Protecting dissent in faculty handbooks

Dissent should be explicitly protected in faculty handbooks. In my tenure case at a liberal arts college, a faculty appeals committee ruled that even if some colleagues on my tenure committee had conducted a bad-faith evaluation in retaliation for past disagreement, this was not grounds for appeal: “you did not set out allegations, which, if true, would warrant or require remedial action or relief.”

Faculty handbooks generally contain academic freedom statements, but these should specifically cover dissent. For example, the University of Wisconsin–Stout added an AAUP statement to its faculty handbook, and this later benefited a tenure-track faculty member who was judged to be experiencing retaliation for disagreement. See the statements page on this site for an introduction to the relevant AAUP language on this topic.

Universities can also design the appeals process to better handle academic freedom issues that arise in the context of tenure and promotion cases, because such situations can be very messy. The AAUP recommends that when violations of academic freedom are alleged in the context of reappointment and tenure decisions, the faculty committee that reviews the allegations will first “seek to settle the matter by informal methods.”