Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure

This book-length report offers general advice on basic faculty intellectual property rights; mechanisms to ensure academic freedom in publishing; handling faculty and administrator conflicts of interest; and grievance procedures for faculty members, academic professionals, and students. An appendix provides language appropriate for inclusion in faculty handbooks and collective bargaining agreements.

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.

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.

Policy discussing what post-tenure review should be and not be and its impact on academic freedom.