Washington
The American Association of University Professors just reaffirmed its commitment to defend principles of due process and shared governance come hell or high water. This past weekend, at its annual meeting here, the pre-eminent national faculty organization voted to censure four university administrations in New Orleans for layoffs and other actions affecting faculty members after Hurricane Katrina.
The association also voted to censure two other universities for actions not related to any natural disaster: Bastyr University, a Washington institution specializing in natural medicine, for how it terminated three professors; and Our Lady of Holy Cross College, a Roman Catholic institution in Louisiana, for firing a pugnacious Faculty Senate president.
After voting on all of those additions to its censure list, the association also removed two institutions -- Tiffin University and New Mexico Highlands University -- from the list because they had recently either reached settlements with fired professors or rewritten their policies to bring them more in line with AAUP standards.
But most of the discussion at the meeting over censure dealt with the four storm-ravaged institutions. Just under 300 AAUP delegates from across the country decided unanimously to censure Loyola University New Orleans, Southern University at New Orleans, the University of New Orleans, and Tulane University.
Those institutions, along with the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, were the subject of a yearlong AAUP investigation into faculty complaints of administrative overreach. According to the investigation, whose findings were published in a report in May, administrators at several New Orleans universities have used the hurricane as a blanket excuse to run their institutions with a kind of martial law -- furloughing or terminating professors, cutting programs, and restructuring curricula with little or no regard for faculty governance.
“Policies at these institutions that were already in place when Katrina hit would have worked in response to the Katrina emergency,” David M. Rabban, chairman of the association’s Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure, said to professors gathered at the meeting. Those policies, he said, “could have worked to avoid many of the harmful results that are reported here.”
Mr. Rabban, who is also a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, said the AAUP recognized that Katrina was an unprecedented disaster and that “even tenured faculty members may lose their positions under extraordinary circumstances because of financial exigency.” But the four New Orleans institutions, he said, had simply gone too far.
However, in the view of officials of at least two of the New Orleans institutions now under censure, it is the AAUP that has gone too far. In a prepared statement, administrators at Tulane said the AAUP report that inspired the censure vote was a “deeply flawed” and “inaccurate” document that did a “disservice to the values for which the AAUP stands and to the thousands of individuals, including those at Tulane, who have suffered through the worst natural disaster in the history of the U.S.”
Administrators at Loyola said in a statement they found it “astonishing” the AAUP would censure universities who are still suffering from the aftereffects of Katrina, “especially sharp declines in enrollments with the multiple-year impacts they entail.”
Administrators at the University of New Orleans and at Southern could not be reached for comment over the weekend.
Most administrative responses to the censures have accused the AAUP of kicking institutions while they are down. However, a number of professors who lost jobs at the censured institutions said those administrators are not really the ones who are down.
Denise Strong, a professor of public administration at the University of New Orleans, will be laid off in August as part of the university’s response to the hurricane. She joined the AAUP when it began its investigation into her and other professors’ grievances about their universities.
At the meeting, Ms. Strong lamented what she saw as a “lack of humanity” in her administration’s behavior since the storm. Professors “were more than willing to participate in the rebuilding of our university,” she said, her voice breaking with emotion. “Many of us would have been willing to accept temporary cuts in our salary,” she said. “Many people would have voluntarily retired if they knew that that was necessary.”
However, she said, “we were not engaged.”
The association opted to withhold censure of the health-sciences center, Mr. Rabban said, because it has begun responding to some of the association’s concerns.
Background articles from The Chronicle: