¶ The Laboratorium (3d ser.)

Here’s a simple taxonomy for thinking about academic duties and freedoms. There are basically three kinds of reasons why a university could take disciplinary action against an academic:

1. Nonfeasance: “You were hired to do X and you didn’t do it.” These are the easiest cases, because even when X is a specialized activity, evaluating whether someone did it at all is usually a bright-line rule that can be enforced by non-experts. You don’t need to be an expert in microbiology to see that a microbiologist hasn’t been publishing or showing up to class.
2. Misfeasance: “You were hired to do X and you did it badly.” These are the hardest cases, because evaluating whether an academic did X badly requires the exercise of professional scholarly judgment. A key part of academic freedom and shared governance is that judgments of this sort need to be made by scholars with appropriate expertise in the field.
3. Malfeasance: “You were hired to do X, but you did something else wrong.” These involve some kind of serious interference with the university’s work; knowing what is and isn’t a serious interference requires familiarity with the functioning of a university, but it generally doesn’t require deep scholarly expertise. Some malfeasance cases are easy because they are so trivial (you parked in the department chair’s space) and some are easy because they are so severe (you assaulted the department chair with a broadsword); in between the harder ones that occupy much of university administrators’ attention.

Note what isn’t on this list: “You were hired to do X and you also did Y.” Doing something not in the job description cannot by itself be grounds for discipline, because that would destroy academics’ freedom when they act as citizens and as private individuals. Philosophers and chemists can advocate for nuclear disarmament; mathematicians can publish novels; art historians can have long-running feuds with their neighbors. It would be absurd to say that all of them violated their academic obligations by doing things outside of their fields. That’s called being a person and having a life.

Similarly, it is not disqualifying by itself to work on academic projects outside of one’s discipline or contracted role. An antitrust scholar can write on family law; a geologist can write on diplomatic history. Indeed, it mostly doesn’t matter whether these side hustles are good or not—that is for the family lawyers and the diplomatic historians to judge, and the consequences of their judgment are mostly confined to where these works are published and to how much note the academic community takes of them. If your geology is amateurish; the geology department should deny you tenure. If your diplomatic history is amateurish; the geology department mostly shouldn’t care.

Instead, these frolics become relevant only when and only to the extent that they constitute nonfeasance, misfeasance, or malfeasace—that is, when they either so interfere with the job you were hired to do that they result in you not doing it (nonfeasance) or doing it badly (misfeasance), or that they seriously interfere with the university’s other work (malfeasance). But, and this is the point to underline, they must be judged by the standards of those other tests.

Did your political activism keep you from showing up to class? That’s nonfeasance, and the dean can note your repeated absences and take action without inquiring into the content of your activism. Did you include your ill-informed diplomatic history articles as part of your geology tenure file? That’s misfeasance, which means it’s not a matter for swift action by the dean; it’s for your geology colleagues to weigh as part of a more deliberate review. Did you drive your car into your pickleball rival or publish op-eds that misrepresent your relationship to the university? These could be malfeasance, but, to repeat, they must be judged by the standards of malfeasance, which means showing wrongdoing of the sort the university can legitimately care about: serious interference with its own mission. The dean cannot short-circuit the inquiry by saying saying you were hired to teach physics rather than play pickleball and publish op-eds.

The standards of academic freedom are different for on-the-job and off-the-job conduct—but both have protections suitable to the occasion. Universities have, and should have, substantial freedom to structure different kinds of jobs with different kinds of duties: a senior lecturer is doing something different than a research scientist, who is doing something different than a tenured professor, who is doing something different than a postdoctoral associate. The scope of the job affects the boundaries between nonfeasance, misfeasance, and malfeasance, not whether academic freedom applies at all. Put another way, a university cannot circumvent academic freedom by gerrymandering the job.

I’m posting this so that I have it written down in a convenient place I can link to later. I will not be taking further questions at this time.