The need for academic freedom continues to be just as central in today's polarized political and ideological worlds as it was at its outset. Tenure is a system intended to offer protection against donors, state representatives, faculty, and administrators who may not understand one's line of inquiry. Qualitative researchers have additional burdens in proving the validity of interpretive and critical paradigms. While there has been more space for such alternative paradigms in the last three decades, the organized starvation of public universities in the last decade has made the tenure trajectory particularly challenging for interpretive and critical qualitative inquiry.
