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

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

The Association's staff wrote to the Meharry administration on August 19, 2003, observing that many of the issues posed by the 2003 terminations seemed virtually identical to those the staff had raised in 1998: claims to tenure on the basis of length of service, lack of faculty involvement in the decision-making process, and denial of academic due process. Additionally, the staff expressed concern over allegations by several of the affected faculty members that the administration had singled them out for reasons that violated their academic freedom, resulting from displeasure with their outspoken criticism of certain administration policies and practices. The staff noted that all the professors who received notices of termination had been placed on administrative leave with pay and banned from the campus, despite the absence of evidence that imminent harm was threatened either to them or to others by their continuance in their academic duties or by their presence on the campus. When the administration, after a further exchange of correspondence, declined to address the Association's concerns, the staff advised President Manpin by letter tinted November 10, 2003, of the general secretary's decision to appoint an ad hoc committee to investigate the issues of academic freedom, tenure, and due process raised by the cases. Following a subsequent exchange of correspondence with attorneys for Meharry, the visit of the committee to Nashville was set for February 26-27, 2004. In the course of its visit, the committee met with President Manpin, Dean Coney, General Counsel Leilani Bonlware, ami current and former members of the faculty, including representatives of the AAUP chapter. The committee thanks all those who met with it for their cooperation.

IV. Basic-Science Faculty

In the discussions of individual basic-science faculty cases that follow, the investigating committee confines itself to an analysis of those cases in terms of Association-supported principles and procedural standards. Several issues are also implicitly raised with respect to the status of Meharry's own statutes, procedures, and guidelines. These, in the committee's judgment, are more properly treated separately as part of continuing governance issues at the institution, although a number of points will be noted at which the dispositions of individual cases appear not to have comported even with the inadequate standards set forth under the college's own guidelines.

1. PROFESSOR SHIRLEY B. RUSSELL

Shirley Russell received her PhI) in medical genetics from the University of Wisconsin in 1969, and was a postdoctoral student at the Howard University College of Medicine, where she studied somatic cell genetics from 1968 to 1970. From 1970 to 1974 she was first a part-time instructor and then an assistant professor m the Division of Genetics and Molecular Medicine, School of Graduate Studies, at Meharry, her appointment becoming full time in 1974. Dr. Russell was promoted to the rank of associate professor in the Division of Biomédical Sciences and the Department of Microbiology in 1980 and to the rank of professor in the Department of Microbiology in 1994. She served as department chair from 1989 to 2003, and as associate dean for research in the School of Dentistry from 1995 to 2003. Professor Russell received various teaching and service honors at Meharry, including an award in Î999 "for her untiring efforts and commitment to the School of Dentistry." She served as the co-principal investigator and principal investigator on a variety of research and training grants from the National Science Foundation and from several institutes (among them, the National Cancer Institute; the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute; and the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). She was the principal investigator for a regional research center for minority oral health, for expanding oral health disparities research at Meharry, and for various minority research and training grants in cellular and molecular biology. Total funding for research projects in which Professor Russell participated exceeded $4 million in direct costs and resulted in twenty-three publications, seventeen of them in peer-reviewed journals. She also obtained more than $7 million in direct costs for expanding institutional research infrastructure and for training PhD students.