This article examines how tenure and academic freedom are portrayed in novels about academic life. The novel provides unique opportunities to explore philosophical questions and allows readers to examine meaning rather than truth, existence as opposed to reality. Thus, the novel suggests what is possible, which reality forecloses insofar as from a realist position reality is definite, describing what the author believed actually happened, rather than what might have happened. What do academic novels tell us about academic freedom and tenure? What messages do these novels convey to the broad public? This article attempts to answer these questions by analyzing academic novels that have been written over the last century, paying particular attention to novels written in the last twenty-five years in order to assess current portrayals of academic life. It begins with a brief discussion about how the author defines and studies the academic novel and then analyzes how academic freedom and tenure have been portrayed.