However conflicted minority academics and administrators may feel about the current tenure system, it will neither immediately disappear nor forever remain unchanged.

"What is critical" says Professor Evelyn Hu-Dehart of the University of Colorado, "is that women, African-Americans, and others who already have problems with the system make sure they are at the table when the change is being negotiated."

"Something has to change," notes Brown-Collins. "The current system is certainly not protecting academic freedom. If anything, the tenure process is a way to screen out people with new and controversial ideas."

But even Dr. Estevan Flores of the University of Colorado-Boulder, whose former department made every effort to screen him out, feels that tenure is more complicated than that. (See sidebar, pg. 24.)

"It really cuts both ways," he says. "Sure they used the tenure process to try and get rid of me. But since we've been on the other side of the powers that be, I value tenure because without it, they'd surely find some way to get rid of us."

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"I know a lot of Black faculty members don't want to hear this," says Dr. Henry Allen of Rochester Institute of Technology, "because they feel a lot like the Black mayors - just as we got in the door, all the good stuff started disappearing. But expecting tenure to protect you from the vast economic forces reshaping academia is like counting on a newspaper to keep you dry in a hurricane. Do you really have academic freedom if you can't get a gram to fund your research? Can any college afford tenured faculty in a department that doesn't attract any students?"

Allen's warning seems particularly timely given the recent example of the University of the District of Columbia, which laid off 125 professors, and Central State University in Ohio, which fired nineteen faculty members. And for that matter, small, traditionally White liberal arts colleges are not immune, either. In January 1994, Bennington College eliminated tenure, dissolved all academic departments, and fired twenty-seven faculty members.