Today, the AAUP released its report on Northeastern Illinois University dealing with the tenure case of John Boyle. Peter N. Kirstein of the Illinois AAUP comments on the process in this case.
By Peter N. Kirstein, St. Xavier University
One of the unresolved structural problems within the AAUP is the relationship between State Conferences’ Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure and the national academic freedom office.
In Illinois, we have one of the more active Conference Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure in the nation. It is in Illinois where the Norman Finkelstein tenure travesty occurred. It is here where Mehrene Larudee, Namita Goswami, Loretta Capeheart and the DePaul Three were involved in nationally covered cases where academic freedom, due process and faculty autonomy were eviscerated.
The Committee A of the Illinois Conference consists of five members. Walter J. Kendall, professor of law at John Marshall Law School, Loretta Capeheart, associate professor of justice at Northeastern Illinois University, Matthew Abraham, associate professor of writing, rhetoric, and discourse at DePaul University and John Wilson, an editor of this blog and noted author. Previously we did not have the cooperation and the constructive engagement with national that would optimize the defense of faculty rights in Illinois. I have spoken and lobbied with mixed success on the great divide between the gatekeepers at national and the subaltern conferences attempting dutifully to implement the AAUP documents and suggested best practices on many recalcitrant campuses in the Land of Lincoln. Indeed, we are ground zero in the academic freedom wars in the United States.
Yet a dramatic change occurred in the John Boyle tenure case at Northeastern Illinois University. Some of my initial conversations with Hank Reichman, chair of Committee A and First Vice President of AAUP, were very productive and the key in unlocking the Gordian knot with the national office. It was also the Illinois Committee A’s initial investigation and subsequent report that contributed to the national office’s strikingly collegial and heroic engagement in this matter.
Today the AAUP has released its report, “Academic Freedom and Tenure: Northeastern Illinois University.” The report graciously cites the Illinois Conference Committee A report and efforts to protect John Boyle’s academic freedom and academic due process on several pages. Yet the individual not mentioned in its pages who deserved the most credit in this rapprochement is Associate General Secretary Jordan Kurland. It was Kurland who I met with in Washington, D.C. seeking AAUP intervention. It was Kurland who recognized that a great injustice had occurred when a linguistics professor, John Boyle, was denied tenure despite unanimous support from his department, department chair, school dean, and university personnel committee. Jordan recognized that the Illinois Conference Committee A report had raised significant violations of academic freedom and substantive due process at N.E.I.U.
It was his energy and organizational skill that led to the composition of the investigating committee under the intelligent and gifted leadership of Professor Rebecca J. Williams, University of Central Arkansas, and the path that has taken us to this moment. The Boyle case, I hope, augurs well that a new day of cooperation between national and state conferences in academic freedom and tenure cases is at hand. It creates greater resolve; it raises the spirit of those fighting for faculty rights and the preservation of freedom on our campuses. It maximizes the efficiency of the Association and, not to be provocative, challenges the increasingly corporatization of the Association as was so poignantly elucidated in Cary Nelson, No University is an Island.
Yet I do not know if this remarkable collaboration between one conference and national, as wondrous and exciting as it is, is merely an interlude or a systemic change that is revealing a new age of national-state conference cooperation in aggressively pursuing faculty persecution cases across the beleaguered academy. It is essential that AAUP develop a new appeals process when a conference construes that a national-office decision not to intervene in an academic freedom or shared governance case is inappropriate. The gatekeeper syndrome within the national academic freedom office has been long standing: in part due to staff preeminence in handling such matters, in part due to a turf war between professional staff and faculty in the hinterland and resulting from limited resources that significantly circumscribe the number of cases that can be investigated.
The current appeals procedure is broken, obsolete and risible. It appears in a seven line, three-word conclusion of a “Report of Committee A, 1978-1979.” There is no Rebook articulated procedure. It states that a state conference may notify the “general secretary” of a dispute and the “general secretary” should designate a single Committee A current or prior member to “review the matter and advise.” If for no other reason than the recent elimination of the politburo-sounding name of “general secretary” to the more prosaic “executive director,” change is necessary. Any appeals process worthy of the name should contain specific deadlines and timeframes. Justice too long delayed, is justice denied!
The responsibility and duties of the Committee A person are not defined. I am also concerned about a buddy system where an executive director could appoint someone without any input from the conference or a non-staff person. I am also concerned about the lack of presidential involvement. Since conferences consist of post-secondary faculty members in a dispute with staff, faculty should be engaged in every step of the process including a final decision whether an investigation should occur. That would be the president’s role in my opinion and not the “general secretary” to determine if an academic freedom case should be undertaken. Whatever reforms can be addressed, ideological or procedural differences between staff and the conference Committee A in various states needs to be adjudicated in a manner that is clear, thorough and impartial.
