When Richard Miller told his colleagues that he was leaving his tenured position as dean of the University of Iowa’s engineering school, a number of them asked if he was smoking dope. Mr. Miller was stepping down to become the first president of the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts—and Olin, which opened its doors 10 years ago, does not offer tenure to its faculty.

“Don’t you realize that if you go there you’ll never work in higher education again?” Mr. Miller recalls his friends asking. “They’ll think you turned in your union card—that you don’t …

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