differences.

Finally, bothered by that conflict, about 20 years ago he told the University of Minnesota, where he worked at the time, that he was giving up his own job security.

He hasn’t had tenure ever since. By choice.

Not only that, but he believes so strongly that academic freedom should be protected by the First Amendment — not a job-security plan — that he’s asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear his case against Texas Tech.

The tenure system was designed to ensure academic freedom, allowing scholars to ask hard questions and pursue research that might rankle leaders, shake up mainstream thought, question the status quo. It was established long ago, when many universities were closely affiliated with churches.

But now it mostly functions as a job-protection plan, Wetherbe argues.

“The irony of this whole story,” he said, is that “tenure is supposed to protect academic freedom. I have spoken out against tenure, and been retaliated against for that.”

That’s why he’s fighting back: He claims he had the courage to live by his principles, asked to be continuously evaluated on his own performance rather than coasting along, and that his career is suffering for that.