Giving tenure if you know the faculty member is leaving We had a tenure track professor announce she was leaving at the start of the academic year. Documented in faculty meeting minutes. Job posting appeared shortly thereafter. Candidates brought in and offers were made. This person was up for tenure. The committee voted no for tenure since she was leaving. Is the committee in error here?
Usually people leave before they are up for tenure when they think the answer won't be a good one. A tenure package that doesn't get you tenure at Princeton might get you tenure no-questions-asked at state school. If you make that move as fast as possible, everything you have in the pipeline can be attributed to your new institution and help with promotion there, rather than throwing your output down a poisoned well. During my time at Mid-Ivy university tenure candidate A (best candidate) was denied, future tenure candidates B and C (weaker candidates) promptly left as soon as they lined up offers elsewhere.

Is the committee at error here? Ethically if they have submitted their package, I suppose it "should" be evaluated without respect to what the candidate does afterwards. However in the real world any offer of tenure or permanency is only provided at a cost of significant intraorganizational capital all the way up to dean &amp; potentially president level and is only offered when the expected returns on such investment are likely. 

At my previous job my colleague was up for a permanent scientific position in government and had completed his entire package when he started having stomach pains. Turns out he had stage 4 cancer, and the division did not put forth his package. We all donated our sick leave to him so he could keep his salary and insurance. When I resigned I brought up that he was not put up for the permanent position he had worked over a 6-7 year period to attain and my director said "well, when he beats the stage 4 cancer and can come back to work we will put his package forward" (paraphrasing). While extremely cold, I took it to mean that he would not create a permanent position for a terminally ill employee because then he wouldn't have the capital later on to get another one. So certainly if someone is unlikely to accept the offer of tenure the tenure process would not continue. For example, try interviewing for a job and then telling the hiring manager that you were going to take an offer elsewhere. Do you think you would still get a formal offer from this hiring manager?