Eight faculty members at the Tufts University School of Medicine are suing it over a pair of policies they say violate the terms of their tenure contracts.
The faculty members say that a revised compensation plan and guidelines for laboratory space — both of which were enacted after they received tenure — have resulted in salary cuts and loss of the facilities necessary to do their work. The policies undermine the institution of tenure, they say, without an institutional declaration of financial exigency.
The compensation plan, which took effect in July 2017, mandates that professors support 40 percent of their salaries through outside grant funding; that proportion is slated to increase to 50 percent this July. The research-space guidelines, meanwhile, allocate the square footage each faculty member is provided according to the dollars that research brings in.
Four of the plaintiffs have had their labs closed down under the new policies — two of them as recently as February 28 — and at least two other faculty members have had theirs shut as well. All eight plaintiffs have seen their salaries cut, some by half.
Among those without a lab is Henry H. Wortis, a professor of immunology. That makes it harder to pursue research, which in turn makes obtaining grants all the more difficult, he said. Wortis called it a “double bind.”
The most basic, existential question was, Can the institution condition your employment on the research you do?
“The most basic, existential question was, Can the institution condition your employment on the research you do?” said Kevin T. Peters, a partner at the law firm Gesmer Updegrove who is representing the professors. By forcing researchers to focus on topics that are likely to net them federal grants — and thus enable them to keep their salaries and lab space — Tufts is violating their academic freedom, he said.
“Frankly, I think the institution understands that,” Peters said. “It’s just the environment that we’re in now, where people appear to be justified in undertaking actions that they don’t have a right to undertake if they can simply rely on the battle cry ‘We need to save money for this important institution.’”
Patrick Collins, executive director of media relations at the Massachusetts university, rejected those claims as without merit. The policies in question, Collins wrote in an email, are “equitable, transparent, and reward quality research and related productivity, which are integral to the school’s mission. They also are fully consistent with the commitment of the university and the medical school to core principles of tenure, academic freedom, and the equitable treatment of all employees.”
A Bid to ‘Retrofit’ the Terms of Tenure
The Tufts case is compelling but not unprecedented, said Lynne Bernabei, a lawyer in Washington, D.C., who has represented faculty members in employment-discrimination cases.
Reviewing the Tufts professors’ complaint, Bernabei was reminded of a 1998 case in which medical-school professors at Georgetown University succeeded in suspending a program that had linked their salaries to their ability to secure grants.
Similar funding requirements, Bernabei said, are being imposed at a number of institutions, most often in the middle of scholars’ tenure-probationary periods. “After someone’s been there four years, they tell them, ‘Oh, you have to get funding,’” Bernabei said. “What they’re trying to do is basically retrofit these requirements.”
Bernabei sees the new policies as symptomatic of a corporatized-university model, a means of whittling away the proportion of tenured faculty members in favor of a contingent work force. And given that most of the Tufts plaintiffs are senior scholars, she said, the maneuver reeks of age discrimination.
Tufts developed the requirements in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, when the institution sought to reduce its operating budget. Faculty input on the medical-school compensation plan was ignored, and four faculty members appointed by the administration effectively rubber-stamped the policy, Wortis said.
Wortis, a member and past chair of the medical school’s Faculty Senate, said the school’s finances have not been shared with the Senate, nor were the compensation plan or lab-space guidelines ever brought before the Senate for discussion. “The administration likes to use the term ‘transparent’ about its process, but it has not been transparent and has not been for 10 years or more,” he said.
Collins wrote in an email to The Chronicle that such statements, about faculty input on the compensation plan and about denying the Faculty Senate an opportunity to give feedback, were “categorically false.”
“The university remains committed to litigating this case in the appropriate forum,” he wrote.
Professors filed an internal grievance, but it failed when the Tufts president, Anthony P. Monaco, opted not to void the compensation plan. (Both the plaintiffs and Collins declined to provide documentation of Monaco’s decision, saying the grievance process had been confidential.)
Before filing suit, the plaintiffs sought guidance from the American Association of University Professors, which sent them an advisory letter in December 2016. “We view the compensation plan as severely deficient relative to widely observed principles of academic freedom, tenure, and due process,” Hans-Joerg Tiede, then the AAUP’s associate secretary in the department of academic freedom, tenure, and governance, wrote in the letter.
A June 2018 letter from the then provost, Deborah T. Kochevar, responded to faculty requests that a moratorium be placed on the policies. “These plans, long in development, are part of an individual school’s effort to handle serious financial difficulties, and it is the dean’s responsibility to ensure the financial health of his or her school,” she wrote in the letter, which was provided to The Chronicle.
In December 2019 the plaintiffs filed suit in Middlesex County Superior Court, seeking a declaration that Tufts cannot retroactively apply the policies to faculty members whose tenure contracts did not contain such stipulations, and demanding damages for all eight plaintiffs.
Tufts filed a motion for dismissal of the complaint and motions to have it moved to a different court and to shift its consideration from a “fast track” to an “average track.” A hearing on those motions is scheduled for April 23.
‘Mission Impossible’
The school, said one plaintiff, Emmanuel N. Pothos, realizes that most faculty members will not be able to bring in enough funding to keep their space, and administrators do not seem to take into account other funding streams that faculty members create. The National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies that make research grants accept only 5 to 10 percent of grant applications.
“They know that most of their faculty will not be able, under current circumstances, to bring in this kind of funding,” said Pothos, an associate professor of immunology. “So they put you under these odds, and they know very well that, at the end of the process, you are going to lose your lab.
“It has become mission impossible,” he said.
If medical-school faculty members do not raise the requisite funds, they can be deemed to hold a less-than-full-time position, as has happened to several plaintiffs. The compensation plan stipulates that tenure can be revoked if a professor remains under three-quarters of a full-time-equivalency, or FTE, position for four years.
Ana M. Soto, a professor of immunology whose research has demonstrated a link between breast cancer and exposure to bisphenol A, a chemical once commonly found in plastics, said the policies at Tufts created expectations similar to those in the private sector.
“In the private sector, there are companies where the so-called personnel have to go out to get business. I was never signing for that,” Soto said.
The policies may also prevent scholars from doing important science, by creating “a degenerative spiral where those who have chosen to investigate important issues too original or arcane to interest the NIH or other federal funding agencies are denied dedicated space necessary to undertake such novel and yet-to-be funded research,” the plaintiffs’ complaint says.
At stake, too, is the plaintiffs’ economic security. Soto said she makes $70,000 per year less than she did in 2016, and Wortis said his pay cuts had made him nearly eligible for affordable housing.
“That’s bizarre, when a full tenured professor at a leading university becomes eligible for affordable housing,” Wortis said.
And while Wortis does not have an active lab, he continues to apply for grants. He said he must do so at a pace at least equal to that of five years ago, when he did have a lab — all while being paid about one-quarter of his former salary.
The process of contesting the policies has been difficult. “It’s, of course, not easy knowing that you’re essentially putting the target on your back,” Pothos said. “But the policies were so flagrant that something had to be done.”
