TBers, 

The posting below looks gives an interesting take on the value of tenure.
It is by Scott Jaschik and is from the June 8, 2009   issue of INSIDE HIGHER
ED, an excellent - and free - online source for news, opinion and jobs for
all of higher education.  You can subscribe by going to:
http://insidehighered.com/.

Hope your semester is going well

Jim Greenberg

    Tenure's Value ... to Society

A judge ruled last week in Colorado that not only is tenure a good thing for
the professors who enjoy it, it is valuable to the public. Further, the
court ruled that the value (to the public) of tenure outweighed the value of
giving colleges flexibility in hiring and dismissing. That is a principle
that faculty members say is very important and makes this case about much
more than the specific issues at play.

While noting "countervailing public interests" in the case, the judge wrote
that "the public interest is advanced more by tenure systems that favor
academic freedom over tenure systems that favor flexibility in hiring or
firing." The ruling added that "by its very nature, tenure promotes a system
in which academic freedom is protected" and that "a tenure system that
allows flexibility in firing is oxymoronic."

The ruling came in a long legal battle over rules changes imposed by the
board of Metropolitan State College of Denver on its faculty members in
2003. The changes -- made in a faculty handbook -- removed many of the
rights of faculty members in cases of layoffs, where previous college
policies had given such professors seniority rights to avoid layoffs in many
cases, and the right to be hired back in many other cases. Metro State's
board said that the changes were needed, some professors sued, and the case
has been in the courts ever since.

The first ruling in the case, by a state district court in 2005, backed the
college's board and not the faculty who sued. The judge ruled that the
changes in the faculty handbook did not materially change tenure
protections. But the professors appealed and, backed by the American
Association of University Professors, won the next round. A state appeals
court in 2007 ordered a new trial, at which the judge was to consider a
series of questions, such as the public interest in tenure vs. flexibility,
and the reasonable expectations of tenured faculty members that the faculty
handbook that existed prior to 2003 represented a commitment on behalf of
the college.

On these questions, Judge Norman D. Haglund ruled in favor of the
professors. The decision noted that the college questioned whether its
professors had specific expectations related to the old faculty handbook not
changing. The judge indicated that the compelling evidence was not about
Metro State's professors but the expert testimony about "industry-wide
expectations of academic institutions and tenured faculty."

Rachel Levinson, senior counsel for the AAUP, called the ruling "fantastic,"
both for the individual faculty members and for professors elsewhere. Those
who were at Metro State prior to the handbook changes will still have the
protections they enjoyed at that time, she said.

"More broadly, what this does is reiterate the value of tenure and the
importance of tenure, and that tenure itself can be a public interest,"
Levinson said. She noted that the college "was trying to argue that its
flexibility was the sole public interest," and that a court endorsement of
that idea could have been dangerous for many faculty members.

A spokeswoman for Metro State said that lawyers were still reviewing the
ruling and that no decision had been made on whether to appeal.