Across all types of higher education in the United States, tenure has been historically linked to the concepts of academic freedom and economic security. In medical schools, however, the link between tenure and a financial guarantee has changed appreciably over the past decade into something much more tenuous. In the current economic environment where medical schools operate with limited and, arguably, unstable bases of “hard” funding, the liability of a financial guarantee to tenured faculty presents schools with a fiscal risk they often must manage. Accordingly, schools continue to revise their policies and increasingly provide no financial guarantee at all, or when they do, it is on a much more limited basis. This Analysis in Brief (AIB) presents data on the current relationship of the financial guarantee associated with tenure for both clinical and basic science medical school faculty, and how that relationship has evolved over time
