Thursday 3 January 2019

Will professors get dismissed for not actively doing research?



According to Wikipedia:



A tenured professor or curator has an appointment that lasts until retirement age, except for dismissal with just cause. A common justification for existence of such a privileged position is the principle of academic freedom, which holds that it is beneficial for state, society and academy in the long run if scholars are free to examine, hold, and advance controversial views.



I know this "just cause" includes academic misconducts and crimes, but my question is about a mild case:


I have heard that professors and associate professors have certain research requirements. If a professor or associate professor stops to be active in his research (for instance, publishing very few or even no papers for years) after he gets tenured (but let's assume he still does a fair job in teaching and outreach), will he be dismissed from the university?


If there are no such examples, then what is the binding power of research requirements upon professors and associate professors?



Answer




What is the binding power of research requirements upon professors and associate professors?




Without some specific agreement to the contrary, tenure means you can't be fired for doing insufficiently good research. Some tenured positions involve post-tenure review, which can weaken the notion of tenure by expanding the cases in which you could be disciplined or even fired, but this is not the default.


On the other hand, there are tons of other ways to enforce requirements. If a professor is not doing good research, they may be asked to take on extra teaching or service (which is reasonable: if they aren't spending time productively on research, then they should spend it on something else). In more extreme cases, they might never get a raise again, in which case their salary is gradually eaten away by inflation if they aren't near retirement. If the chair specifically wants to punish someone, they can assign them the classes or committees nobody else wants, give them the least desirable office, etc. In short, there are lots of ways a tenured position can become unpleasant, which gives the administration more leverage than one might guess from the definition of tenure.


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