Robert M. O’Neil
Professor of Law and Director
Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression
University of Virginia
University Governance and Academic Freedom
This paper will focus on five or six different dimensions of the
relationship between university governance and academic freedom,
with each of which I have had personal experience during four
decades as professor and/or academic administrator. It will begin
by examining governance issues involved in the granting of tenure,
such as the expectation of a positive recommendation by the
candidate’s academic department or school as prerequisite to
favorable action, and the circumstances under which senior
administrators and a governing board might gainsay the negative
judgment of the academic unit. Equally difficult, though vastly
different, governance issues surround the removal of tenure (e.g.,
the expectation of faculty involvement in determining a financial
exigency or reviewing the elimination of a department or program,
and of course the importance of faculty review of a proposed
termination for cause.
Several issues at the intersection of academic freedom and
collective bargaining will receive substantial attention,
triggered in part by a pending Washington state bill, which would
condition faculty bargaining on the elimination of traditional
governance and academic senates. Other intriguing issues arise
here as well – for example, how a traditional guardian of
academic freedom such as the American Association of University
Professors should treat adverse personnel actions which are
authorized under an AAUP-negotiated bargaining agreement.
Brief attention will also be given to the recurrent question
whether the interests of academic freedom are well served by
including faculty members on the institution’s governing board.
Finally, a pending federal court case (involving the University of
Utah and a drama student) poses a novel but deeply troubling
conflict between faculty and student academic freedom over
curriculum, and inevitably implicates difficult questions of
governance, some but not all of which are now before the appeals
court in Denver.
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