2007-08 Committee A Report

In my report last year, I highlighted two documents for special attention: the comprehensive report of the Special Committee on Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans Universities and the draft report Freedom in the Classroom, prepared by a subcommittee of Committee A. Both of those reports have generated significant developments during the past academic year.

The report of the special committee included investigations of five universities in New Orleans affected by Hurricane Katrina. Following the recommendation of Committee A and the concurrence of the Council, the 2007 annual meeting voted to place four of those universities on the Association’s list of censured administrations: Southern University at New Orleans, the University of New Orleans, Loyola University New Orleans, and Tulane University. Committee A made no recommendation regarding censure at the fifth university investigated, the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center. In its statement to the annual meeting, Committee A observed that the LSU Health Sciences Center administration had addressed many of the problems identified by the investigating committee and was working with the Association’s staff to resolve lingering issues of concern. I told the 2007 gathering that I would inform the 2008 annual meeting of developments at this institution during the intervening year. Happily, I was able to report to the 2008 annual meeting that the resolution of remaining cases and modifications of institutional policies at the LSU Health Sciences Center enabled Committee A to commend both the administration and faculty officers. Similar progress in resolving cases and modifying policies prompted the annual meeting to remove Southern University at New Orleans from the list of censured administrations, following the recommendation of Committee A and the concurrence of the Council. The Judicial Business section of this report provides more detailed information about developments at these two institutions. It is worth emphasizing that Southern University at New Orleans and the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center were the two institutions in New Orleans that implemented “force-majeure” policies to supersede existing institutional regulations (the post-hurricane action the special committee most vigorously condemned) and that both institutions have now abandoned “force majeure” while adopting or reinstating regulations compatible with AAUP-supported standards. Unfortunately, I cannot report sufficient progress at the other three institutions investigated as part of the Katrina report, and they remain on the list of censured administrations.

The publication in Academe (September–October 2007) of the draft report on Freedom in the Classroom, and its unprecedented distribution over the Internet to several hundred thousand faculty members, attracted widespread attention and provoked a great many written responses. Some of the responses were exceptionally thoughtful and detailed. They stimulated an excellent discussion at the June 2008 Committee A meeting on many issues related to teaching controversial subjects, including the relevance of political references, the nature of truth claims, the meaning of dogmatism, and the relationships among disciplines and subdisciplines. This discussion will inform the subcommittee as it considers potential revisions. Committee A will discuss the report again at its next meeting.

Legislative Business

In addition to providing updates about important matters
carried over from last year, I want to comment on several new items on the Committee A agenda. The case that led to the placement of the University of New Haven on the list of censured administrations, described more fully later in this report, involved the failure to provide appropriate due process to a lecturer, not on the tenure track, in her eighth year of full-time teaching. Members of the Association, both at the Council and at the annual meeting, emphasized the significance of applying to faculty who are not on the tenure track the requirement, derived from the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, that all full-time teachers who have taught for more than seven years are entitled to the safeguards associated with a dismissal for cause. On its policy agenda, Committee A discussed a new subcommittee report, The Use and Abuse of Suspension in Actions Affecting Faculty Status. Committee A established this subcommittee after reviewing several cases involving faculty suspension and banishment from campus and hearing staff reports that suspension, a sanction that Association policy significantly limits, had become an increasingly common administrative response in a wide variety of cases. The report collected, reviewed, and classified numerous Committee A case reports that involved suspension, and evaluated them in light of existing AAUP policies. During its discussion of this document, the committee suggested revisions with a view to publication of a new draft in Academe. Committee A also established a subcommittee to address issues that have arisen at American universities establishing campuses in other countries. In collaboration with the Canadian Association of University Teachers, the subcommittee will prepare a report on this subject that will stress the importance of respecting academic standards, particularly academic freedom, abroad.

