Castles on Sand: Tenure Protections Against For Cause Termination
FREE SPEECH WEEK EVENT!
Tenure is central to academic freedom and the university’s role as a place for truth-seeking and knowledge. But how well does tenure actually protect faculty? Drawing on an original dataset of for-cause termination policies from more than 400 institutions, Jocelyn Wilson joins us to examine the troubling gaps in protections for tenured faculty, including broad grounds for termination, weak safeguards for academic freedom and speech, and expanding post-tenure review practices. She also offers insights on the potential role of courts, administrators, and the public to strengthen the foundations of faculty rights, and thereby safeguard the the university’s role as a place for truth-seeking and knowledge.
Lunch will be provided. Please RSVP. We hope you join us!
Jocelyn Wilson is a fifth-year PhD Candidate in the Department of Politics at Princeton University, where she specializes in political theory and public law. Her primary research interests are in free speech, U.S. constitutional theory and law, and philosophy of law. Her dissertation presents a site-based approach to free speech according to which the content and scope of speech rights depend on the particular site in which one is speaking. She argues that this site-based approach does more than rival accounts to fit existing judicial practice while fully realizing self-governance and other values underlying free speech. Her work has appeared in the San Diego Law Review, Res Publica, among other venues.
Wilson holds a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an M.A. in Legal and Political Philosophy from University College London, and a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law. She was previously a law clerk for the Hon. Judge Robert Sack of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.