Academic Freedom and Tenure: Meharry Medical College (Tennessee)1

Academe, Nov/Dec 2004 by Poston, Lawrence S, Bloch, Earl F, Soslau, Gerald

This report has its immediate origin in events at Mcliarry Medical College, in Nashville, Tennessee, which led to the issuance of notices of nonretention to more than a dozen faculty members, most of whom had completed over seven years of full-time service at the institution. Several of these faculty members received notices dated January 1, 2003, from Dr. Ponjola S. Coney, dean of the School of Medicine, stating that, "due to restructuring in the School of Medicine, your Faculty Appointment will not be renewed for the 2003-2004 academic year." These letters earned a termination date of June 30, 2003. Another, larger group of faculty members received notices dated May 29, 2003, which stated that "due to budget constraints in the School of Medicine, your Faculty Appointment will not be renewed for the 2003-2004 academic year." This second group of letters carried a termination date of December 31, 2003. In the visit to Meharry Medical College by the undersigned investigating committee on February 26-27, 2004, the committee met with many of the affected faculty members, two of whom had their initial termination notices rescinded. Subsequent to the committee's visit, the chair interviewed an additional affected faculty member, no longer at Meharry, by telephone. These cases grew out of a larger set of issues that will be treated in the latter half of the report.

I. The Institution

Meharry Medical College, one of four historically black medical schools in the United States, was founded in 1876 as the medical department of ("entrai "Feimessee College of Nashville, under the auspices of the Freedman's Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church. The school is named after the Meharry brothers, whose donation or more than $30,000 was part of its initial financing and was matched by the church. In 1900, (!entrai Tennessee College became WaIJen University, and by 1915, through a new state charter, the medical department gained a separate corporate existence from the university. Meharry Medical College moved to its present location, a twenty-six-acre campus in the northern part of Nashville, in 1931.

The mission of Meharry is to provide education and training in the health sciences, with a special focus on providing opportunities to promising African Americans and other underrepresented ethnic minority students. It has graduated nearly 15 percent of all African American physicians and dentists practicing in the United States, approximately 70 percent of whom work in poor and underserved areas of the country, and about 10 percent of the PhDs in biomédical sciences received by African Americans since 1970. Meharry, which has some 625 students served by a full-time faculty numbering approximately 190, is presently composed of schools of medicine, dentistry, and graduate studies, with another program, in allied health professions, conducted jointly with Tennessee State University. The School of Graduate Studies and Research originally had its own faculty roster, but these were merged into departments of the School of Medicine about five years before the events described in this report.

The college has been accredited since 1972 by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS). Its medical school is accredited by the American Association of Medical Colleges and its dental school by the American Dental Association. The college currently operates training centers in the Nashville and Murfreesboro areas, to name only two.

In 1994, Dr. John R. Maupin, Jr., a 1972 graduate of Meharry's dental school, became the college's ninth president. He had previously held positions as executive vice president of the Morehouse School of Medicine and as chief executive officer of Southside Healthcare, Inc., a provider of outpatient health-care services in Atlanta. Dr. Ponjola S. Coney became dean of the School of Medicine and senior vice president for health afrairs at Meharry in July 2002, having previously served as professor and chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Southern Illinois University College of Medicine in Springfield.

At the time of the events that led to the investigation resulting in this report, the chair of the college's forty-onemember board of trustees was Dr. Frank S. Royal, a prominent Richmond, Virginia, physician and a 1968 graduate of Meharry.

II. Issues Raised Previously

The Association's current involvement with issues of academic freedom and tenure at Meharry Medical College extends back to the 1994-95 academic year, when officers of the Meharry Faculty Senate consulted with the AAUP's staff regarding proposed revisions of the college's existing faculty personnel policies, which the board of trustees had approved in 1984. In 1998, a faculty member called the staffs attention to the status of at least half a dozen professors with more than seven years of full-time service on the Meharry faculty who had received notices of nonretention.

These cases, in turn, grew out of a longer record, dating back to the inception of President Maupin's term of office. Faculty concerns involved governance issues and administrative policies, particularly unilateral changes by the administration in academic programs, including the merger or restructuring of departments and the appointments of deans and department chairs with little or no faculty consultation. Following a tenure moratorium imposed by the board of trustees in January 1996, a 1997 self-study report for a SACS reaccreditation visit cited the status of tenure at Meharry as a long-standing "source of faculty unrest."2