In short, the tenure-denial case of John Boyle is an egregious violation of academic freedom and basic justice. It cynically demonstrated unbridled administration power wielded in an arbitrary and relentless manner. In its conclusion, the AAUP report states: “The Northeastern Illinois University administra tion, in denying tenure to Assistant Professor John P. Boyle, violated principles of academic freedom as enunciated in the joint 1940 State ment of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure and derivative Association documents.” This corroborates the Illinois Conference Report.
Today’s report affirms that the denial of tenure violated the Statement on Procedural Standards in the Renewal or Nonre newal of Faculty Appointments. It supported our own findings that the administration arbitrarily and capriciously used collegiality as a cynical tool to deny Dr. Boyle tenure: “The administration, by questioning Professor Boyle’s collegiality in denying him tenure, disre garded the admonitions in the statement On Col legiality as a Criterion for Faculty Evaluation.” The AAUP also found that President Sharon Hahs’s reversal of multiple units’ unanimous support of tenure was in direct contravention of the Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities. Specifically, “that the reasons for rejecting an affirmative faculty recommendation be ‘compelling’ and ‘stated in detail.’”
The process that led to an AAUP formal investigation of Professor Boyle’s denial of tenure is an example of how the national academic freedom office and a state conference can work in a collaborative and extremely effective manner. However, without systemic reform of the inchoate appeals process, I am afraid the joy of the moment, despite the suffering that a tenure-denial case means to the probationary-faculty member, may be transitory in which legitimate investigations and possible censures are suppressed and persecuted faculty are simply forgotten.
Peter N. Kirstein, Vice President Illinois AAUP, and Chair Illinois Conference Committee A, Professor of History, Saint Xavier University
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The author points to this rare collaboration (and not unsurprisingly credits Jordan Kurland, a national staff “eminence grise”) and then rightly underscores the endemic and historic disconnects between the conferences and national. In fact, the governance problem in AAUP highlighted in this blog posting is larger than just Committee A and taking the larger view will hopefully lead to the kind of reflection and action which might improve the processes within the Association.
Yes, the AAUP’s General Secretary has been endowed traditionally with executive powers which, though denied by AAUP in the course of the election challenges with the Department of Labor, actually make him/her a national officer – and an officer who, like the other officers, should be elected, even if for a longer term than the usual officer commitment to provide an overlap of continuity. Indeed, while it could appear tempting to say that the President should take over this officer’s role as the arbiter of national Committee A investigations as well as the role of the president, the Association would likely not be well served were that the case. The AAUP President already unilaterally appoints every single member of every single national committee and adding this power to his/her role would only further corrupt what is already a model of governance often resembling a Politburo – almost no checks and balances are exercised to ensure that the Association reflects and respects the will of the membership.
The Assembly of State Conferences is, for all intents and purposes, a “window-dressing” organization – not that its constitution condemns it to be so. On the contrary, it is clearly structured to be an independent body, endowed by its constitution with the right to levy its own dues, etc., yet its officers choose to subjugate the organization to national rather than run the organization fully independently of national influence and interference (which does not mean that dues collection, for example, could not be consolidated into the national dues collection, for example). As things stand, the ASC gets a relative pittance from national’s budget which does not even cover the travel for delegates to elections (again eroding governance and representation), and the ASC officers are in fact very busy only rarely: reviewing and making small grants to conferences from that pittance budget, holding perhaps a meeting or two, and then going through the perfunctory business of holding officer elections at the time of the AAUP National Meeting. Occasionally, the ASC’s national meeting does review a policy or two to present to the Council or to the membership at the Annual Meeting, but this is, for all intents and purposes, a rare occurrence. Still, the President of the ASC is a national officer of the AAUP and sits on the Council and Executive Committee – but apparently, as a member of a Politburo style of governance. There has never ever been the sense that the ASC Chair actually “represents” the constituency of the ASC – s/he represents personal opinions and input to the Executive Committee and Council and enjoys the perquisites attendant thereto. Indeed, candidates for chair campaign generally on philosophical platitudes rather than on platforms of proposed action – heaven forbid. Sigh.
