Naomi Schaefer Riley’s latest book, The Faculty Lounges: And Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get the College Education You Pay For, is deliberately bold and even provocative in a way that many readers will appreciate. The book as a whole presents a case for abolishing faculty tenure at universities, and proceeds by considering many of the arguments for and against it. Riley skewers the platitudes that are often advanced about the necessity of tenure for “academic freedom”—platitudes frequently offered by people who appear never to have given the idea a serious thought. She argues that professors who teach in fields with “pre-stipulated goals” (a phrase borrowed from Stanley Fish) such as “family and consumer sciences” do not even needacademic freedom, which is intended to facilitate the free expression of potentially controversial ideas within the university. “More college teachers,”
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