I’m writing to let you know that today the AAUP is releasing an investigative report, Academic Freedom and Tenure: University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. The report finds that the cancer center administration violated commonly accepted academic standards when it terminated the appointments of two professors.
MD Anderson is one of the country’s foremost cancer centers, and among them unique in lacking a system of indefinite tenure. Instead, MD Anderson employs a system of so-called “term tenure” in which “tenured” faculty members serve on renewable seven-year appointments.
Both professors at issue in this case had been recommended for “renewal of tenure” by the faculty personnel committee. One professor had twelve years of service and the other had thirty.
Neither of the two professors at MD Anderson received the due process recommended by the AAUP for full-time faculty members with more than seven years of service: an opportunity for a faculty hearing, in which the burden of demonstrating adequate cause for dismissal rests with the administration. Instead, after being notified that their appointments would not be renewed, the professors were limited to appealing the decision to the same administrative officers who made it.
The report also finds that the MD Anderson administration disregarded normative standards of academic governance, as set forth in the AAUP’sStatementon Government of Colleges and Universities, by refusing to provide “compelling reasons stated in detail” when it rejected the faculty personnel committee’s recommendations. The academic senate at MD Anderson has for some time been resisting inappropriate administrative interference. The decisions in these cases therefore represent, as the report reveals, wider problems in shared governance.
AAUP investigating committees, which are authorized in a few selected cases when significant violations of academic freedom, tenure, or governance have been alleged and persist despite AAUP staff efforts to resolve them, are generally composed of AAUP members from other institutions with no previous involvement in the matter. We all owe a debt of gratitude to those who willingly take on these assignments. This is just one of many ways in which AAUP members like you serve our profession.
If no steps are taken to remediate the MD Anderson policies, it is likely that the AAUP membership will consider imposing censure on the MD Anderson administration at our annual meeting on June 13.
Direct link to the report: http://www.aaup.org/report/academic-freedom-and-tenure-university-texas-md-anderson-cancer-center.