BY HANK REICHMAN

The following is the report of the AAUP’s Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure, presented to the AAUP annual meeting in Arlington, Virginia, on June 15 and to be published in the annual AAUP Bulletin issue of Academe later this summer.

Introduction

In the past year Committee A reviewed important cases and case reports of investigations, monitored developments at censured institutions, and formulated recommendations on censure and censure removal. In addition, the committee engaged in fruitful discussion of several pressing issues on campuses nationwide that impact academic freedom and began implementing an ambitious program aimed at producing new and relevant policy documents and reports that we hope will serve the needs of chapters, conferences, and faculty members everywhere.

Judicial Business

Impositions of Censure

At its spring meeting Committee A considered two cases that had been subjects of ad hoc investigating committee reports published since the 2018 annual meeting. The committee adopted the following statements concerning these cases, the Council concurred in them, and the 2019 annual meeting voted to impose censure

Nunez Community College (Louisiana)

The report of the investigating committee concerns the administration’s action to terminate the services of an associate professor of English following his twenty-second year on the faculty. The investigating committee concluded that the action was taken in violation of the faculty member’s academic freedom to speak on institutional matters without fear of reprisal. The investigating committee further concluded that the administration had not afforded him the dismissal hearing to which he was entitled as the result of having obtained de facto tenure at the institution through length of service. Nunez Community College does not have a formal tenure system.

The decision to terminate the professor’s services followed his disagreement with the administration over the veracity of information to be provided to the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACS), the college’s regional accreditor. An accreditation visit in 2017 had cited the institution for failing to document “student success.” Shortly after the arrival of a new chancellor in 2018, the administration found itself under pressure to complete monitoring reports for submission to the accreditor.

As general studies program manager, the professor was responsible for the completion of reports on the program. When he expressed concern that reports he had produced were not being included in the material to be submitted to SACS, the administration relieved him of his role. When he learned that the administration was submitting reports not prepared by him to SACS under his name, he requested that his name be removed. The administration denied his request.

The chancellor subsequently informed the faculty member that his services would be terminated, first in a phone call, in which the chancellor stated that he was “not a good fit” at the institution, and subsequently in a letter, in which she declined to provide reasons for the decision, pointing instead to the faculty member’s status as an “at-will employee.” In response to the professor’s written appeal, the chancellor wrote, “[The decision] is not a reflection of your work record or behavior. Nor does it diminish the past contributions you have made to the college. Your time and service to the college is appreciated.”

The report states, “In the absence of any stated cause for the administration’s actions and on the basis of the available information, the investigating committee is left to conclude that the termination of [the faculty member’s] services was a retaliatory measure taken in violation of his academic freedom.”

Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure recommends to the 105th annual meeting that Nunez Community College be added to the Association’s list of censured administrations.

St. Edward’s University (Texas)

The investigating committee’s report concerns the dismissals of two tenured faculty members and the nonrenewal of a tenure-track faculty member. The tenured faculty members were in their twelfth year of service in the college’s communication department. The tenure-track faculty member was in her fifth year of service in the teacher education department.

The two tenured professors, husband and wife, received almost identical letters notifying them of their dismissal for cause. The stated grounds were “continued disrespect and disregard for the mission and goals of the university,” charges they sharply contested. Despite the urging of the AAUP’s staff, the university’s president declined to afford them a dismissal procedure that comported with AAUP-supported standards—an adjudicative hearing before an elected faculty body in which the burden of demonstrating adequate cause for dismissal rests with the administration. Instead, they were required to persuade an anonymous three-member faculty appeal body, one member of which was selected by the president, that the action taken against them was the result of “unlawful bias, arbitrary or capricious decision making, or a violation of procedures in the Faculty Manual.” Their appeal was unsuccessful, as was a similar appeal to the governing board.

The tenure-track faculty member was afforded less than six months’ notice (under AAUP-recommended standards, she was entitled to a year of notice) and not allowed to appeal the nonrenewal to an elected faculty committee. She thus was denied the opportunity to ask a duly constituted faculty body to review her allegation that the real reason for the nonreappointment was her dean’s perception of her as a troublemaker. Three years previously she had filed a complaint of sexual harassment against an associate dean in the School of Education, which did not, according to her account, result in a cessation of the objectionable conduct. As a result, she filed additional complaints. The school’s dean, she charged, seemed irritated by the complaints, spoke of them disparagingly, failed to support her tenure application, and, after the associate dean retired, rehired him in another capacity.

The investigating committee found that, in dismissing the two tenured professors without affording them academic due process, the St. Edward’s administration had violated the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure and the AAUP-supported dismissal standards set forth in Regulations 5 and 6 of the AAUP’s Recommended Institutional Regulations on Academic Freedom and Tenure. The committee also found that the administration may have acted against the two professors because of their “persistent outspokenness about administrative decisions and actions.” As a result, in the absence of a faculty dismissal hearing, their plausible claim that they were dismissed for reasons that violated their academic freedom remained unrebutted.