Committee A was asked by the Association’s North Carolina conference to address the potential academic freedom issues posed by the outside funding of classroom materials. Since 2005, the charitable arm of the BB&T Corporation has given some two dozen colleges and universities—in most cases the business schools of those institutions—several million dollars to create programs devoted to the study of the economic philosophy of Ayn Rand. Many of these grants have been offered with the stipulation that Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged be made required reading for students in one or more courses either already included in the curriculum or created for the purpose of meeting the donor’s expectations. Academic institutions relinquish autonomy and the primary authority of their faculty over the curriculum when they accept outside funding that comes with such conditions attached. Committee A believes that the solicitation and acceptance of gifts, conditioned on a requirement to assign specific course material that the faculty would not otherwise assign, is inconsistent with principles of academic freedom.

Judicial Business

Imposition of Censure

At its June meeting, Committee A considered the single investigating committee report that had been published in Academe since July 2007. The committee adopted the statement below recommending the imposition of censure, the Council concurred in the recommendation, and the Ninety-fourth Annual Meeting imposed censure.

University of New Haven.The report of the investigating committee deals with action by a new dean of the College of Arts and Sciences to terminate the services of a member of the English department who had taught for six years as a part-time instructor and was by then in her eighth year on renewable annual appointments as a full-time non-tenure-track lecturer. Colleagues in English, and especially the department chair, have testified to her value as a department member and also as a member of the faculty senate. The English department has customarily considered for promotion to the rank of senior lecturer and multiyear reappointment those with more than six years on fulltime annual appointments. Accordingly, during the fall 2006 semester, the lecturer whose case was investigated had her performance evaluated by her four tenured colleagues, who unanimously supported her candidacy for promotion.

While the English department was moving that fall to promote the lecturer, however, the office of the dean of her college was acting to deprive her of any position at the University of New Haven. A student who was unhappy with the lecturer following a dispute over class attendance sent a complaint to the university president, who forwarded it to the new dean. The dean met with the lecturer and her department chair and then learned of a file containing earlier student complaints against the lecturer that the associate dean had kept. The dean concluded that the student who complained to the president had been treated unfairly and that the lecturer had shown a pattern of inappropriate behavior toward her students. He determined that her services should be terminated upon the end of her current appointment, believing that as dean he had the authority to deny further appointment to a non-tenure-track lecturer.

Notified on November 30 that the dean had so acted, the lecturer filed separate grievances in December against him and the associate dean. Hearings were not held until May, when the lecturer’s appointment was drawing to a close. The hearing committee issued its reports on both grievances on May 23, finding unanimously for the lecturer on all charges and recommending that she be offered a multiyear reappointment. The AAUP staff wrote initially to the university president on June 26, expressing concern over the apparent departures from AAUP-recommended standards in the treatment of the lecturer’s case and over the president’s not yet having acted on the grievance committee’s recommendation for reappointment, with the 2007–08 academic year soon to begin. The president’s response to the grievance committee, rejecting its findings and recommendation, came on August 28, after others had been assigned the classes the lecturer would have taught, whereupon the Association proceeded with an investigation.

The investigating committee found that the dean’s judgment regarding the lecturer’s fitness, stemming from his assessment of her handling of student complaints, implicated AAUP-supported standards set forth in Committee A’s The Assignment of Course Grades and Student Appeals. That statement considers the assessment of student academic performance to be a faculty responsibility, with the authority of the instructor to evaluate student performance “a direct corollary” of the “freedom in the classroom” provided the instructor under the 1940 Statement of Principles.

The dean’s office based its case against the lecturer on a total of nine student complaints. The oldest, dating back to 1999, preceded the arrival of the current dean and associate dean. The next seven were handled by the current associate dean, and the ninth, in fall 2006, was forwarded to the dean by the president. Only the first of the nine, a dispute over a student appeal of a grade, was processed through the grievance procedure set forth in the university’s student handbook, culminating in a hearing before the faculty’s grievance committee. That committee found no fault with the lecturer’s grading or conduct. After 1999, no student filed a complaint against the lecturer under the stated procedures of the English department, which required that the complaint be in writing. Complaints reached the dean’s office from a variety of sources. The documentation on some of these includes nothing in writing from the student but only the associate dean’s notes about what the student told him. The investigating committee found that the associate dean handled student complaints essentially by himself, resolving some conflicts to the satisfaction of the student but ignoring and indeed subverting the system at the university for determining the validity of the complaints. The investigating committee concluded that the actions of both deans in the lecturer’s case were fundamentally at odds with the Association’s stated position that reviewing student complaints about an instructor’s evaluation of student academic performance is the responsibility of the faculty.

