Tenure

1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure

Statement promoting public understanding and support of academic freedom and tenure and agreement upon procedures to ensure them in colleges and universities. Institutions of higher education are conducted for the common good and not to further the interest of either the individual teacher or the institution as a whole. The common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition.

Recommended Institutional Regulations on Academic Freedom and Tenure

Regulations outlining recommended institutional processes that enable institutions to protect academic freedom, tenure, and to ensure academic due process.

On Collegiality as a Criterion for Faculty Evaluation

Report addressing the increasing tendency to add the criterion of “collegiality” to faculty evaluations and enumerates why this practice should be discouraged.

On Extending the Probationary Period

There are good reasons for a seven-year maximum probationary period.

From the General Secretary: What We do to Our Young

I believe in high standards for new faculty appointments and for tenure and promotion decisions. But I also believe that a growing number of institutions are using tenure standards as a lever to increase their status and are thereby compromising the future of our profession. And I believe that too often we are complicit in a process that does more harm to prospective and junior faculty than it does good for the profession as a whole.

An Examination of the Tenured Mind

Professing to Learn: Creating Tenured Lives and Careers in the American Research University. Anna Neumann. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

Tenure and Teaching- Intensive Appointments

The majority of faculty members hold teaching-intensive positions, and over the past few decades the majority of teaching-intensive positions have been shunted outside of the tenure system and stripped of other responsibilities, says Tenure and Teaching-Intensive Appointments, a report issued by the AAUP’s Committee on Contingency and the Profession. The report, originally titled Conversion of Appointments to the Tenure Track, was issued in draft form in October 2009 and prompted almost two hundred comments.

Crisis In Public Higher Education

Public education in many states is facing a crisis, with sharp budget cuts, unprecedented attacks on faculty status and rights, and swelling enrollments.

Resources on Tenure

AAUP Policy Statements, Reports, and Analysis 

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