Summary: Joint Statement Urging Kansas Board of Regents to Uphold Employment Protections for Faculty
January 2021
- American colleges and universities are facing severe financial and operational challenges, which have resulted in a great number of faculty layoffs. Even faculty members with tenure—a structure that supposedly protects the freedom to conduct independent inquiry without constraints from political or cultural forces—might face layoffs.
- The preservation of the established process of tenure has been long upheld by colleges and universities in the United States.
- It is key to the principles of academic freedom and tenure first articulated by the American Association of University Professors in 1915, promulgated in the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure by the AAUP and the Association of American Colleges (now the Association of American Colleges and Universities), and now endorsed by hundreds of educational and scholarly organizations in the United States.
- ACLS proudly stands by those principles, and we urge the Kansas Board of Regents to withdraw its endorsement of a proposed policy to ease the path to suspending, dismissing, or terminating employees, including tenured faculty members, without first formally declaring a financial emergency.
- We must remain focused on investing in the future of higher education, maintaining our national commitment to the promotion of knowledge—what George Washington called “the surest basis of public happiness.”
- We also encourage you to look at a statement cosigned in summer 2020 by leaders of cultural institutions and scholarly societies across the country attesting to the importance of teaching and research to sustaining a robust economy and a just democracy.