Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Due Process

This 2021 report, prepared by the Association’s staff, concerns the action taken on October 13, 2021, by the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia to remove the procedural protections of tenure from the system’s post-tenure review policy.

This 2020 report provides a statistical analysis of the presence of AAUP-recommended policies on academic freedom, dismissal for cause, financial exigency, and program discontinuance in faculty handbooks and collective bargaining agreements. Analysis of their prevalence can usefully inform the work of AAUP chapters, faculty governance bodies, and higher education unions.

This 2020 report concerns the case of Dr. Jane Harty, a part-time faculty member with forty years of service at Pacific Lutheran University. Dr. Harty was suspended from her teaching responsibilities in November 2018 for the remainder of her one-year contract and informed that she would not be reappointed. The stated reason was that she had violated a directive issued by her department chair but the summary nature of the action, the relatively minor character of the infraction, and her longtime advocacy for the rights of faculty members on contingent appointments indicated otherwise.

This 2019 report concerns actions taken in spring 2018 by the administration of Nunez Community College to terminate the services of Professor Richard Schmitt following his twenty-second year on the faculty. These actions were taken in apparent violation of his academic freedom and without affordance of the protections of academic due process to which he was entitled as the result of having obtained de facto tenure at the institution through length of full-time service.

This 2018 report concerns the dismissals of two tenured faculty members and the nonrenewal of a tenure-track faculty member at St. Edward’s University (SEU) in Austin, Texas, in violation of AAUP-recommended procedural standards and principles of academic freedom. According to the report, the SEU administration failed to afford the tenure-track professor timely notice of nonrenewal and a faculty appeal process, and it declined to afford the tenured professors a dismissal hearing before an elected faculty body.

This 2018 report concerns the administration’s actions to suspend from her teaching responsibilities—initially, for stated safety concerns—a sixth-year doctoral student with a part-time appointment as lecturer for the 2017–18 academic year. The lecturer, Ms. Courtney Lawton, received threats after a video recording of her participation in a demonstration protesting an on-campus recruitment table for Turning Point USA was disseminated on the internet.

This 2017 report highlights how the Trump administration’s alarming hostility to science has exacerbated already troubling threats to academic freedom in the physical and natural sciences in two different areas: an area of international scientific exchange, and in the field of climate science, which has been subjected to vicious attempts to discredit its validity.

This 2017 report concerns actions taken by the administration of Spalding University to terminate the appointment of tenured professor of social work Erlene Grise-Owens after she criticized the administration’s handling of an incident involving a student who brought a gun to a campus parking lot. The social work school’s chair immediately alerted social work faculty about the incident—except the school’s three faculty members of color, even though the student was scheduled to attend class with one of them the next day.

This 2017 report concerns actions taken by the administration of the Community College of Aurora, during the fourth week of the fall 2016 semester, to terminate the appointment of part-time instructor of philosophy Nathanial Bork without affordance of academic due process. Mr. Bork was dismissed after conveying his intention to send to the college's accreditor a report detailing his “deep concerns” about the college’s Gateway to Success initiative, which modified certain entry-level liberal arts courses in an effort to improve their pass rates.

This 2016 report concerns the action taken on February 25, 2016, by the Board of Curators of the University of Missouri to dismiss Dr. Melissa A. Click, an assistant professor of communication, from the faculty of the University of Missouri on charges of misconduct without having afforded her the faculty hearing called for under both the university’s regulations and the recommended standards of the American Association of University Professors.