My colleague Michael Kremer calls my attention to this CHE story about a U.S. Court of Appeals decision (for the Sixth Circuit, which includes Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee, and Kentucky) affirming a lower court's decision (in a bench-trial, i.e., the judge was the trier of fact) against a tenured professor who had been fired by Thomas Cooley Law School, an independent law school in Michigan. The main takeaway from the opinion is that one should take a look at how your school defines tenure!
The court declined, quite unsurprisingly, to adopt the fired professor's view that "tenure" means "lifetime employment," holding instead that "tenure" meant what it meant in the faculty member's contract with the school. Cooley, perhaps unsurprisingly, set a very low bar for termination of tenured faculty, though it did include some procedural requirements (amazingly, Cooley failed to satisfy them initially, but, during the first iteration of this lawsuit, it went back and followed the rules, but reached the same outcome). Curious, I looked at the University of Chicago rules, and they define tenure as "indefinite tenure" (unlike Cooley) and specify "adequate cause" as the standard for termination, thus making clear that the employment relationship is not "at will" (the latter is the norm in the reactionary United States, though not in other Western nations, which is one reason there is so much resentment towards tenure). "At will" employees can be terminated for almost any reason whatsoever (though not ones that involve prohibited forms of discrimination, e.g., based on race or age or disability).
In the Cooley case, the professor had declined to teach the classes she was asked to teach. To be fired required only a vote of the faculty as well as certain advance notice of the proposed action. That procedure was, in fact, specified in the terms of employment. That procedure is extraordinariily weak, and should certainly give any prospective faculty member pause. But faculty might want to examine their faculty handbooks to see what "tenure" means at their institution. (Many institutions, though not all, explicitly incorporate the AAUP interpretation of tenure--their website is down, or I would have added a link.)
ADDENDUM: A medical school professor at a major research university writes with a striking anecdote about "tenure":
In regard to the meaning of tenure, as a Vice Dean whose portfolio included faculty affairs, I had the usual experience of being the interpreter of what “tenure” meant for my School in a larger University. The answer from the General Counsel’s office was very clear: we don’t definetenure. While it was not defined, I was instructed to apply that “’tenure’ means a promise of continued employment absent malfeasance.“ We had an interesting case where the expectations began to matter. A relatively junior faculty member in a basic science department (where salary comes through the university. In clinical departments the faculty comes through the university and the practice plan) achieved tenure, then immediately became a tenure slug. He/she did not apply for grants, taught so badly that no one in good conscience could allow him/her to lead a class, and came to the office sporadically. In order to provide some incentives, we froze the faculty person’s salary for several years. No effect. We threatened to reduce their salary by a few percent, but before we did we ran it by our faculty council. The council said they would rather fire a faculty person than reduce their salary. Regardless, the good news is that whatever the threat, my understanding is that the individual is now a model faculty member – back to being the person who earned tenure in the first place.
And for what it’s worth, in schools with a formal practice plan, despite tenure the presence of two committed pay points means that neither is obligated to provide the full salary unless there is an explicit contractual arrangement. So for practitioners, “salaries” go up and down with a flexible university base and an incentive plan for the practice elements.
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