Dear Commons Community,

Along with a secure post and academic freedom, tenured professors enjoy financial security—or so many outsiders imagine. In fact, many tenured faculty are expected to cover much of their salary with grants, and may be penalized with salary reductions if they do not. That’s what happened at Tufts University School of Medicine—and some researchers are fighting back.  As reported by Science.

Last month, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court sent a case brought by eight of the school’s faculty members to trial, writing that their claims have merit: “Tenure would seem to be a hollow promise if it came without any salary commitment.” The case, likely to be heard in 2025, could set an important precedent for tenure expectations across the country.

At issue is a policy the medical school enacted in 2017, stating that tenured faculty members in the basic sciences need to cover 50% of their salary with external grants. If they fail to obtain sufficient funding, they could face a salary reduction and lose their full-time status; the school could also take away their lab space. Similar policies are in place at many medical schools around the country.

In 2019, the eight faculty members—who had been granted tenure between 1970 and 2009—sued the university after their salaries were reduced, claiming their tenure rights had been violated. They point to a key sentence in the university’s policy on academic freedom, tenure, and retirement, which states that tenure includes “a sufficient degree of economic security to make the profession attractive to men and women of ability.” A court rejected the plaintiffs’ claims in 2023, but they appealed, leading to the recent ruling that the case should proceed.

“This case, this decision, will be very influential to other state courts looking at contractual issues of the meaning of tenure,” says Risa Lieberwitz, a professor of labor and employment law at Cornell University and general counsel for the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). In an amicus brief submitted on behalf of AAUP, Lieberwitz argued that the Tufts plan was “fundamentally incompatible with the principles of tenure, economic security, and academic freedom.”

The faculty bringing the case saw salary reductions ranging from roughly $4500 to $95,500. Some also had their workload cut to part time and their lab space taken away. “My salary is [about] $60,000,” says cancer biologist Amy Yee, a plaintiff who has been a tenured faculty member at Tufts since 1998. “It’s created significant financial hardship.” She’s taken on work in real estate to supplement her income.

“It’s created significant financial hardship.”

In court filings, Tufts has contended it was within its rights to reduce the salaries. “The Plaintiffs for many years have failed to meet the performance expectations,” reads a brief filed during the appeals process. “They have failed to maintain independent research programs which result in impactful scholarship and failed to secure meaningful external funding to support their research.” Court documents indicate that in 2020, the plaintiffs fell well short of covering 50% of their salary.

The plaintiffs point out that they were hired to do research, teach, and carry out service work—not simply to write grants. “I disagree with any language … that considers any of our faculty in the medical school as unproductive,” a plaintiff who requested anonymity told Science.

They also point out that many funders limit how much of a grant can go toward a principal investigator’s pay. Some “won’t pay a penny of my salary,” says Ana Soto, a plaintiff who has been a tenured faculty member at Tufts since 1994 and is known for research showing that bisphenol A, a chemical found in some plastics, is an endocrine disrupter. Pushing faculty members to avoid such grants in favor of others without that restriction infringes on their academic freedom, their lawyer contends.

For Soto, the 2017 policy put her in the difficult position of either satisfying the new university requirement or keeping her lab personnel. “They are not disposable,” she says. Soto chose not to adhere to the policy; court records show she covered 25% of her salary in 2020.

Tufts’s lawyers have argued that the statement in the tenure documents about economic security—which is a customary part of the documents at many U.S. universities, copied from a seminal 1940 AAUP statement—is “aspirational” and not contractually binding because it lacks specificity. But in the judicial court’s decision last month, it concluded that “economic security is an important substantive provision of the tenure contract.” Although the court added that “further evidence … is required to define what types of reductions are consistent with, and not in violation of” the contract, the decision was largely a win for the plaintiffs. The court sided with Tufts on one matter: The professors were not entitled to their own lab space.

The case’s outcome could reverberate around the country. In an amicus brief filed last year, the Association of American Universities—which represents 69 research universities around the country—wrote that accepting the plaintiffs’ argument would “create a financial crisis” because medical schools rely on external grant funding to support their operations. “The understanding for at least the past few decades has been that a medical school can reduce a tenured faculty member’s salary due to lack of productivity.”

Soto counters that universities have a mission that goes beyond doing big-dollar research and that many projects can be done with very little funding. “Universities are not businesses and running them as such is detrimental to the creativity and insight that only academia can produce.”

Tony

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