 Helfand notably declined an offer of tenure from Columbia in the early 1980s due to his belief that the tenure system does more to deny academic freedom to those who do not have tenure than it does to protect the freedom of those who do have tenure.He believes that it also selects the wrong fraction of smart people in society to play the important role of advancing knowledge and passing it on to the next generation.He advocates a system in which each senior professor's job performance is reviewed every six years by a five-member "ad hoc" faculty committee, which would then recommend whether the professor should be retained or dismissed.