It is notable that the author does not even mention the fact that one member of the elected ASC Executive Committee is a formal liaison and voting member of Committee A – again, because that position, like so many of the AAUP “elite corps” of elected officers, renders the incumbent a member of “the anointed of God” who are thus special persons unlike other members and not “responsible” to the membership of the organization but only to their own vision of their participation in the Committtee at hand. Were these positions to operate fully with official reporting and canvassing mechanisms between and among the conferences, the AAUP might come alive and become a truly viable organization.
All attempts to democratize and broaden the strength and influence of the ASC have been radically opposed by national and the national officers (who are part of national, of course). The AAUP leadership has steadfastly refused to work to extend to all officer positions in the ASC (and the CBC) the application of the basic democratic election guarantees required by LMRDA, preferring instead to let the conferences and chapters become uneven and unequal in their structures and performance. Nevertheless, the good thing that came from the DOL election challenges is the now undisputed fact that the ASC and CBC Chairs must be elected in a democratic manner consistent with LMRDA (Landrum-Griffin) and, in some cases, that has had a small “trickle-down” effect on the internal governance of many of the conferences and chapters.
The “dirty little secret” is that many if not most conferences are – like the national staff and the national Executive Committee – composed of small enclaves of “the anointed of God,” many of whom elect themselves at conference annual meetings where presence is required – as in the case of the New York State Conference, the elections were generally held in NYC where the majority of the entrenched leadership lived and worked and where the rest of the state’s AAUP members would suffer an undue financial burden to travel to and stay in NYC in order to exercise the franchise. This changed with the DOL challenges to the NYS Conference elections from several members – and DOL declared the conference to be subject to LMRDA in the election of all of its officers.
So why does national (and that means also the national officers and often also the National Council) refuse to enforce democracy in elections in the AAUP at all levels including the conferences? The cynical answer is precisely to prevent the conferences from “interfering” with “the anointed of God” at national and its operation of the Council and national committees, including but not limited to Committee A. This effective disenfranchisement of members and failure of the Association to make of the ASC (or the CBC) a viable active body are, again, central features of any Politburo-driven organization. And the response of the membership has been to dwindle in numbers and to stay away from elections in droves: “plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.” And so, the AAUP is graying as it approaches the centennial but it is by no means clear at all that the graying heads which populate the leadership meetings are “eminences” in the senses that the founders envisioned.
The time has come for AAUP members to demand their rights in the Association – many of which are being whittled away. Now the national officers and Council have successfully rammed through a change of the length of terms of office to hold onto this Politburo-style of governance more easily and more “efficiently.” Yes, as a result of the DOL election challenges, nominations for office far more open: it was a scandal that AAUP’s Nominating Committee essentially chose the only two candidates who could run for each national office (with the committee sometimes even engineering withdrawals from candidacy to ensure elections of the “insider” candidates, as well). But the majority of the offices in the ASC – and the CBC, for that matter – are remain essential “honorific” and do not require of their incumbents an active obligation to foster representative democracy within the sub-organization.
“Process is the most important product” in organizations (and governments) seeking to be democratic. The fact that AAUP is and has for quite some time been essentially a top-down organization dictating to the membership and conferences what the policies will be, which grievances will get national Committee A support, etc. is an open secret. One need only look at the Redbook and track the history of the policy documents to see that in the past decade policies are “promulgated” almost exclusively by the Presidential hand-picked committees, without their even having submitted the documents to Council and the membership for ratification. Indeed, Committee members, as well, should be subject to ratification from an elected body, but are not. So it is not surprising that AAUP, even as it approaches its centennial, is structured more like a small private club than a democratic association of members committed to academic freedom (and freedom of speech within the organization as well) and all of the principles of good governance. Instead, this long history of disregard for democracy and the membership has eroded the numbers of members in the Association, emasculated the majority of the conferences, and undermined any true semblance of democracy in the ASC.
In short, it is time for “grass roots democracy” in the AAUP, for the members to rise up and actively leaven the national organization rather than to be constrained by it. All of the beating-down must be transformed into the occasion for the elevation of the masses of the membership who are now so disaffected as to not even bother to vote in AAUP elections. The author’s posting above – reminiscent of past experiences of the domination of the membership and the conferences by national (as in, for example, the St. Bonaventure case a score of years ago) – will now hopefully set the stage for more discussion. If not, the centennial will be a hollow “stirring of echoes,” with the Association’s structures and operations resembling those same anti-democratic structures and suppression of speech which its constitution and founding principles sought collectively to question and overthrow.
I have posted a response to this posting and to the comment above separately, under the title “The AAUP and the NEIU Case: A Response.” It is here: https://academeblog.org/2013/12/18/the-aaup-and-the-neiu-case-a-response/
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