2000-01 Committee A Report

Judicial Business

Imposition of Censure

Committee A at its June meeting considered the case of Charleston Southern University, the subject of a report published in Academe since the 2000 annual meeting. The committee adopted the following statement, in which the Council concurred. Censure was voted by the 2001 annual meeting.

Charleston Southern University  (South Carolina)

The report of the investigating committee is concerned with the action taken by the administration of Charleston Southern University to dismiss a faculty member for cause in the middle of his eleventh year of service at the institution. The dismissal, effected without a hearing, came after the professor had made remarks critical of the administration at a memorial service for a recently deceased colleague.

The investigating committee concluded that the administration acted in violation of the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure in dismissing him without having demonstrated cause for its action in a hearing of record before a faculty committee. The committee also concluded that, to the extent that the administration acted against this professor because of displeasure with his critical remarks at the memorial service, it acted for reasons violative of his academic freedom. The committee found that the notice of dismissal—seven weeks—was severely inadequate when measured against the one year called for by the Association.

The report is also concerned with the administration’s decision to deny reappointment to another faculty member after six years of service without providing reasons for doing so. He alleged that the decision was based on considerations violative of his academic freedom, relating to differences he had with his department chair, but he was not afforded opportunity to appeal. The investigating committee concluded that the administration acted in disregard of the Association’s Statement on Procedural Standards in the Renewal or Nonrenewal of Faculty Appointments by not affording him the reasons for its decision and opportunity for faculty review of his allegation regarding violation of his academic freedom.

The investigating committee found that the university’s policies on tenure do not in fact provide a tenure system: faculty members can serve indefinitely on renewable-term appointments and can have their appointments terminated without demonstration of cause in a faculty hearing. The committee found further that the current policies and practices at the university contribute to an atmosphere that inhibits the exercise of academic freedom.

Committee A recommends to the Eighty-seventh Annual Meeting that Charleston Southern University be placed on the Association’s list of censured administrations.

Removal of Censure

The following statement, recommending action with respect to Blinn College in Texas, was adopted by Committee A. The Council concurred in the recommendation, and the censure was removed by vote of the 2001 annual meeting.

Blinn College (Texas)  

Blinn College was placed on the Association’s list of censured administrations in 1976 after the administration terminated the services of sixteen faculty members. The investigating committee concluded that eight of the sixteen were entitled under the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure to the protections of tenure but did not receive them and that the remaining eight were denied the safeguards set forth in the Association’s Statement on Procedural Standards in the Renewal or Nonrenewal of Faculty Appointments.

The cases that led to the censure were resolved in 1980, but the censure remained in effect because of policies that failed to provide the protections of tenure for faculty members who had served beyond a probationary period.

In February 2001, the current college administration informed the Association’s staff of a "new initiative" to revise the college’s policies to bring them into closer conformity with Association-supported standards. The staff proposed specific changes in the Blinn College faculty handbook, which the college accepted. While the system of faculty appointment at the college calls for contracts of only one or two years in length, the handbook provides that a faculty member who has been affiliated with the college for seven or more years and is issued notice of termination of services will be afforded a hearing of record before an elected faculty body. "In the hearing the administration will have the burden of proof to demonstrate cause for its proposed action." The handbook also provides that the administration, after consulting with the appropriate faculty body, may suspend a faculty member only "if immediate harm to the faculty member or others in the college environment is threatened by the faculty member’s continued presence."

Probationary faculty members with less than seven years of service who are issued notice of a decision against reappointment are to be provided reasons in explanation of that decision and have the right to appeal the decision to a faculty body. The standards for notice of nonreappointment are those recommended by the Association.

In May, two members of the AAUP chapter at Texas A&M University visited Blinn College as representatives of the Association and held meetings with the administration and members of the faculty. Writing in support of the removal of censure, they described a college significantly changed from what it was twenty-five years ago, including a faculty with an active role in the governance of the institution. The president of the Texas AAUP state conference has indicated that she, too, favors removing the censure.

Committee A recommends to the Eighty-seventh Annual Meeting that Blinn College be removed from the Association’s list of censured administrations.

Case Held Over from 2000 Annual Meeting

Last year, Committee A presented the following statement, regarding the MCP Hahnemann School of Medicine, to the 2000 annual meeting.

MCP Hahnemann School of Medicine (Pennsylvania)

The report of the investigating committee concerns the termination of the appointments of more than a dozen tenured members of the basic-science faculty of the MCP Hahnemann School of Medicine, then a component of the Allegheny University of the Health Sciences (AUHS), now MCP Hahnemann University. The terminations were in response to a declaration of financial exigency occasioned by a filing for bankruptcy by the health-care conglomerate of which the university then was a part. The investigating committee found that the university was in a state of exigency in fall 1998, when the administration decided to release tenured faculty members in the school of medicine. Despite well-established channels within the medical school for participation by faculty bodies in addressing compelling problems of faculty status, and several requests to be involved, the committee found that no such participation was permitted. No faculty body had an opportunity to contribute to decisions on whether terminations of tenured appointments were warranted, where within the overall academic program terminations should occur, or which criteria should be used to identify particular individuals for release. The faculty was thus deprived of the role provided for it in the Association’s Recommended Institutional Regulations on Academic Freedom and Tenure.

