Academic Freedom and Tenure

Report concerning the action taken by the administration of the New Community College of Baltimore to terminate a tenured faculty member without cause or due process following an announced termination of tenure commitments with the transfer of the college's control from the city of Baltimore to the state of Maryland.

This 1989 report involves a Catholic University of America professor who has not been dismissed from his position but who, with conditions imposed upon his teaching that he considers unacceptable, had chosen to take a leave of absence and teach elsewhere. Although the events of primary interest in the case occurred within three years, they can best be understood in the context of a history spanning more than two decades. This case has been the subject of two books and of countless magazine and newspaper articles both in this country and abroad, and aspects of  it have been argued at length before a faculty committee and a superior court; few Association cases, it may be said, have been so widely publicized or so profusely documented. Additionally, the case arose and developed at a university with a governance structure that has no exact counterpart in this country, even among other Catholic institutions.

1988 Report dealing with the denial of due process and lack of protections of academic freedom at Hillsdale College. The investigating committee concluded that the administration, in declining to provide the faculty member with a statement of the reasons for not reappointing him and in failing to afford opportunity for review by a faculty body of his allegation relating to academic freedom, denied him basic procedural safeguards to which he was entitled under the Association's Statement on Procedural Standards in the Renewal or Nonrenewal of Faculty Appointments. The absence of these procedural safeguards, the committee found, leaves the faculty of Hillsdale College inadequately protected against an improper exercise of administrative power.

This 1987 report describes actions by the administration of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico to suspend and then to dismiss a tenured professor, without any severance salary, once it was informed that she had remarried in a civil ceremony after a previous Catholic marriage had ended, thirteen years earlier, in civil divorce. The administration justified its action by stating that faculty members at the university, which was canonically established by the Holy See, must adhere even in their private lives to the laws of the church, under which the professor's marital life following her civil remarriage was considered to be sinful. At the time of her initial appointment she was warned orally of this constraint but she states that she explicitly refused to acquiesce in it.