Academic Freedom and Tenure

Three Clicks and Academic Freedom Is Out

A 2008 report from a libertarian think tank in North Carolina set the stage for a problematic kind of “transparency,” where posting faculty syllabi would “expose a professor’s deviation from normal expectations.”

The Costs of a Climate of Fear

When scientists are attacked professionally and personally, independent science and the public suffer.

Victory for Tenure Rights in Louisiana

At a time when the news about faculty tenure rights has been grim in many public higher education systems, recent events at one of Louisiana’s three university systems brought a welcome reminder that faculty action can be effective— even in the most challenging circumstances.

Academic Freedom and Tenure: Bethune-Cookman University

Report dealing with due process, tenure, sexual harassment, and financial exigency in 2009 at Bethune-Cookman University, a historically black university. The report concerns the actions taken by the administration to suspend and then dismiss four professors, two with tenure, without having demonstrated cause for its actions in hearings before faculty peers. The report also deals with the administration's actions to terminate the appoint ments of three other professors without advance notice, without affording academic due process, and in two cases without the protections of due process that under the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure should have been provided because of the length of their service.

Academic Freedom and Tenure: Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge

2011 report finding violations of academic freedom in two cases at Louisiana’s flagship public institution, Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, that are different in the administrative officers involved and in the matters under dispute but alike in putting core issues of aca demic freedom to the test. The first case, affecting a nontenured associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in his seventeenth year of full-time service on the faculty, tested the rela tionship between freedom of research and publication and freedom of extramural utterance in a politically charged atmosphere. The second case, affecting a tenured full professor in the Department of Biological Sciences in her thirty-first year on the faculty, tested the freedom of a classroom teacher to assign student grades.

Academic Freedom and Tenure: Northwestern State University of Louisiana and Southeastern Louisiana University

Report finding administrators discontinued or consolidated academic programs and arbitrarily selected certain tenured professors in the programs for termination of appointment.

Academic Freedom and Tenure: University of Northern Iowa

Report examining the move last year by the administration of the University of Northern Iowa to discontinue nearly one-fifth of the university’s academic programs and close the university’s laboratory school. More than fifty faculty members were threatened with layoffs, and numerous tenured professors were constructively dismissed.

Academic Freedom and Tenure: Lawrence Technological University

Report concerning the actions taken by the administration of Lawrence Technological University regarding appointment termination following a decision to discontinue the undergraduate programs in business management.

Academic Freedom and Tenure University of the District of Columbia

Report concerning the actions by the administration of the University of the District of Columbia to terminate the appointments of 125 faculty members.

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