The investigating committee also concluded that the AUHS administration, in designating some tenured basic-science faculty members for release while at the same time retaining nontenured faculty colleagues in the same department, failed to demonstrate the basis or the necessity for the release of the former or the retention of the latter, thereby acting in violation of the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure and in disregard of the Recommended Institutional Regulations.

In November 1998, the administration of Drexel University assumed the management of AUHS and its medical school as part of an arrangement to resolve the health-care conglomerate’s bankruptcy situation. The investigating committee found that, by all major academic indicators, save for its administration and control structure, the renamed MCP Hahnemann University is a continuation of the former AUHS. The committee concluded that the Drexel administration, in assuming its managerial role and in agreeing to accept substantial financial compensation for doing so, should have respected the tenure rights of the released faculty members. In the committee’s judgment, the administration failed to meet its obligations under the Recommended Institutional Regulations in this regard. It did not offer them other suitable work at the medical school for which they were potentially qualified or reinstate them to their positions when vacancies were advertised in their specialties and were filled in most cases by new appointees.

The affected faculty members, as a condition of receiving more than two weeks of severance salary and of retaining access to their offices and laboratories, were required to waive their right to a hearing assured them under the applicable AUHS regulations then in force and as called for in the 1940 Statement of Principles. Those faculty members thus lost any opportunity to contest the criteria for the termination of their appointments or to challenge why they in particular were singled out for release. They were also denied the severance salary called for in the Association’s Recommended Institutional Regulations, even after MCP Hahnemann’s financial picture had dramatically improved.

Late last month, subsequent to the publication of the investigating committee’s report, Drexel University president Constantine Papadakis convened a meeting of trustees, administrative officers, and faculty leaders from Drexel and MCP Hahnemann to discuss the report’s findings and conclusions. He then wrote to the Association, reaffirming MCP Hahnemann University’s commitment to academic tenure and stating that the administration was taking immediate steps to find continuing appointments for those faculty members whose cases remain unresolved. The president of the MCP Hahnemann AAUP chapter has expressed his support for the administration’s intended action. "I believe," he wrote, "that Dr. Papadakis and his colleagues are moving forward with good intentions to rectify all issues currently being considered for the AAUP censure of our institution. These actions should warrant the AAUP’s delaying, for one year, the censure issue [as it relates to] MCP Hahnemann and Drexel University."

Committee A is encouraged by these promising developments. The committee hopes and expects that suitable continuing appointments will soon result for the affected faculty members, and it will assist as appropriate in this regard. It makes no recommendation to the Eighty-sixth Annual Meeting regarding the MCP Hahnemann School of Medicine and will report back to the annual meeting in 2001.

At its June 2001 meeting, Committee A added the following statement.

Over the ensuing months the administration of Drexel University, as Committee A hoped and expected it would do, reached settlements with the faculty members whose services it had identified for termination. The administration had earlier reinstated several, but not all, of the tenured faculty members whose appointments the bankruptcy court had identified for termination. Committee A believes that the actions taken by the administration, along with the reiteration of its previously stated commitment to academic tenure, address the concerns that the Association had conveyed.

Committee A accordingly makes no recommendation regarding the MCP Hahnemann School of Medicine to the Eighty-seventh Annual Meeting.

A Matter of Concern at Chowan College (North Carolina)

(At its June meeting Committee A decided to include information on this matter in its annual report.)

The release of a professor after thirty years of service with three months of notice led to the censure of the Chowan College administration in 1992. The investigating committee’s published report, the basis for the censure, called the standards for notice at the college "woefully deficient."

During the 1995-96 academic year, an interim president of Chowan College took steps to achieve removal of the censure, including a settlement with the released professor and adoption by the board of trustees, according to a letter to the Association from the interim president, of the following provision for notice: "A faculty member in the third or a subsequent year of employment will be given notification at least a full year in advance of the date of termination." The published statement of Committee A, calling for censure removal in 1996, reported that AAUP-recommended notice standards had been adopted.

Early in 2000, a Chowan College faculty member in her sixth year of service brought a complaint to the Association after having received three months of notice of nonreappointment beyond that academic year. Her successive annual term appointments had stated that a decision regarding renewal would be made by March 1. The current college president, responding to concern conveyed by Committee A’s staff over this departure from the "full year" notice standard that had been adopted as a condition for censure removal, asserted that the "full year" was meant to apply only to tenure-track faculty and the nonreappointed faculty member was in a category of full-time non-tenure-track faculty for whom reappointment for a succeeding year is determined by March 1 each year. The president subsequently provided minutes of a faculty-staff meeting which do seem to confine the "full year" to faculty members, in their third year or beyond, who are probationary for tenure.

