From 2016 to 2019 Tufts University instituted policies that required tenured medical school professors to cover 50% of their salary with external research funding.
According to the policies, any professor who failed to produce the required funding could have his lab space reduced or eliminated. Additionally, the university could reduce the professor’s salary if his external funding got too low.
Unsurprisingly, a group of eight medical professors filed a lawsuit against the school in superior court. A trial judge dismissed the lawsuit after university lawyers filed a motion for summary judgment.
The trial judge’s decision is attached.
The professors appealed the ruling and the matter eventually made its way to the Supreme Judicial Court (SJC).
The SJC concluded that the trial judge rightly dismissed the legal challenge to the lab-space policy. However, the justices held that the dispute over the salary-reduction policy could move forward in superior court.
According to the opinion,
We conclude that academic freedom and economic security are not hortatory concepts but important norms in the academic community. Importantly, they are substantive terms expressly incorporated in Tufts’s tenure documents. The meaning of at least economic security is not, however, self-explanatory and may vary depending upon the particular university and even the particular school within the university. We further conclude that the meaning of economic security for tenured medical school professors at Tufts is ambiguous in the tenure documents, and more evidence is required regarding the customs and practices and reasonable expectations related to salary and full time status for tenured professors at TUSM, and even other universities and medical schools, to resolve the question whether the significant reductions in salary and full-time status imposed here violated the economic security provided in the tenure documents. Summary judgment was therefore not appropriate on this issue. In contrast, nothing in the tenure documents, including the protection provided by the terms “academic freedom” and “economic security,” guarantee the lab space commitments claimed here. Summary judgment on these claims was therefore proper. We therefore affirm in part and reverse in part.
To read the SJC’s full opinion, click the document below.