Academic Freedom and Tenure: Minneapolis College of Art and Design

Published in the May-June 1997 issue of Academe.

This report concerns the action taken in May 1996 by the administration of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design to dismiss, with a year of severance salary, five senior members of the faculty, each of whom was completing the second year of a three-year term contract. No reasons were given for the administration's action, other than the institution's asserted "right to terminate [the] appointment without cause one year prior to the expiration of its term," and no hearing was afforded to any of the affected professors.