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The North Dakota House passed a bill Monday that would let the presidents of two colleges fire tenured faculty members without review from, or the right to appeal to, a faculty committee.
The bill now heads to the State Senate.
Mike Lefor, who leads the Republican House supermajority, filed the bill, which would affect Dickinson State University and Bismarck State College. Dickinson State president Steve Easton has supported it.
Lefor’s original version would have provided no appeal for these fired faculty members. The modified version, which the state’s House of Representatives passed 66 to 27, says they “may appeal the review to the commissioner of the State Board of Higher Education.”
Under the bill, the presidents would be able to conduct these faculty reviews at any time. The bill would add new requirements that faculty members would be expected to meet under the reviews—including, among other things, a requirement to “Effectively teach and advise a number of students approximately equal to the average campus faculty teaching and advising load.”
Removed from the modified version of the bill was a requirement for faculty members to “Generate more tuition or grant revenue than the combined total of the salary, fringe benefits, compensation and other expenses of the tenured faculty member plus all other costs of employing the faculty member, including employment taxes.”
