Academic Freedom and Tenure

Academic Freedom and Tenure: American International College

Report concerning the administration of American International College's dismissal of a faculty member after thirteen years of service without setting forth specific cause for its action and without offering him a hearing and other safeguards of academic due process.

Academic Freedom and Tenure: Nichols College

Report concerning the administration of Nichols College's dismissal of a faculty member  prior to the expiration of his term of appointment, without providing him with the basic safeguards of academic due process

Academic Freedom and Tenure: Murray State University

Report on the administration of Murray State University's 1975 termination of the services of nine faculty members without due process and in disregard of the role of faculty in reaching decisions of faculty status.

Academic Freedom and Tenure: State University of New York

Report regarding retrenchments at the State University of New York that were initiated by the University administration without appropriate consultation with the faculty and without any showing of a financial exigency. They were overseen by the administration with disregard for the rights of tenure, for due notice, and for the role of the faculty in institutional government.

Academic Freedom and Tenure: Concordia Seminary

Report regarding the administration of Concordia Seminary's 1972 termination of a faculty member based on outside ecclesiastical authorities' displeasure with his views on matters that fell within his academic competence, despite the recommendations of his colleagues and inadequate notice of the termination of his services

Academic Freedom and Tenure: Frank Phillips College

Report on the administration of  Frank Phillips College's 1965 dismissal of a faculty member without providing cause, without academic due process, and without providing for any payment of salary beyond the date of notification of dismissal.

Incentives to Forgo Tenure

Tenure is "indispensable to the success of an institution in fulfilling its obligations to its students and to society." So declares the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure. The academic community, however, has never lacked for proposals that would undermine tenure and thus its role in serving students and society. Among such current proposals, one in particular requires comment because it has surfaced in recent cases considered by Committee A.1  It proposes that prospective faculty members accept renewable term appointments and forgo consideration for tenure and/or that current faculty members renounce tenure in return for some advantage, such as a higher salary, accelerated leave, or other pecuniary consideration. Proponents of these agreements argue that they embody a free exchange of mutual benefit to the parties. If academic tenure withers in consequence, they claim, that only demonstrates that, in a free market, faculty will have demonstrated their unwillingness to support tenure.

Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance Violations at NEIU

An AAUP investigating committee’s report published in December deals with a case of tenure denial at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. The candidate, an assistant professor of linguistics, had been recommended for tenure successively during the 2011–12 academic year by his tenured linguistics colleagues, his department chair, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and, unanimously, the faculty’s elected University Personnel Committee.

Investigative Procedures in Academic Freedom and Tenure Cases

Nothing can trump the hundred-year-old story of the Association’s first investigation: its hero, AAUP founder Arthur O. Lovejoy of Johns Hopkins University, was arriving in New York in April 1915 to see plays when he read in a local newspaper that the administration of Utah’s state university had dismissed some faculty, that seventeen members of the university had resigned in protest, and that a Utah newspaper editorial had called on the AAUP, then only three months old, to look into the matter.

In Response to Ellen Schrecker’s “Ward Churchill at the Dalton Trumbo Fountain”: An Introduction to the Colorado Conference of the AAUP’s Report on the Termination of Ward Churchill

Prominently featured in the inaugural issue of the AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom (JAF) was an article by historian cum AAUP Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure member Ellen Schrecker titled “Ward Churchill at the Dalton Trumbo Fountain,” purportedly using my much-publicized case at the University of Colorado, Boulder (UCB) as a means of illuminating the more generalized repression of critical scholarship in the United States since September 2001. Having received a heads-up that the article would be appearing, I must admit that I’d been awaiting its publication with considerable eagerness. This was so, both because I hoped its release might reflect a change for the better in my theretofore negative experience with the AAUP’s national office, and because I held—in fact, still hold—Schrecker’s work concerning the impact of McCarthyism on the academy in highest esteem.She of all people, I imagined, couldbe relied upon not only to recount what had transpired at UCB in a fair and accurate manner but to properly contextualize it.

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