Public universities helped make American higher education a draw for students and researchers worldwide. Now lawmakers and governing boards from Kansas to Utah want proof that the professors who teach there work hard enough.
Faculty say the premise is backward. Professors who spoke with Fortune describe 55-hour weeks, departments that have shrunk by as much as half, and raises that haven’t kept pace with inflation.
“We are losing ground,” said Renita Coleman, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
As scrutiny of higher education grows, state legislators, governing boards, and administrators have started questioning how professors spend their time and whether they deliver enough for their salaries and job protections. Some have pushed to limit tenure. Others are demanding a detailed accounting of faculty responsibilities.
Critics see tenure as a shield for underperformers. Faculty say that misreads the job
Public confidence in American higher education has fallen sharply over the past decade. According to Gallup, 38% of Americans expressed a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in higher education in 2026, down from 57% in 2015. The share expressing very little or no confidence rose from 10% to 25%.
The weakening trust comes amid a convergence of concerns, from rising college costs and questions about the value of degrees to political battles on campuses. Those frustrations have fueled skepticism of tenure, which grants professors permanent faculty status after they meet a university’s standards for teaching, research, and service.
Tenure was designed to safeguard academic freedom. But the American Council of Trustees and Alumni acknowledged in July that the public increasingly sees it as “a mere promise of job security, even for incompetent or unproductive professors.”
Against that backdrop, lawmakers and university governing boards in states including Wisconsin, Utah, Ohio, and Kansas have moved to tighten faculty accountability. They have imposed minimum teaching loads, more rigorous post-tenure reviews, and other requirements to ensure professors do their share.
For Coleman, the assumption that professors ease up once they earn tenure couldn’t be further from reality.
“If they would only follow us around for a while, they would see this is ridiculous,” she said. “The pressure, the way they think, as soon as we get tenure, you’re going to stop working.”
Earning tenure can take half a dozen years, and by then the pace of the job is habit. The idea of slowing down can feel almost foreign, Coleman said.
“By the time we get tenure, we’re so ingrained in this, we can’t stop,” she said.
George Dehner, a history professor and department chair at Wichita State University, said the scrutiny often starts from a basic disconnect about what professors do.
“If you think the faculty are scamming you and don’t really work hard…this idea that faculty are working four or six hours a week teaching classes is a deep misunderstanding of what faculty do,” Dehner said. He and his peers “easily” work 55-hour weeks, he added, though their contracts stipulate 40-hour weeks during the nine-month academic year.
Kansas now requires written work plans and five-year reviews for tenured faculty
Many universities have long used a rough 40-40-20 model for faculty time: 40% teaching, 40% research, and 20% service to the institution and broader community.
In January, the Kansas Board of Regents, which governs the state’s six public universities, put those expectations in writing. Under its new policy, faculty at the three research universities (the University of Kansas, Kansas State, and Wichita State) must devote 40% to 55% of their workload to teaching, 35% to 45% to research, and 5% to 20% to public service. At the three regional universities, teaching rises to 60% to 75%.
Every faculty member now needs a written work plan, and annual reviews are mandatory. Those who fall short of workload expectations are placed on an improvement plan, and tenured faculty with two consecutive unsatisfactory annual reviews face dismissal, reassignment, or an additional one-year improvement plan.
Tenured faculty will also undergo a comprehensive peer review every five years, down from every seven.
Dehner described the policy as a concession to lawmakers who had pushed to give the regents greater authority to revoke tenure. Rather than protecting faculty, he argued, the new requirements reflect the same suspicion that professors aren’t doing enough.
“It is absolutely not welcome,” Dehner said. “It comes from a space where there’s a deep suspicion that faculty don’t do anything… that’s a bad-faith place to start. This belief that faculty are lazy and are scamming them [is] compounded by the fact that they have no idea what higher education people do.”
Gamal Weheba, an engineering professor at Wichita State, also sees the policy as an attempt to appease legislators rather than a meaningful measure of productivity. Academic work, he argued, can’t be measured by hours spent in a classroom or an office.
“It’s not just an idea of having a time card that I clock in and clock out before I talk to students,” Weheba said. “That can never happen.”
The Kansas Board of Regents did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment. At a January meeting, Regent Matt Crocker said the new policies strengthen accountability for state higher education spending, the University Daily Kansan reported.
“The question I seem to get all the time, especially being here in Topeka, is making sure I’m being a good steward for the state’s funding for higher education, and I think the program and policies help answer that question,” Crocker said.
More work to go around, and fewer tenured professors to do it
For faculty, one of the biggest frustrations with the new mandates is that they’re being asked to do more without more colleagues to share the load.
