Misconduct has led to dismissals of both tenured and non-tenured faculty at Harvard’s peer institutions. In 2008, Madonna G. Constantine, a tenured professor at Columbia Teachers College, was fired for plagiarism, and in 2005, Luk Van Parijs, associate professor of biology at MIT, was dismissed after admitting to falsifying data.

But tenure terminations remain a rarity. A 2005 Yale Daily News article stated only two Yale professors have ever had their tenure revoked.

A copy of Harvard statutes revised in 2004 states that only the Harvard Corporation, the University’s highest governing body, can dismiss a permanently appointed faculty member for “grave misconduct or neglect of duty.”

The Corporation can also require a faculty member to resign due to “ill health” or serious disability.

For example, during the McCarthy era, the Corporation found that Wendell H. Furry, an associate professor of physics and former member of the Communist party, had committed “grave misconduct” for providing a government agent with false information. But the Corporation stopped short of revoking his tenure because he had left the party due to the “increasing violence and untruth of its propaganda and its growing hostility to the United States,” according to a statement it made in 1953.

It is unclear whether the statutes have been revised since 2004, and a request to Neal for information on Harvard’s procedures on terminating tenure was not returned in time for this article.

Government professor Harvey C. Mansfield ’53, who has been on the faculty since 1962, said he could not recall a tenured professor being removed for misconduct.

“People [leave when they] don’t get tenure, but that’s a perfectly honorable departure. And often people leave for a better job. But hardly anyone is dismissed,” he said.

—Staff writer Naveen N. Srivatsa can be reached at srivatsa@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer William N. White can be reached at wwhite@fas.harvard.edu.