With regard to the tenure-track faculty member, the committee found that the administration, by failing to afford her an appeal process and a year of notice, had violated Regulation 2 of the Recommended Institutional Regulations. The committee also found credible her allegation that the nonrenewal was a consequence of her having lodged complaints of sexual harassment against an administrator, noting that the allegation remained unrefuted absent an appropriate faculty review procedure. The committee further concluded that general conditions for academic freedom and governance at St. Edward’s University were “abysmal,” with “fear and demoralization” widespread among the faculty.

Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure recommends to the AAUP’s 105th annual meeting that St. Edward’s University be added to the list of censured administrations.

Other Committee Activity

At its fall and spring meetings Committee A discussed a number of issues that have emerged around the country with potentially significant impact on the climate for academic freedom.

Nondisclosure agreements have become disturbingly common in matters of faculty employment. As noted in the following report of the Committee on College and University Governance, at Vermont Law School such agreements were employed to strip faculty members of tenure. At Purdue University the institution’s newly acquired online arm, Purdue Global (formerly Kaplan University), required all faculty members to sign sweeping agreements as a condition of employment. However, after the Purdue University AAUP chapter, supported by our national staff, pushed back, Purdue Global was compelled to rescind this requirement. Still, use of such agreements is a phenomenon that the committee and its staff will continue to watch closely.

Last year a professor at the University of Michigan, for political reasons, rescinded an offer to write a letter of recommendation for a student wishing to study in Israel. The action prompted considerable debate on the Academe Blog and elsewhere, and the administration sanctioned the professor without an appropriate faculty hearing, as stipulated in the AAUP’s Recommended Institutional Regulations on Academic Freedom and Tenure. In response, the staff wrote the administration to urge provision of such a hearing. At its fall meeting Committee A engaged in a lengthy discussion of the issues posed by this case. While the committee ultimately decided that it was premature to prepare a general statement on such letters, there was consensus that while writing letters of recommendation for students is an obligation incurred by most teaching faculty, no faculty member can be required to write any specific letter or to provide a student with a specific rationale for declining to write. At the same time, members of the committee agreed that some rationales violate professional ethics.

In 2016 a joint subcommittee of Committee A and the Committee on Women in the Academic Profession produced a report, The History, Uses, and Abuses of Title IX. In the wake of proposed changes to Title IX enforcement by Secretary DeVos’s Department of Education, that subcommittee submitted formal comments to the department. The subcommittee also issued the statement The Assault on Gender and Gender Studies.

Issues of campus free speech, as distinct from academic freedom per se, continue to roil the national conversation. This spring President Trump issued his notorious executive order ostensibly in defense of free speech on campus. In response to his March 2 initial proposal for such an order, the AAUP, in consultation with Committee A, prepared a statement that was eventually cosigned by ten other national organizations. Following official promulgation of the order, Executive Director Schmid released a statement calling it “a solution in search of a problem” but nonetheless “troubling in that it serves a broader goal of attempting to discredit higher education.” Committee A and its staff will continue to monitor Trump administration policies that may impact academic freedom.

Another issue that has attracted the committee’s attention is the increasing displacement of faculty disciplinary processes, committees, and hearings with bureaucratic interventions by human resources departments. This phenomenon is especially common in cases involving alleged sexual harassment, but may well be spreading to other areas as well, as exemplified by a case at George Mason University reviewed this spring by the committee. The committee also discussed the threat posed to Stanford University Press by the Stanford administration’s reluctance to continue a longstanding subsidy, a situation that highlights the increasingly precarious state of academic publishing. Committee A will continue to keep track of these sorts of developments.

At its spring meeting the committee engaged in a productive conversation about potential reports and statements, which resulted in a commitment to prepare two documents for consideration at our fall meeting. The first, using the working title of “In Defense of Knowledge,” is envisioned as a sweeping and hopefully rousing statement in defense of higher education, expertise, and knowledge in the face of the sorts of widespread attacks on higher learning that we have seen in recent years. The second will be a report documenting how collective bargaining agreements in higher education—and not only AAUP agreements—seek to defend academic freedom, highlighting best practices and hopefully providing a useful tool for our collective bargaining chapters and faculty unions more generally to strengthen protections. I am hopeful that these reports will be written and approved before the end of this year. At its fall meeting the committee will also continue its discussion of potential statements and reports.

Finally, I should note that Committee A, like the Association as a whole, has sought to respond to the challenge posed for our Association and its finances by the Janus decision. Facing the possibility that we might no longer be able to afford two annual in-person meetings, as has been the practice for decades, members of the committee took   the initiative to secure external funding. As a result, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has given the AAUP Foundation’s Academic Freedom Fund a $150,000 grant to cover all costs associated with one meeting of Committee A each year for three years as well as any costs associated with producing reports or statements approved at those meetings. We owe a debt of gratitude to Committee A members Joan Scott and, especially, Robert Post, whose efforts were essential to obtaining this support.

Conclusion

I want to thank the members of Committee A for their tireless work on behalf of the principles of academic freedom, our profession, and the AAUP. I would also like to thank the members of the Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance as well as other members of our devoted and hard-working national staff for their support of the committee and their tireless efforts on behalf of academic freedom, shared governance, and the common good throughout higher education.