A repeated recommendation from Committee A’s staff that the nonreappointed faculty member be compensated for the inadequacy of notice has been rejected by the president, who maintains that he is not responsible for the "miscommunication" his predecessor submitted to the Association in 1996 and that the nonreappointment was "clearly within the boundaries" of college policies. The staff also recommended a change in the policies so that henceforth all full-time faculty members on renewable term appointments will receive the same amount of notice as those who are probationary for tenure. Early in the second semester of the 2000–01 academic year, the faculty’s Promotion and Tenure Committee voted in favor of such a change, and the matter went to the president for his review prior to its being voted on by the full faculty. The academic year ended, however, without the president’s having sent it on. Asked about this by Committee A’s staff, the president replied in late June that he did not do so because he does not believe the proposed change "to be in the best interest of Chowan College."

Legislative Business

At its meeting in November 2000, Committee A approved for publication with an invitation for comments a new statement titled Incentives to Forgo Tenure. It was published in the January–February 2001 issue of Academe. We will take up the comments received at our meeting in November 2001 and then submit the statement to the Council for adoption as Association policy. Also at its November meeting, the committee discussed a draft report, Protecting Human Beings: Institutional Review Boards and Social Science Research,prepared by AAUP associate secretary Jonathan Knight. After offering editorial changes, the committee voted to endorse the substance of the report and called for its prompt circulation among other organizations also working on this topic (the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the Oral History Association, the American Anthropological Association, the American Political Science Association, the American Sociological Association, and the American Folklore Society). The report, dealing with the vexed question of the limits to review-board intervention in social science research, was published in the May-June issue of Academe with an invitation for comments. Committee A at its November meeting discussed, and subsequently approved for publication, a subcommittee Statement on Corporate Funding of Academic Research. It, too, appeared in the May–June Academe with an invitation for comments. Finally in November, the committee discussed but did not act on a special committee’s draft report on the status of nonfaculty academic professionals.

At its June 2001 meeting, Committee A endorsed in substance a draft Statement of Principles on Family Responsibilities and Academic Work developed by the Committee on the Status of Women in the Academic Profession. Committee A commended the work of that committee and approved a limited extension of the probationary period for new parents. While acknowledging that the extension is a departure from the 1940 Statement of Principles, we are convinced that it is necessary because it provides important relief for probationary faculty during the infancy of their children. The committee authorized participation in two joint subcommittees: one with the Committee on Part-Time and Non-Tenure-Track Appointments to address the issues posed in a draft report received from that body, and the other with the Committee on Government of Colleges and Universities to review AAUP policy on mergers and acquisitions. We also heard disturbing reports from the legal staff about several recent court decisions that affect academic freedom.

Outreach Activities

During the past year, Committee A significantly increased its efforts to engage a variety of constituencies through presentations and participation in meetings and conferences. Staff members participated in the 2000 Summer Institute at Kent State University and in the Regional Leadership Workshop in Kansas City, both jointly sponsored by the Assembly of State Conferences and the Collective Bargaining Congress. Participation in these events will be a regular part of the Committee A outreach and education commitment.

Committee A collaborated with other professional organizations to bring the AAUP and Committee A perspective to other audiences. Staff members made presentations at the annual meetings of the Association of American Colleges and Universities in New Orleans, the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco, and the Consortium of Social Science Associations. In addition, staff collaborated with the leadership of the American Conference of Academic Deans to produce their first joint annual governance conference, held in Washington, D.C. The conference addressed issues of shared governance from both the administration and faculty perspectives.

Committee A staff also brought its knowledge and expertise to various state conference meetings, including those of Georgia, Kansas, Michigan, New York, and Ohio, as well as to individual institutions. Among the colleges and universities at which staff made presentations were the University of New Mexico, Mount St. Mary’s College (Maryland), and Alvernia College (Pennsylvania). Committee A staff will continue to extend its outreach and education activities in the coming year.

In Appreciation of Ernst Benjamin

The committee, by acclamation, adopted the following resolution:

Committee A wishes to recognize the exceptional service of Ernst Benjamin to Committee A in the last seventeen years. Ernie has proven himself to be one of the most astute and able minds in the AAUP dealing with issues of academic freedom and tenure, and his contributions have helped shape the history of the Committee’s work.He has been, and we expect he will continue to be even in retirement, a pillar of Committee A’s endeavors.

In Conclusion

A report like this one can never capture the qualities that make Committee A such a vital part of the Association: its intense debates, its rigorous discussions, the directness of its members, and their joint commitment to academic freedom and tenure. When representatives of other committees or organizations sit with us they are sometimes dismayed by the severity of our various opinions, mistaking critical analyses for personal attacks. In fact, such attacks are rare; the issues, not the individuals, are what is at stake. And though our deliberations are lengthy and our conclusions not perfect, the actions that we take have been carefully considered and well prepared. They are actions we can stand by in good conscience as representing the Association’s principles. The staff prepares us well for these deliberations and often guides us through them. For their work on behalf of the committee and the Association, we are extremely grateful.

JOAN WALLACH SCOTT (History), Institute for Advanced Study, chair