Academic Freedom & Tenure Investigations

Academic Freedom and Tenure: University of Texas Medical Branch

The report of the investigating committee concerns the actions taken by the administration of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, after a declaration of financial exigency at that institution by the University of Texas Board of Regents, to terminate the appointments of more than 120 faculty members, approximately one-third of them tenured. The actions followed a suspension of operations at the medical branch and its affected hospital as a result of the devastation inflicted on September 13, 2008, by Hurricane Ike. Faculty members received between six and nine months of notice, depending on their tenure status and length of service.

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.

College and University Governance: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Report concerning the action taken in summer 2007 by the board of trustees and the administration of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to suspend the faculty senate and replace it with a “transitional structure of faculty governance.”

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 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.

Academic Freedom and Tenure: Brigham Young University

Report concerning academic freedom at Brigham Young University, a religiously affiliated university, and the denial of tenure.

Academic Freedom and Tenure: Minneapolis College of Art and Design

Report regarding action taken by the administration of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design to dismiss five senior members of the faculty without cause and without hearings.

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