When Coleman started teaching at UT Austin in 2005, her department had roughly 25 full-time tenured faculty members. Today it has about 18, a decline of roughly 28%.
The same pattern shows up in Kansas. Dehner said Wichita State’s history department has shrunk from about 17 faculty members when he joined in 2004 to roughly nine today. In Weheba’s engineering department, the count has fallen from about 14 to eight.
Nationally, about 32% of faculty members held full-time tenured or tenure-track appointments in fall 2023, down from about 53% in 1987, according to data from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).
The shrinking ranks matter because tenured faculty carry duties well beyond the classroom. They serve on university committees, advise students, help colleagues pursue research funding, and sit on search committees for new university leaders, a particularly time-consuming job amid the revolving door of college presidents.
Professors also face problems that were far less prominent when many of them started: student mental health crises, the rapid adoption of AI, cuts to research funding, and political and social unrest on campus.
“There are more burdens than ever being placed on faculty shoulders, which is putting incredible strain on them individually, but also strain on the overall ecosystem in higher ed,” said Geoff Watson, CEO of NCFDD, which provides faculty development resources.
“When you put all of that together, more is being asked of faculty, and actually they’re being provided less support than they ever have been,” he added.
None of that means professors should get a pass, or that they’re all complaining, Coleman said. Universities have long had ways to deal with faculty who don’t meet expectations, she noted, including pushing some out.
A legislative audit released in Utah in October suggests those mechanisms don’t always work. Auditors examined materials from 666 performance reviews of tenured faculty, and only eight concluded that a professor’s teaching needed improvement.
The auditors highlighted 40 cases in which professors received “satisfactory” ratings despite evidence of poor teaching. Utah Legislative Auditor General Kade Minchey told Fortune his office has also received allegations of harassment and of professors not showing up to class.
The report pinned much of the problem on leadership. Department chairs, who are often responsible for holding faculty accountable, typically rotate through the job and take on its administrative duties on top of their own teaching, research, and service, leaving them little time or incentive to confront colleagues.
“When chairs are faculty first and supervisors second, they may neglect the harder, time-intensive leadership responsibilities that drive accountability,” the report stated.
The audit called on universities to strengthen the supervisory role of department leaders and redefine what chairs do. It also asked the Legislature to consider whether the minimum due process required to remove a tenured professor is excessive.
Minchey stressed that the findings weren’t “an attack on tenure,” but rather “a problem of leadership, and it’s a problem of structure.”
The strain on faculty isn’t a red-state or blue-state issue
Much of the push for faculty accountability has come from Republican-led legislatures, and the Nov. 3 midterms reshuffled that map. In Texas, Democrat Gina Hinojosa unseated Gov. Greg Abbott. In Wisconsin, which wrote a minimum teaching load into law, Democrats flipped both legislative chambers.
That gives some faculty reason for optimism, but neither result rewrites existing policy, and meaningful change is unlikely to happen overnight. The workload strain, meanwhile, isn’t confined to red states.
In Massachusetts, free community college has helped drive enrollment up more than 43% since 2022, adding roughly 27,000 students, according to the state. The program has opened doors for students and added pressure on the professors who teach them.
Darren Stocker, a criminal justice professor at Cape Cod Community College, typically teaches five classes a semester. Each can have as many as 32 students, and he often makes room for more.
The result is workdays that stretch at least 12 hours, “from sun up to sundown, seven days a week,” he said, as he grades assignments, meets with students, prepares lectures, and handles his other responsibilities.
Pay compounds the long hours. Stocker said Cape Cod housing costs have made it increasingly hard for educators to live near campus.
“It’s very difficult to really live in the area in which you work,” Stocker said. “That’s the reality of it.”
Average pay for full-time faculty rose 2.3% between fall 2024 and fall 2025, but inflation ran 2.7% over the same period, according to the AAUP’s annual report on faculty pay. Adjusted for inflation, faculty salaries remain 9.5% below their fall 2019 levels.
Policy changes could ease some of that pressure. Rebuilding confidence in higher education, and the research capacity it has lost, will take considerably longer.
“There is no more pressing issue for higher education than getting very serious about how we rebuild what’s been lost and hopefully build upon it from there,” Watson said. “But it’s not a short-fuse fix that is going to have to take years to kind of come back.”
Stocker, for one, isn’t looking for a way out.
“I absolutely love my job. I don’t think there’s anything I would ever want to do more than what I do now, and that’s teaching in the classroom,” Stocker said. “I live to see the success of my students.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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