The reason given by the deans for dismissing the lecturer was “a pattern of behaviors that were inconsistent with common sense notions of professionalism and incivility in addressing students and their concerns.” Through the cooperation of the deans, the investigating committee, like the faculty’s grievance committee, had the opportunity to examine their files on the nine cases. The investigating committee found evidence of “unprofessional conduct” in only one case, and definitely no “pattern” of it in the nine cases that stretched over seven years. In the last of the cases, the investigating committee saw the lecturer’s responses to the student as “perhaps overly hostile under the circumstances,” but not unprofessional or uncivil and hardly of a magnitude for becoming “the last straw” calling for termination of the lecturer’s services. The committee concluded with an expression of strong doubt as to whether the administration would have moved to terminate the lecturer’s services if it did not believe it could act unilaterally to do so because of her non-tenure-track status.

AAUP-supported standards limit full-time nontenured faculty membership to appointments that are probationary for tenure and special appointments of brief duration. The lecturer, having served on a full-time basis in excess of the seven-year maximum period of probation permitted under the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, was no longer subject under that document to nonrenewal of a term appointment, but instead was entitled to the safeguards associated with a dismissal for cause. The investigating committee concluded that the University of New Haven administration, by dismissing the lecturer without first having demonstrated cause before a faculty hearing body and affording other procedural safeguards, acted in disregard of the 1940 Statement of Principles and the complementary 1958 Statement on Procedural Standards in Faculty Dismissal Proceedings.

Committee A agrees. Whether one’s impression of the lecturer’s alleged mistreatment of some students is that it provided no grounds for sanctioning her, or, alternatively, that the mistreatment, if accurately reported, fell beneath generally accepted standards of professional behavior, no action should have been taken absent an adjudicative proceeding before a faculty hearing body as called for in the 1940 and 1958 statements.

Committee A recommends to the Ninety-fourth Annual Meeting that the University of New Haven be placed on the Association’s list of censured administrations.

No Recommendation Regarding Censure

Reporting back on one case on which Committee A had initially reported to the annual meeting in 2007, the committee with Council concurrence submitted the following statement to the 2008 annual meeting.

Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center (pdf). Committee A reported last June to the 2007 annual meeting on the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, one of the five institutions investigated by the Association’s Special Committee on Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans Universities. Last year’s statement to the annual meeting conveyed the investigating body’s condemnation of the adoption and implementation of a “force-majeure” exigency plan under which sixty-one full-time members of the faculty were placed on unpaid furlough. The investigators were also able to report encouraging developments, however, as the health sciences center and its affiliated hospitals showed signs of recovery from the trauma inflicted by the hurricane. What follows are the opening paragraphs of Committee A’s 2007 statement.

Six schools comprise the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center [LSUHSC], the School of Medicine by far the largest. Hurricane Katrina’s damage to the institution’s facilities, finances, and sheer ability to perform was immense, yet it managed within weeks to resume some of its functions by using other locations. All faculty continued to receive salary and benefits while the university was closed and when it reopened partially in September, October, and into November 2005. That situation was to change abruptly, however, with the approval on November 18 by the LSU board of supervisors of a “force-majeure” exigency plan that superseded existing Louisiana State University regulations.

