This volume is of considerable interest to any faculty member who desires tenure, promotion, or reappointment. It should be noted at the outset that the intended audience seems to be administrators. That is, the authors, through a thorough review of case law and discussion of various legal situations, seem most interested in helping colleges and universities avoid successful lawsuits for denying their faculty tenure, reappointment or promotion.

Faculty members and those who encourage and support their career development--Teaching Center staff, for instance, or department chairs--can learn a great deal from this book about what rights faculty members possess; which of them are constitutional, which of them are dependent on a contract of employment, and which are in some way derived from the AAUP's 1940 Statement of Principles (which, having been endorsed by many universities, has become a binding code); and which rights apply to employees of public institutions but not of private ones.

The authors address the following questions:

• What has been the role of the courts in reappointment, promotion, or tenure decisions?
• What is tenure, and why is it the subject of many faculty lawsuits?
• What constitutes the faculty employment contract?
• To what extent are untenured faculty members at public institutions entitled to due process under the Constitution?
• How do courts balance institutional and individual academic freedom rights?
• How are faculty members protected from illegal discrimination in reappointment, promotion, or tenure decisions?
• What are the legal boundaries of affirmative action in faculty employment?
• What rights do faculty members have to access confidential peer-review materials?
• To what extent are administrators and faculty members involved in the peer-review process liable for defamation and other tort claims?
• What can we do to minimize the risk of litigation?

This last question is clearly at the heart of the book. The more legalistic answers include making sure that the procedure for granting tenure is clearly spelled out in the faculty handbook and creating paper trails; a broader, more humane answer lies more, as Justice Douglas said, "in the penumbras"--that is, treat faculty members fairly, with dignity and full information.

A few points which struck me very forcefully:
*Particularly in North Carolina, where General Administration Memoranduam 338 has mandated peer review as part of the process for granting (or denying) tenure and promotion, peer reviewers should be aware of their potential liabilities. Their comments may not remain confidential (even comments on persons other than plaintiffs may be disclosed, when plaintiffs attempt to prove discrimination by showing that other candidates were not held to the same standard), and reviewers are liable, under some circumstances, to being sued for what they have written about candidates.

*Suits claiming that applicants have been denied tenure or promotion because of racial discrimination are unlikely to succeed, history shows, except when the plaintiff is a white faculty member suing a historically black institution.

*For most college and university teachers, "academic freedom" probably refers to their freedom from interference in what and how they teach. But there is a dimension that faculty consider less often: the institution's freedom to select its faculty. Justice Frankfurter is quoted as identifying the "four essential freedoms" as being freedom "to determine for itself on academic grounds who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study." The first clause grants universities wide latitude, which the courts have been fairly reluctant to abridge, in choosing and rewarding their teaching staff.

There is something in this report which ought to be of interest to anybody involved in university employment decisions and anybody who might one day be caught up in litigation. In the America of the 1990's, the second category unfortunately includes us all.

Merritt Moseley, The University of North Carolina at Ashville