The American Association of University Professors is poised to overhaul its guidelines on faculty layoffs, by both taking a much broader view of the circumstances in which such job cuts are acceptable and requiring much more faculty involvement in decisions to eliminate academic programs and positions.
Current guidelines say colleges can eliminate the positions of tenured faculty members only in cases of “financial exigency.” Proposed new guidelines would lower that bar but require much more faculty input on decisions about cuts.
A draft AAUP report proposing the changes characterizes them as a recognition that the organization’s current guidelines are being ignored by some colleges as setting too high a bar in judging when layoffs of tenured faculty members are justified.
The AAUP’s current guidelines say colleges can eliminate the positions of tenured faculty members only in cases of “financial exigency,” and define “financial exigency” as an “imminent financial crisis” that threatens the survival of the college as a whole. The revised guidelines under consideration by the AAUP redefine “financial exigency” as “a severe financial crisis that threatens the academic mission of the institution as a whole.”
The proposed change opens the door for colleges to lay off tenured faculty members in situations where the threat on the horizon is not bankruptcy but some lesser hazard, such as a decline in academic quality or in the college’s ability to serve students.
The proposed new guidelines stress, however, that the elimination of tenured faculty positions should be regarded as a last resort, acceptable only after colleges have cut spending on administrative costs and in nonacademic areas, such as athletics programs. In an attempt to hold colleges’ feet to the fire to make such decisions objectively, the draft guidelines state that the process of planning cuts in academic programs or positions should involve faculty representatives who are provided with access to extensive budget data.
The proposed guidelines also set forth very clear procedures that colleges should follow in dealing with faculty members whose positions are on the chopping block. They state, for example, that colleges should make every effort to find new jobs in-house for faculty members whose positions are threatened, but that other, surviving academic programs should not be compelled to hire “refugee” faculty members from eliminated programs if they are not a good fit.
The guidelines also call for tenured faculty members to generally be given priority over nontenured faculty members when it comes to trying to preserve or fill jobs, and they cite a longstanding AAUP definition of tenure that essentially bestows such status on faculty members who have been at a college full time for seven years or more.
The AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure plans to vote this week on the draft report and proposed guidelines, which were summarized during a panel discussion here on Saturday during an AAUP conference on shared governance. If approved by Committee A, the report and guidelines will be released to the public for comment.
In establishing the subcommittee that developed the new standards, AAUP officials acknowledged that the guidelines the association had on the books had failed to account for many colleges that have been going through a slow bleeding process without facing imminent bankruptcy. Such has especially been the case at many public colleges experiencing long-term declines in their state support.
Among the institutions that have recently come under fire from the AAUP for terminating tenured faculty positions in the absence of any declaration of fiscal exigency are the University of Northern Iowa and the University at Albany. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the AAUP accused several Louisiana public universities of exaggerating how much financial pressure they were under as a result of the storm to try to justify academic program cuts that they had wanted to bring about long before the storm hit.
The draft report argues that, for the most part, many of the program closings that the association has fought as not meeting its current standards would not meet its proposed new standards either. But David M. Rabban, a professor of law at the University of Texas at Austin who recently served as chairman of Committee A, said in outlining the new standards on Saturday that he hoped they “may elicit a different response” from colleges than the current ones.
“I hope, because they are more realistic, they might be more effective,” Mr. Rabban said. He added, however, “I certainly expect resistance” from colleges to the new standards as well.
