You have /5 articles left.
Sign up for a free account or log in.
You get a tenure-track job. You meet all expectations and then some. Then, halfway through your tenure-track period, you are let go, something like an at-will employee.
Sadly, it’s not unheard for tenure-track professors to be treated like adjuncts in academe, but a recent legal decision involving Yeshiva University says it can’t happen there, based on its own policies. And elements of those policies exist elsewhere, making the ruling potentially significant to others on the tenure track.
“The question of whether a school has followed its own rules does not involve any highly specialized, academic judgment,” reads an opinion rendered this month by New York State Judge Barbara Jaffe. It orders Yeshiva to conduct a new tenure reappointment review for two professors, Michael Richter and Williams Hawkins, who were let go in 2015, after three years on the tenure track, for financial reasons.
Yeshiva hired Richter and Hawkins as assistant professors of economics in 2012. Both applied for renewal in 2015, as is customary for those on the tenure track, but were told by Selma Botman, university provost, that she was denying their reappointment due to financial considerations, including the discontinuance of “partial gift income.”
Richter and Hawkins appealed to the decision to the Faculty Review Committee, as permitted by the Faculty Handbook. That committee determined that the non-reappointment was based on inadequate consideration -- i.e., that financial considerations shouldn’t have played a role, according to the handbook. It said that Richard M. Joel, university president, should reappoint the petitioners to the tenure track immediately or pending a new, “clear and appropriate review” of their applications.
Joel responded to the committee, saying that the nonrenewal was in fact in line with university policy and that no remedial action was necessary.
Richter and Hawkins eventually took the matter to court, asserting that the university violated its own handbook and guidelines, acted arbitrarily and capriciously, and breached their employment contracts.
Jaffe, the judge, agreed with their arguments, in part, ordering a new reappointment review but not necessarily reappointment. While she found Yeshiva had violated its own policies, she did not agree that that constituted a breach of contract.
Joshua Parkhurst, the professors’ lawyer, said they were able to show that the faculty handbook doesn’t list financial considerations among criteria for reappointment to the tenure track. Such reappointments are also subject to review by a faculty committee, he added, and the university president shall carry out an appropriate remedy for decisions determined to be inadequate, according to the handbook (Jaffe also noted that the president doesn’t get to determine whether a remedy is called for, just what it will be).
Parkhurst underscored that the university had initially argued that the professors’ lines had to be terminated because they were funded through a finite gift, but then said it was facing overall financial difficulties and had to scale back on faculty costs.
Both professors are now employed elsewhere out of financial considerations, but Parkhurst said they need to be made whole somehow, whether they’re reappointed to the tenure track or awarded financial compensation.
Over all, Parkhurst said the case shows that institutions can’t “willy-nilly eliminate lines without adequate consideration.” So tenure-track professors can’t be treated (sadly) like adjuncts. Moreover, he said, “faculty still have some say in the affairs of the university.”
Yeshiva did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
