Draconian Compensation Plan Violates Principle of Tenure at Tufts

On Friday, the AAUP submitted an amicus brief explaining how Tufts University violated the principle of tenure, and its protections for academic freedom and economic security, when it imposed a draconian compensation plan on medical school faculty that required faculty to raise a portion of their salaries by obtaining external grant funding.

Faculty at Tufts sued the university after they were punished by the administration with punitive reductions in lab space and reduced full-time status. The plaintiffs in Wortis v. Tufts point out that Tufts’s definition of tenure in their contract language was lifted virtually verbatim from the AAUP’s 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, stating that faculty must have “academic freedom” and “economic security.” The trial court ruled against the plaintiffs, and they appealed to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

The Supreme Judicial Court invited interested parties to weigh in on whether the granting of tenure to plaintiff faculty members provided them with enforceable contractual rights to academic freedom and economic security. The AAUP asserts in the amicus brief that it did and that the adoption of policies that required faculty to cover a significant percentage of their salaries through external grant funding and imposed consequences for noncompliance thoroughly violates a core component of tenure and a key predicate to academic freedom.

Faculty tenure serves as an essential safeguard for academic freedom because it removes the threat of powerful interests exerting financial pressure on research findings. In addition, economic security in the form of restrictions on when a faculty member can be dismissed or sanctioned guarantees stability in employment and the preservation of academic freedom by preventing the use of discipline as a means of infringing upon faculty research and other activities.

In this case, when Tufts unilaterally imposed an extraordinarily harsh set of measures that conditioned a substantial portion of faculty salary on obtaining external grant funding and inflicted punitive reductions in lab space and full-time status for noncompliance, it ran roughshod over contractual guarantees of economic security and academic freedom, and thereby breached its contracts with plaintiffs.

The AAUP also has over sixty years of experience providing guidance to courts on how to interpret the 1940 Statement. Authors of the brief are available for comment.