Scholars say tenured professors are rarely fired

The University of Colorado has fired two tenured professors in the history of the Boulder campus.

And Ward Churchill, if dismissed, would be the first to be fired because of alleged research misconduct.

Scholars say it's more common at universities that unpopular professors are squeezed out — or given early-retirement settlements — rather than fired. The protection of tenure can make outright job termination a costly and lengthy battle.

Richard Berthold, a former University of New Mexico professor, retired two years after he was censured for telling his class on Sept. 11, 2001: "Anyone who blows up the Pentagon gets my vote."

The 31-year professor said he was "harassed" into retiring after the notorious comment, which prompted death threats and hate mail. He was given a negative post-tenure review and a 1 percent raise at UNM, barred from teaching a freshman Western civilization class he'd led his whole career, and his graduate-student help was cut, he said.

Administrators there kept a close eye on him, he said, and only one faculty member in his department publicly defended him after his comment drew national attention.

"It started to seem that every time I opened my mouth, I was being accused of some kind of unprofessional conduct,"

Berthold said. "At the time, it was getting to me. ... They made it perfectly clear that they didn't want me there, and it was just not as fun anymore."

Churchill came under fire last year for a Sept. 11 essay that compared victims in the World Trade Center attacks to a notorious Nazi. Ensuing allegations of research misconduct prompted investigations that led interim Chancellor Phil DiStefano to call Monday for the tenured ethnic studies professor's dismissal.

Churchill has denied the claims and said he's under a right-wing attack on academic freedom.

The chancellor's decision, which will be appealed and would need Board of Regents approval to be final, is rare for CU.

Members of one CU committee that reviewed Churchill's work called his case an "anomaly" and said they found no other instances in campus history that resulted in a research-misconduct finding. They discovered one case of plagiarism, but that faculty member resigned, apparently as part of a negotiated settlement.

About 40 faculty members nationwide are fired every year, said Jonathan Knight, spokesman for the American Association of University Professors. The ensuing legal battles can last several years.

R. Igor Gamow, fired from CU in 2004, said in a letter to the editor last month that the university has "well-used strategies to eliminate tenured professors" short of dismissing them.

"The first one is to freeze or almost freeze their salaries," he wrote. "The second strategy is to give them unpalatable courses to teach. The third strategy is to move them into administration."

CU dismissed Gamow for "moral turpitude" after seven women accused him of sexual assault and harassment. He denies the allegations and is suing the school for wrongful termination.

Mahinder Uberoi is the only other tenured CU professor to have been fired, said school spokeswoman Jeannine Malmsbury.

Uberoi was dismissed in 2000 for reasons that weren't made public. He had filed eight lawsuits over six years against the university, claiming everything from racial discrimination to hazardous laboratory working conditions and violations of the state's Open Records Act.

If it is any help, I ran a small business for years. I did some adjuncting for my local university and then found that I enjoyed the give-and-take of the classroom. Real live work experience is not very helpful. Academe is still a lot like a monastery. Most people get there young and the only language and the customs they know relate almost entirely to academe. Often times my discourse is not on line and they make certain judgments that are not very bright. >>> Story <<< A young professor who grew up in academe and has no experiences out of it was in my office one day and made a remark about priests and pedophilia. I was looking down at that moment and he started to say, "pedophilia is . . . " when I looked up at him in shock and then amusement. But he certainly had revealed what he thought of an old geezer who had gone on tenure-track at 40. To make it even weirder, I have been published in two of the top three journals in my field and he has had one article published (in some lesser journal) in the last six years. So . . . get the right set of feathers so you will blend in.

I now do a whole lot of different things in academe, but still commit the great bulk of my time to teaching and research and the next bulk to service--mostly to senior citizens.

That is my problem...I am a history major. The pay for that area is awful unless you get to a huge university, so it is just not worth it to get the phd and try to become a prof.

I am trying to decide between teaching high school history/govt. and going into journalism to start out with after college; the latter would require getting a master's, but it would be worth it because I would advance more quickly to an okay wage (would likely start at 27,000 instead of 22,000 or so and would advance to 35 or so much more quickly). The pay for journalism would be really bad, but it would be worth it only having to take 2 more years. Having to take 4 more years to become a history prof with similar pay is not worth it.

I do wonder what journalism prof pay is like, but since it would be a humanities area, it is probably pretty low.

I guess if I want money, I do have two alternatives I may consider down the line if necessary: technical writing or public relations. Both would fit my personality well and actually pay a good wage.

But, being a professor is probably not for me. I wish you good luck in your career, however. We need conservative profs!

Well, you are passionate. But if you can't teach the kids because some left-wing kook has decided that you are a throwback . . . .

Something else happens without tenure. Even if you don't get fired, you will find it hard to get on the committees that determine the direction of the school. With tenure, we few conservatives have a source of authority which we can use.

By the way, it was because Hus's friends did not have tenure that he was burned . . . .

Tenure is being used as a tool to maintain a left wing secular outlook among the elites in higher ed. Dare to question or disagree, and the professor become a pariah with all the attendent negatives that that status brings.

Even worse (if anything could be), it maintains the status quo of incompetence, self serving aggrandizement, and a forum or leftist propaganda...notice that conservatives rarely if ever exploit their classroom authority to foist their agendas on students.

Tenure has got to go!

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