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The American Association of University Professors’ governing council voted unanimously over the weekend to censure the University System of Georgia for controversial changes the system made to its posttenure review process last year. The AAUP has criticized these changes as making it possible to fire tenured faculty members without affording them a dismissal hearing, in violation of long-established and widely followed principles on academic freedom and tenure.
“By their unilateral actions, the USG Board of Regents has proclaimed to the academic community that they do not view academic freedom as important for public higher education in the state,” Irene Mulvey, AAUP president, said in a statement. “The removal of protections for academic freedom will have a devastating effect on the quality of education in the USG system, and on recruitment and retention of faculty and students. We call upon the USG regents to rescind the changes to the post-tenure review policy so that academic freedom, so essential for higher education, is restored.”
Teresa MacCartney, acting chancellor for the system, told the AAUP last year in response to its investigation into the new policy that “due process is and will remain a core tenet of the policy updates to the University of Georgia’s post-tenure review process.” The AAUP responded in turn that certain changes to the new posttenure review policy—save the affordance of an adjudicative hearing before a faculty body—could improve it, but they “have nothing to do with academic due process.”
