Aspecial committee of the American Association of University Professors has sharply criticized several New Orleans universities in a draft report of its investigation of layoffs, program cuts, and other steps they took in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
The report, which has not yet been released to the public but was obtained by The Chronicle, assails actions taken by the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, the University of New Orleans, and Southern University at New Orleans, which are public; and Tulane University and Loyola University New Orleans, which are private.
The committee says that while chancellors of the public institutions met with panel members when they visited New Orleans last summer, the presidents of Tulane and Loyola declined to meet with the committee before receiving the report.
The committee’s goal was to examine whether the universities had followed their own policies and procedures, as well as AAUP guidelines, in laying off tenured faculty members and cutting academic programs in cases of financial exigency or under reorganization plans. Committee members also examined whether faculty members had had an adequate say in those decisions.
Each university has defended its actions as necessary for its survival in the devastating aftermath of Katrina. Fredrick P. Barton, provost of the University of New Orleans, disagreed with criticism of the institution for placing faculty members on furlough without regard to their tenure rights. The university, he said, had followed its own guidelines, which “are not necessarily the same guidelines as the AAUP.”
While the AAUP has a role to play in safeguarding academic freedom in the classroom, and in protecting “higher education from the advent of a new McCarthyism,” Mr. Barton argued, classroom politics were not at issue here. “We had a storm come through that practically destroyed us,” he said. When the university suffered a sudden 33-percent decline in enrollment, administrators were forced “to abruptly downsize,” he said, “and you have to do that overnight.”
Likewise, Charles Zewe, a spokesman for the Louisiana State system, which governs the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center and the University of New Orleans, said in a written statement that LSU had been “confronting the unimaginable,” and that it “did the best it could in the face of the worst natural disaster in United States history.”
“The loss of personnel was highly regrettable and painful,” he said, “but decisions to make cuts were reached after extensive consultations with faculty representatives and were made to preserve the institutions.”
Following are highlights of the report:
Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center
The AAUP criticizes the center for setting aside its own financial-exigency procedures and instead adopting a “force majeure” plan. The plan declared the institution’s right, in an emergency, to dispense with the protections of tenure and various rights concerning termination. The report says the administration unilaterally decided whom to furlough and did not try to relocate faculty members into other suitable positions.
University of New Orleans The report faults the university for placing faculty members on furlough without academic due process and without respect to the rights of tenure. “A disturbing abundance of cases,” it says, “suggested a propensity to take advantage of the downsizing by removing someone who was simply no longer wanted, whatever the personal reason and no matter the academic merits and needs.”
Southern University at New Orleans The committee says the university eliminated and added degree programs, fundamentally altering the educational program without faculty consultation. It also furloughed faculty members and, in accordance with a newly adopted “force majeure” plan, allowed them just a five-day window to appeal only to the very administrators who had ordered the furloughs. The committee considers those actions a denial of due process that “manifested flagrant disregard for the faculty’s appropriate role in academic governance.” (Southern University officials declined to comment on the report.)
Loyola University New Orleans The report says Loyola “proceeded in gross disregard” of its own policies when it fired 17 tenured faculty members, citing program discontinuance, without trying to place them in other positions. It also says university officials created a top-down reorganization plan without proper consultation with the appropriate faculty bodies. And it faults them for not responding to calls from the faculty for cooperation following faculty votes of no confidence in the administration. (Loyola’s president declined to comment on the report.)
Tulane University The report criticizes the administration’s “refusal to provide any but the most generic evidence with respect to the declared state of financial exigency.” In doing so, it deprived more than 200 terminated faculty members of the ability to assess how such evidence applied to their particular cases. In declining to relocate faculty members into alternative positions, the report says, Tulane violated its own policies. In splitting the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences into separate schools without faculty consultation, it violated faculty bylaws and AAUP policies. (A spokesman for Tulane declined to comment on the report but pointed out that the university has a Web site presenting its correspondence with the AAUP: http://www.tulane.edu/aaup.)
The five universities have been invited to correct any factual errors and to comment on the draft by February 2. Once the report’s text is made final, it will be discussed at the association’s annual meeting, in June.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 53, Issue 22, Page A6