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By ALEXANDER SEDGWICK 1. Rappahannock Ntwi Contributing Writer
Imagine that you were a full professor with 16 years of distinguished service at a community college in the Old Dominion. Imagine that one day, without warning, the president of the college abolished your position, along with those of six other senior educators and staff people.
This was the scenario that developed in the spring of 1986 at Thomas Nelson Community College in Hampton. The result was pandemonium.
An outraged faculty senate voted a resolution of no confidence in the president, who soon left. However, the Chancellor of the Community College system defended the terminations as within the letter of the law, despite protests and calls for reform by legislators and members of the Community College board.
Ostensibly the chaotic events at Thomas Nelson Community College were dictated by harsh economic realities facing an educational institution with declining enrollment. However, the faculty at Thomas Nelson proposed budget cuts that would have avoided the layoffs as other community colleges with similar enrollment drops had done. In reality, this series of arbitrary terminations - sadly not unique in the community college system — reveals the urgent need for tenure at these educational institutions.
Tenure is basic to scholarship. This historic right became generally recognized by university administrators in Europe and the United States in the 20th century after centuries of oppression - first on the part of the church, and later, the state.
Tenure is part of the contract with educational systems for all academicians in Virginia from kindergarten teachers to graduate school professors - everyone, in fact, except the 2,000 faculty members at
the state’s 23 community colleges.
The shocking failure to protect the long-standing principle of academic freedom drew the censure of the American Association of University Professors and has seriously undermined the reputation of Virginia’s community college system.
Initially, Virginia’s community college instructors did have tenure. However, in September 1972 the State Board of Community Colleges abolished this right. a Then Chancellor Dana B. Hamel Insetted that the traditions of the past ought not to prevent the community college system from moving into the 21st century. Tenure is Sometimes regarded by university administrators as an obstacle to the
of an institution in the Restructuring
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