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[pyromania]

I know of a tenured associate professor at a major university in the Netherlands who was fired for what I consider rather minor issues.  I cannot go into it here for obvious reasons.  I thought said person would have had a written reprimand and nothing more.  I was flabergasted to learn that after an admin meeting that hu was in fact fired.  WTH?

My question is, do any of you know just how strong tenure IS in Holland?  My impression is that it is much weaker than in the USA, and that no formal proceedings need to occur before a tenured faculty member is dismissed.  Does anyone have any insight?

[neuropsych]

I am at a Dutch university and I am sure tenure in the Netherlands is much stronger than in the US. Actually, we do not have actual tenure as such, but 'permanent positions' like in the UK. These are protected by law. This is even the case in commercial businesses but even more so in public offices (among which university personnel, since we only have government-funded universities), because of possible conflict of interest from the government being both a lawmaker and an employer.

In fact, the law is so strict that one is only allowed a fixed contract extension 2 times at the same university, after which the 3rd time becomes by law a permanent position. Here, even small teaching jobs, resarch-assistantships and postdocs count, so you can even become 'tenured' by accident is some HRM person overlooks a 3-month teaching position in some other department at the same university 2 years ago and you don't tell them.

If you say your colleague was fired from a major university for 'minor issues' then I would highly doubt that. Permanent positions in general can only be broken by going to court, and even then your institute must pay the former employee the equivalent of 1 or 2 years (and sometimes more) salary. If you are tenure/faculty at a university, you basically can only be fired if you steal or sexually harass students.

Exceptions are major reorganisations, but this mostly occurs in commercial business (e.g., happening now in the steel industry because of the financial crisis), but even then the employer has to pay ex-employees months of wages for compensation.

[monsterx]

There are actually two kinds of tenure in the Netherlands right now.  The tradional kind, described by neurophysch, is not called tenure, but is.  The new kind is actually called tenure.

Many, if not all, Dutch universities are moving toward a tenure track model, resembling what they think the US system is like.  In some cases, they haven't quite worked out the details of how it works, because it is so new that there are very few actually cases of people going through the system. 

The old sort of tenure was just granted after working someplace for a period of time.  The new kind involves an assessment procedure, with publication standards and so on.  The new kind, at least at my university, also involves a very structured post-tenure evaluation.