After voting last year to censure four Louisiana institutions of higher learning and compile a comprehensive report on faculty fallout from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the American Association of University Professors continued to pay close attention to that situation in two of its motions on censure at its annual meeting here on Saturday.
The association also took up its lance for the rights of adjunct faculty members and the freedom of professors to speak to the news media about university issues in two other motions passed by the membership on Saturday. Those actions added one institution to its censure list and removed another.
After the Flood
A report released by the association in May 2007 found “much to examine, question, and criticize” in the actions of five universities in New Orleans after the disaster of Hurricane Katrina. As a result of that report, AAUP members voted last June to censure four universities: Loyola University New Orleans, Southern University at New Orleans, Tulane University, and the University of New Orleans. The Health Sciences Center of Louisiana State University was also investigated by the AAUP’s special committee on Katrina and New Orleans universities, but it was not placed on the association’s censure list (The Chronicle, June 11, 2007).
The report concluded that many institutions had used the financial exigencies created by the disaster to ignore or subvert policies intended to protect the status of tenured and continuing faculty members at the institutions.
On Saturday, the association’s members voted to remove one of those institutions, Southern University, from the censure list. The other three censured institutions remain on the list. The membership also passed a measure confirming that Louisiana State’s Health Sciences Center was making significant progress on faculty issues related to the hurricane.
Jonathan Knight, director of the AAUP’s department of academic freedom, tenure, and governance, praised Southern University’s efforts to reinstitute relevant policies and reinstate many faculty members. Mr. Knight also told The Chronicle that it was not unusual that one university would leap out ahead of the other censured institutions in its removal from the censure list.
“As happens when you have a number of institutions go on the censure list which have a common element,” he said, “now the cases are starting to diverge. ... As the consequences of Katrina have subsided, to use the flood imagery, so the divergent experiences, expectations, and histories of these institutions come to the fore in terms of how they want to respond and deal with us.”
In response to inquiries from The Chronicle, Viktor Ukpolo, the chancellor of Southern University at New Orleans, sent a written response to the vote to remove his institution from the censure list. “On our long road to recovery post-Katrina,” Mr. Ukpolo wrote, Southern “welcomes AAUP’s recognition of our university’s continuous efforts to maintain an equitable and productive academic environment for our faculty.”
Mr. Knight also said that the other public institution censured in the wake of the association’s Katrina report, the University of New Orleans, had been making preliminary moves to get off the AAUP censure list. But the association has received “no positive indications” from administrators at Loyola or Tulane, he said.
Due Process at New Haven
The only new institution on this year’s AAUP censure list is the University of New Haven. Its censure resulted from the dismissal of a member of its English department who had been at the university for six years as a part-time lecturer and was in her eighth year as a full-time non-tenure-track lecturer. The lecturer was terminated by a decision by the dean of the college, and a grievance committee’s finding in favor of the lecturer was rejected by the university’s president.
The AAUP committee investigating the complaint concluded that the lecturer’s years of service entitled her to a full hearing before a faculty committee before dismissal, rather than a simple nonrenewal of contract.
Mr. Knight observed that “the core principle” at stake in the censure motion “is that if you retain and continually reappoint a faculty member who’s full time, once that faculty member gets past a certain number of years of service, if there’s a serious question as to her not staying, you have to accord her the protections and safeguards of due process. We don’t think that happened here.”
Calls to the University of New Haven for comment on the censure were not returned.
Free Speech at Philander Smith
Association members also voted to remove Philander Smith College, in Little Rock, Ark., from the censure list. The college was censured in 2004 for terminating a professor who had told reporters about a directive from the college’s president that unauthorized contacts with news organizations would constitute insubordination.
The school hired a new president, Walter M. Kimbrough, in December 2004, and he rescinded that directive. Mr. Kimbrough also cleared the fired professor’s personnel file and ended a ban on her presence on campus.
Mr. Knight said that the new president was a “galvanizing force” in the removal of the censure. “A crucial element in many cases is a new president who understands that something went wrong and that it’s important to get out from underneath the censure,” he observed. “He took the initiative of bringing in faculty and the Board of Trustees to do what was needed to be done to remove the censure.”
An official in the president’s office at Philander Smith said that Mr. Kimbrough was out of town and unavailable for comment.