Speaker Series: Deepa Das Acevedo

As academia increasingly comes under attack in the United States, The War on Tenure steps in to demystify what professors do and to explain the importance of tenure for their work. Deepa Das Acevedo takes readers on a backstage tour of tenure-stream academia to reveal hidden dynamics and obstacles. She challenges the common belief that tenure is only important for the protection of academic freedom. Instead, she argues that the security and autonomy provided by tenure are also essential to the performance of work that students, administrators, parents, politicians, and taxpayers value. Going further, Das Acevedo shows that tenure exists on a spectrum of comparable employment contracts and she debunks the notion that tenure warps the incentives of professors. Ultimately, The War on Tenure demonstrates that the job security tenure provides is not nearly as unusual, undesirable, or unwarranted as critics claim.

To register, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org. 

Deepa Das Acevedo is a legal anthropologist. Her research blends ethnographic fieldwork and anthropological theory with doctrinal and policy analysis to provide new insights about legal rules and institutions. She studies employment regulation (particularly faculty tenure as an employment protection), the law and politics of India (focusing on next-generation law & policy organizations), and methodological and theoretical developments in the anthropology of law. She is the Editor of the peer-reviewed journal PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, a past Trustee of the Law & Society Association, and has held leadership positions in the Association of American Law Schools, the American Anthropological Association, and the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology.