Dear Magicians,

Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned as Stanford’s president in 2023. The investigating panel found no evidence he manipulated data or knew his labs were doing it. He kept his faculty position. He’s still there.

Claudine Gay resigned as Harvard’s president in January 2024. Harvard’s own review found “a few instances of inadequate citation” — explicitly short of research misconduct. She kept her tenure. This fall she’s back in the classroom.

Both wore the tenure vest. Both got shot at. Both are still standing, and drawing HUGE salaries because someone actually checked whether the bullet went through before deciding what happened next.

People treat tenure like body armor that works on it’s own. Put it on, walk into the fire, survive automatically. It isn’t. A vest only works if someone runs the test. A named panel. A defined standard. A published finding that says, specifically, here is what we looked at, here is the bar, here is whether it was cleared. Gay and Tessier-Lavigne got that. The process ran. The vest held because someone confirmed it held.

​Jason Arday didn’t get the test.

He was never a university president — no executive post to absorb the hit before it reached his actual academic standing, which is what tenure exists to protect in the first place. They went straight at his doctoral thesis. Liverpool John Moores, the institution that granted the degree, investigated and did not uphold the claims, calling the issues “honest and reasonable error.” Cambridge defended him forcefully as recently as June. Then, on information it has not made public, Cambridge reopened the question and Arday resigned the professorship and the fellowship before that process produced a finding either way.

He was wearing the same vest Gay and Tessier-Lavigne were wearing. Nobody checked whether it worked. He had to decide whether to trust it while the shooting was still going on.

This isn’t unique to universities. It’s the same failure mode boards perform on CEOs constantly, just inverted. A CEO gets fired for optics, for a bad quarter, for a board that wants a scapegoat — and still walks out with severance, vested equity, sometimes a board seat somewhere else next year, because a contract exists and somebody is legally obligated to honor it whether or not the firing was fair.

Tenure is supposed to be the academic version of that contract. But a contract nobody enforces isn’t protection but seemingly it’s a promise you find out was empty exactly when you needed it to be real.

Tenure was never the academic version of the Secret Service that protect the actual President (of the USA, not the University). It’s a vest of sorts… real protection, but protection that still requires you to check the seams before deciding whether you’re safe to keep wearing it.

Gay and Tessier-Lavigne found out the vest worked because the detail showed up and did its job before either of them had to bet a career on faith alone. Arday never got the detail. He had to decide whether to trust the vest while the shooting was still going on, with no one confirming it would hold.

So tell me what form of protection are you relying on without fully stress testing it?

And until next time, have a M.A.G.I.C. Week,

Brian