Compounding the array of threats universities face is the rigid custom of tenure. When many schools desperately need to control expenses and redeploy resources to respond to rising skepticism about the value and the usefulness of their product, they are handcuffed by the commitments to lifelong employment made to many of their faculty by long-gone provosts, presidents and trustees. And they are trapped further by the worry that cutting loose from this anachronistic system will create headaches worse than those it alleviates.

With many higher-ed practices still resembling those of medieval Oxford, some assume that tenure, and the literally lifelong job security it provides, has a much longer history than it does. In fact, tenure as we know it was a 20th-century American invention, and initially its conferral was tightly controlled by presidents and boards. But during the boom decades of the century’s second half, tenure appointments proliferated and, more problematic, became more and more the province of the faculty itself.

Today’s standard practice is for a series of committees to render judgment on a tenure-track applicant, passing recommendations up the chain for rubber-stamping by a provost and eventually a president and board.

After this process, it is rare to hear of a rejected recommendation. When the new board and president at New College of Florida did push back against a few tenure grants last spring, their position was promptly denounced by the president of the statewide faculty union because “all the people qualified to make the decision had approved the candidates.”

Pick up any business magazine or how-to management book, and you’ll run into words like “nimble” and “move fast” on virtually every page. The ability to change direction and shift priorities in reaction to consumer preferences or competitor actions often makes a decisive difference in marketplace success. One can’t think of an enterprise less “nimble” than the modern American university.

Or a practice better designed to limit flexibility than tenure, which Columbia University professor and “Crisis on Campus” author Mark C. Taylor labeled as “the single most important factor preventing change in higher education.” A quick way to induce sobriety in a university board is to suggest they calculate the net present value of each of those tenure decisions they have been routinely approving. Depending on the school, it could come to several million dollars, and with some faculty hanging on and immune to dismissal into their dotage, it could be far more. The macabre old saw “We make progress one funeral at a time” comes to mind.

Tenure is not the only anchor higher-ed is dragging. Decades of easy money and, until recently, little scrutiny of the quality of student learning, have bred a culture of self-satisfaction and a dismissiveness of criticism that can only be called reactionary. But even leaders who accept the need for change are reluctant to take the action that would make the most direct difference.

In my experience, roughly two-thirds of the typical American university’s cost structure goes to pay its personnel and, despite the burgeoning number of administrators now clogging many campuses, faculty still represent the largest fraction of the people cost. Even where student populations still justify the current total number of teachers, often changes in academic preferences mean that schools have too few faculty for in-demand disciplines and far too many tenured in departments attracting little student interest. Economists sometimes refer to “trapped value”; here, the trap is clear, although the value is often suspect.

Only about half of current provosts endorse the tenure custom, but few schools are willing to part with it, fearing either faculty protests or that they would be handing competitors a recruiting advantage. The sector is quietly crab-walking away from the practice by shifting gradually to contingent faculty, generally through attrition, but the prevalence of tenure has been declining at an average rate of less than a half-percent of all faculty per year. Of course, that qualifies as warp speed in American higher education.

With careful management and cost control, tenure and solvency can still coexist. By minimizing nonessential amenities, avoiding any gold-plating of facilities, prioritizing academic vs. administrative positions and managing other simple expense issues, Purdue University has held tuition and fees unchanged since 2012, while maintaining one of the country’s highest ratios of tenure/tenure-track faculty to students. But many schools for too long took the course of least resistance and simply raised student fees year after year. Now resistance has arrived, and too much of their costs is off limits.

So the system staggers on, beset by declining enrollments, plummeting public confidence and self-disgracing violations of the very freedom of inquiry and viewpoint that tenure was created to protect. But, unless state governments mandate its abolition or dramatic revision, as several are considering, don’t expect a sudden throwing off of this straitjacket. Presidents and trustees, Ol’ Blue Eyes is singing to you: “You’re hooked, you’re cooked, you’re caught in the [tenure] trap.”