AAUP Rethinks How It Fights Governing Boards

When the nation’s leading defender of faculty rights decides to rebuke a college, its precise language may leave close observers scratching their heads. Why, for instance, did it vote this month to sanction the University of Iowa over its controversial presidential search, instead of the board, which it explicitly identified as the bad actor?

The answer: It has long believed it has no other choice.

The American Association of University Professors imposes a penalty known as “sanction” against colleges for violations of shared governance, but its bylaws preclude it from directing sanctions at governing boards, no matter how responsible they might be. It imposes a separate category of penalty, “censure,” for violations of tenure or academic freedom. With censures it has the option of directing the rebuke at the board, but it almost always opts to censure the college itself if administrators have any culpability.

Experience has taught the association that governing boards will shrug off its warnings and reprimands unless they’re convinced that their actions will cause a college to suffer from being on the AAUP’s lists of censured or sanctioned institutions.

Recent developments, however, have prompted the AAUP to begin reconsidering how it challenges boards.

The weaknesses of its current approach came into focus at its annual meeting here this month. Top officials of the association bemoaned how it is struggling to fight off increasingly common board overreach in colleges’ affairs, and heard faculty leaders at the University of Iowa protest the AAUP’s sanction of that institution for the actions of a statewide governing board.

In response, the AAUP plans to establish a panel to seek new ways for it to exert pressure on colleges. It also will be reconsidering its policy of sanctioning colleges when their boards trample shared governance.

The AAUP historically has directed its criticisms at colleges’ administrations, rather than their boards, because boards “are less connected to the campus,” says Henry F. (Hank) Reichman, chairman of the association’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure and a professor emeritus of history at California State University-East Bay. “It is more effective,” he says, “to sanction or censure the campus administration because they are the ones who have more of a long-term interest in trying to get off the list.”

That said, the AAUP’s leaders have acknowledged that its policies might need to be revised, Mr. Reichman says. “We have been around over 100 years,” he says. “We have a certain stodginess to us, but we have lasted over 100 years by changing over time.”

Multiple Battlefronts

The University of Iowa case represented the toughest test of the limits of AAUP policies confronted at the association’s recent meeting. The AAUP voted to sanction the university based on a finding that the statewide Iowa Board of Regents had disregarded overwhelming faculty opposition in appointing J. Bruce Harreld, a business consultant, as that institution’s new president. The call for the AAUP sanction vote noted that it was “primarily directed against” the state board, which also oversees Iowa State University and the University of Northern Iowa, but anyone unfamiliar with the controversy surrounding the presidential search would need to do some digging to understand that nuance.

The Iowa case was hardly the only one in which the AAUP’s approach to boards arose as an issue. It censured the University of Missouri at Columbia for the firing of Melissa A. Click, an assistant professor of communication who had aggressively confronted student journalists, even though the AAUP’s own investigation concluded that the Missouri Board of Curators had acted unilaterally in voting to dismiss her. It opted to keep the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign under censure to keep its board under pressure to adopt faculty protections. In censuring the College of Saint Rose over faculty layoffs, the AAUP faulted the private college’s board for asserting too little oversight.

Although they were not the subject of votes at this year’s AAUP meeting, recent clashes between governing boards and faculty leaders at Sweet Briar College, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Wisconsin have helped reinforce the impression that the association and the faculties it represents are having trouble keeping boards in check.

Questioning Fit

Since the late 1930s, the AAUP’s policies have allowed for its censure of boards that bear all of the blame for violations of academic freedom or tenure. In such cases it includes next to the college’s name on its censure list a reference to the board as being the real target.

The AAUP’s practice of sanctioning institutions for violations of shared governance is much more recent, having been adopted in 1994. Its vote this month to sanction the University of Iowa stands out in terms of the amount of faculty opposition generated.

In an April letter, top officers of the University of Iowa’s Faculty Senate strongly discouraged the AAUP from taking such an action. They defended their university as having “an exemplary tradition of shared governance,” and said Mr. Harreld had both expressed and demonstrated a commitment to shared governance since he took office. Their university, they argued, does not deserve a sanction previously reserved for colleges found to have pervasively denied faculty members “any meaningful role in academic governance.”

Michael DeCesare, a professor of sociology at Merrimack College and chairman of the AAUP’s Committee on College and University Governance, says that panel discussed whether to call for the sanction of the Iowa Board of Regents alone but dropped the idea because “we all understood that we could not procedurally do that.” Having ruled out the possibility of sanctioning the board, he said, “we were unanimous that the institution should be the target.”

Christina Bohannan, a professor of law at the University of Iowa and immediate past president of its Faculty Senate, expresses impatience with the idea that the AAUP’s policies gave it no choice but to sanction her institution. “Frankly,” she says, “I think it was on them to say the AAUP needs to change its policy on whom it sanctions, or they should have withheld sanction in this case.”

“Now that we are on the sanction list,” Ms. Bohannan says, “there is nothing we can do about it because we did not cause the problem in the first place.”

Hans-Joerg Tiede, a senior program officer in the AAUP’s department of academic freedom, tenure, and governance, says that by sanctioning the University of Iowa, rather than the Iowa Board of Regents, the AAUP leaves itself the option of issuing additional sanctions if the board violates shared governance at other institutions.

Mr. DeCesare says “it is a bit disingenuous to argue that the faculty and administration were entirely blameless” for what happened at the University of Iowa, because administrators and faculty members were on the presidential-search committee and met with Mr. Harreld as a candidate for the job. He argues that sanctioning the board instead of the university would not have “any effect whatsoever” because the board would lack any real incentive to get the sanction lifted.

For its part, the Iowa Board of Regents appears unfazed by the AAUP’s recent actions. In response to the sanction vote, Josh Lehman, a board spokesman, issued a statement saying the regents had run “a fair search for the president at the University of Iowa.” He said the board disagrees with the AAUP’s characterization of the search process and its imposition of sanction, and “does not have any plans to discuss the sanction at a future meeting.”

Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.