Inside Higher Ed reports:
A plan to eliminate 15 faculty positions regardless of tenure status might hit some speed bumps if Albion College’s faculty handbook were followed, but the college’s trustees have decided to ignore that minor inconvenience.
When Albion faculty said the dismissals might violate the handbook, the board promptly passed a resolution washing their hands of the guidelines. Indeed, the board didn’t even bother to say which parts of the book they would change; the trustees simply declared that anything standing in their way was "amended effective immediately."
And the resolution does indeed say, simply,
RESOLVED that exercising the authority of the Board of Trustees under the Charter of 1857, the Faculty Handbook is amended effective immediately in all ways necessary to
permit the reduction of 15 full time equivalent (FTE) existing faculty positions, which may include tenured faculty positions, by the beginning of the 2010-2011
academic year.
Some of the faculty have advanced various interpretations of the Faculty Handbook which are incompatible with the trustees’ fiduciary obligation to govern the College.
The Board of Trustees reaffirms its fundamental commitment to academic freedom, which tenure protects.
This amendment is made effective immediately because the Board considers it an emergency that the Board’s authority in this area be clarified.
Now, final resolution of the relationship between faculty governance and trustee authority is hard to come by, and one usually wants to avoid pushing things to the point where a resolution is needed. But let's say that the trustees are right that they have the responsibility and authority to act unilaterally if they need to. Suppose that they have the authority to unilaterally amend the Faculty hHandbook-- which is likely to be legally correct.
They still haven't acted.
"the Faculty Handbook is amended effective immediately in all ways necessary to
permit the reduction of 15 full time equivalent (FTE) existing faculty positions, which may include tenured faculty positions, by the beginning of the 2010-2011
academic year."
has no actual amendments contained within its language. The thing about written legal documents is that they contain actual words-- and amending them requires substituting other actual words, or else specifying which original words are being deleted. You can't simply declare a policy goal.
If the Faculty Handbook posed an ex ante obstacle to the firings, then I can't see that that obstacle has been removed.
Update: Paul Gowder thinks I'm wrong about this. As you'll see in the comments over there, I think he's wrong in thinking me wrong.
