Does tenure protect the salaries of medical school faculty?

When faculty have tenure, are their salaries protected? If so, what portion and in what circumstances? In the era of managed care and shrinking resources, these questions are becoming particularly important at medical schools because salaries there tend to be higher than salaries elsewhere in academia and because those salaries are more commonly dependent on outside funding. A fundamental question that will increasingly be asked is whether reductions in the salaries of tenured faculty are legally permissible. To a large extent, the answer is a matter of interpreting what each medical school has contractually obligated itself to do regarding tenure; generally, schools' tenure rules support the legal right to impose a salary reduction. But, in fact, the historical record shows few instances of such reductions. Thus there are few judicial decisions regarding tenure that can help predict how particular tenure contracts are likely to be interpreted. In this situation, faculty and institutions can be expected to interpret the historical absence of salary reductions for tenured faculty in contrasting ways. Generally, if the written policies are clear, past practices will play little or no legal role. If the policies are unclear, institutions must show that their practices were primarily related to the pre-1994 conditions of mandatory retirement and have little relevance to present circumstances. Although the main historical purpose of tenure was the protection of academic freedom, can the protection of salary be encompassed within this purpose? Usually not; the current situation is almost always one in which cost concerns, not political ones, motivate medical schools to reduce the salaries of faculty with reduced funding or practice incomes. The author concludes that although there are few precedents and many unexplored issues, it is clear that tenure was not intended to protect full salaries at most medical schools. His view is that in appropriate circumstances, reductions in the salaries of tenured faculty are legally achievable.