For the first time, the American Association of University Professors has sanctioned a college for denying faculty members a “meaningful” voice in campus governance.
For years the association has censured institutions for violating the academic freedom of faculty members. Now it is building a separate blacklist for institutions found to have violated its principles of academic governance.
Lindenwood College has the distinction of being the first on the new list. About 220 professors debated the situation at Lindenwood at the association’s 80th annual meeting here.
The AAUP has had a committee on academic governance since 1916, but only since 1991 has it had the power to recommend that a college be sanctioned. Lindenwood’s is the first such case ever presented to the annual meeting.
Much better known is the AAUP panel that recommends campuses for the academic-freedom and tenure censure list. Members voted at this year’s meeting to censure the administrations of Benedict College and the University of Bridgeport for violating faculty rights. At the same time, they voted to remove three institutions from the censure list: Bridgewater State College, Southern Arkansas University, and the University of Detroit Mercy.
The changes, approved by a voice vote, brought to 48 the number of campuses now on the censure list, down from 49 last year. “It’s been, on the whole, a pretty good year for academic freedom and tenure,” said Jordan E. Kurland, the associate general secretary of the AAUP who works with its Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure.
Removing Southern Arkansas from the list “marks the end of an era for us,” Mr. Kurland said. The university was censured in 1971. Then known as Southern State College, it had dismissed a tenured professor and not renewed the probationary appointment of an assistant professor. Both faculty members claimed they had been fired for defending the civil rights of black students on the campus. There was a time, Mr. Kurland said, when many institutions were on the censure list as the result of similar complaints.
Members lifted the censure of Southern Arkansas because they determined that the university’s newly updated policies on tenure were now in compliance with AAUP standards, Mr. Kurland said. In May, the university’s governing board approved payment of an undisclosed amount of money to the two faculty members who had been fired.
Officials of the university could not be reached for comment.
Bridgewater State and Detroit Mercy were removed from the AAUP blacklist after they revised their personnel policies to meet the association’s standards, Mr. Kurland said. Bridgewater State had been on the list since 1981, and Detroit Mercy since 1978.
In both cases, the issue was how the institutions had handled dismissals. Since then, the universities have reached settlements with the faculty members who were dismissed, but they have just come into full compliance with AAUP standards.
Mr. Kurland was optimistic that five or six other colleges would be dropped from the list of academic-freedom violators at next year’s annual meeting.
The new sanctions list, however, is likely only to grow, said B. Robert Kreiser, the AAUP associate secretary who works with the academic-governance panel, which is called Committee T on College and University Government. “There are widespread problems of governance across the country,” he said.
One of the worst cases, he said, is at Lindenwood. Among other controversial actions, he said, the college administration has abolished tenure, replaced the faculty council with a group of deans, and required faculty members to be on the campus 40 hours a week. Faculty members typically “aren’t expected to clock in or clock out,” Mr. Kreiser said.
Any doubt that the AAUP would sanction Lindenwood was erased after Alan W. Friedman, chairman of Committee T, read passages from a local newspaper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In it, Dennis C. Spellmann, president of the college, was quoted as calling the AAUP “the National Society of Professorial Featherbedders” and as saying that tenure meant “nobody had to work too hard.”
After the muttering in the audience had died down, Linda Ray Pratt, in one of her last acts as association president, raised her gavel and asked with a smile: “Are you ready to vote?” (The new president of the AAUP is James E. Perley, a professor of biology at the College of Wooster.)
In a formal statement, Mr. Spellmann said the AAUP “is out of touch with the realities of teaching colleges.”
“Lindenwood has taken a stand,” he continued. “The effects of this decision have sparked the rejuvenation of a college that was on the verge of closing its doors.”
Following are summaries of the three cases placed on the AAUP censure or sanction lists:
BENEDICT COLLEGE. An AAUP team found that three professors who publicly criticized the president of the historically black college for his handling of faculty layoffs had been dismissed in 1992 in violation of their academic freedom.
John V. Crangle, a history professor, was dismissed because, the college said, he had falsified “information concerning [his] qualifications” when he was hired in 1979. Mr. Crangle admitted he had failed to note that he had jumped bail on a misdemeanor charge of assault and battery stemming from a protest against the Vietnam War at South Dakota State University in 1970. He later paid a $100 fine.
Robert M. O’Neil, chairman of Committee A, said the president had known of the incident for some time but had decided that it was grounds for dismissal only after Mr. Crangle criticized him publicly.
The AAUP also concluded that two other faculty members who criticized the president had been wrongly dismissed, one for insufficient cause and the other on a technicality.
The college declined to comment on the allegations or on the censure.
LINDENWOOD COLLEGE. Faculty members have no “meaningful” role in the governance of the institution, an investigating team for Committee T concluded.
Lindenwood was in a perilous financial condition in 1989 when its governing board hired Mr. Spellmann as a consultant. Within a year, the financial health of the institution had dramatically improved. Conditions for faculty members, however, had worsened, the AAUP report said. Mr. Spellmann, who was named president of the college in 1991, eliminated tenure, replaced the Faculty Council with a Council of Deans, and set new working conditions for professors -- all without faculty involvement.
UNIVERSITY OF BRIDGEPORT. An AAUP team concluded that Bridgeport had improperly dismissed two tenured psychology professors, both with more than 30 years of service.
Bridgeport administrators had declared a financial exigency -- a state of fiscal crisis under which institutions can fire tenured professors. On December 15, 1991, more than a year after the crisis began, John R. Braun and Richard H. Ehmer were dismissed with 30 days’ notice.
Five months later the university signed an agreement with the Professors World Peace Academy, which had been founded by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. Despite the infusion of new money, Bridgeport refused to reinstate the two professors. Instead, it hired a part-time instructor to teach psychology courses.
The AAUP principles allow institutions to terminate tenured professors if there is “a demonstrably bona fide condition of financial exigency.” However, the AAUP team “found no evidence that any faculty body was involved” in determining the extent of the crisis at Bridgeport or whether there was an alternative to layoffs.
Edwin G. Eigel, president of Bridgeport, said in a statement: “It appears that the AAUP has taken action on the basis of incomplete and, in some respects, inaccurate information. We clearly disagree with their position.”
Mr. O’Neil said the chairman of Bridgeport’s Board of Trustees had asked the association to postpone censure to give the university “more time to negotiate” with the dismissed professors.
Mr. O’Neil said, however, that any postponement would have been inappropriate, considering that the university’s policies and practices were still “seriously deficient.”