POSTED BY JOERG TIEDE

The following resolution was adopted by the Fifty-seventh Annual Meeting of the American Association of University Professors on April 17, 1971.

Misconceptions of tenure are commonplace. For many groups and individuals tenure has become a conveniently simple explanation for what they perceive as a variety of educational ills. Tenure is not the cause of these ills, nor is it an incidental and self-serving privilege of the academic profession which may be casually dismissed. It is the foundation of intellectual freedom in American colleges and universities and has important but frequently overlooked benefits for society at large.

Basically tenure insures that faculty members will not be dismissed without adequate cause and without due process. From the long list of academic freedom and tenure cases with which the Association has been confronted, it is evident that many good teachers and scholars have been arbitrarily dismissed, and that many more would have been dismissed without the protection of tenure. In the absence of a manifestly more effective means for safeguarding intellectual freedom, attacks on tenure are irresponsible. Therefore, the Fifty-seventh Annual Meeting of the American Association of University Professors reaffirms the Association’s commitment to tenure and insists upon its centrality as an enabling principle of American higher education.