The plan provided the LSUHSC chancellor with authority to determine how many and what kinds of positions were currently needed and thereby to decide which professor would be placed on “furlough” status, defined as “temporary leave without pay” that could “lead to eventual termination.” . . . Notifications of placement on furlough reached affected professors only a few days before and, in some cases, only on or after the December 1 date when they ceased being paid. The procedure provided them with only five working days to request review of the decision by the vice chancellor and the appropriate dean, who would then submit a recommendation to the chancellor on whether to sustain or reverse the decision. If the chancellor sustained the decision the notified professors would then have three working days to apply for a review by the system president.

The administration discarded existing financial exigency procedures without adequately explaining why it found them inadequate, thereby setting aside standards conforming more closely with those in the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure and derivative AAUP-supported policies and procedures. The administration proceeded to place numerous professors on unpaid furlough with virtually no notice, acting at odds with AAUP-recommended standards and the institution’s own previous standards by unilaterally deciding whom to furlough, while paying little, if any, deference to tenure rights and rights to relocation in another suitable position.

Perhaps the first sign that the days of “force majeure” were nearing their end was an announcement at the final board of supervisors meeting for 2006 that no more “force-majeure” furloughs would be imposed. By that time, the number of professors on involuntary furlough was dropping at an accelerating rate. By January 2007, when the special committee’s draft report was circulated with an invitation for comments, the total of sixty-one had been reduced to twenty-two. By June 2007 the total was down to twelve, and in only four of these cases, just one of which involved a professor with tenure, was a resolution not yet in sight. The “force-majeure” plan was to remain officially in place until June 2008, when notices of termination to four nontenured professors furloughed under the plan would run their course, at which point the financial-exigency policy at the LSU Health Sciences Center would revert back to the policy in the LSU Health Sciences Center faculty handbook at the time Katrina struck. The AAUP investigating body had reported that this policy, while greatly to be preferred over “force majeure,” had its flaws, but the LSU Health Sciences Center administration indicated its willingness to consider specific AAUP proposals for modifications in the policy.

Committee A’s report on the LSU Health Sciences Center to the 2007 annual meeting concluded as follows:

In light of these salutary developments and with further developments in process, Committee A makes no recommendation to the Ninety-third Annual Meeting regarding the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center. The committee and its staff plan to keep in close contact with the institution’s administrative officers and faculty leadership in the year ahead, and the committee will report back on LSUHSC to the Ninety-fourth Annual Meeting in 2008.

Since last June, the LSU Health Sciences Center administration has worked in close cooperation with the AAUP staff in seeking to resolve the handful of unresolved furlough cases. As of April, two such cases remained. One involved a professor who had already rejected two offers of recall and made it clear that she would not consider any offer to be suitable if it was not for a position more closely resembling her previous position, which had been discontinued. The other furlough case involved an alleged financial irregularity, which was sufficient not only to keep the administration from offering reinstatement but also to keep the professor from requesting it.

With regard to the adoption of standards that will serve to prevent future cases, members of the Special Committee on Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans Universities, appointed as a subcommittee of Committee A, guided the staff in proposing modifications to the LSU Health Sciences Center financial-exigency policies. Following discussion among the staff and the subcommittee, the staff in November sent a proposal for ten modifications for consideration by the administrative officers and the relevant faculty committees. An April 30 letter from the administration informed the Association that all responsible LSU Health Sciences Center bodies had approved adoption of most of the modifications, including the three viewed by the AAUP as most important.

Two of the three major modifications strengthen the faculty’s role in governance. In the event of financial exigency, the previous policy called on the chancellor to appoint an ad hoc committee of faculty members and administrators to institute a retrenchment plan. As now modified, the chancellor is to appoint this committee “after consulting with the officers of the Faculty Senate.” Similarly, the previous plan had the chancellor appointing a standing committee for hearing faculty appeals. Here, too, the provision as now modified has the appointing done “after consulting with the officers of the Faculty Senate.” The third major modification strengthens tenure. The policy had called for retrenchment by order of seniority, but with exceptions allowed because of institutional need. As now revised, in any departure from the order of seniority “the burden of justifying exceptions will rest with the administration.”

The proposed modifications were submitted to the Louisiana State University system office for review to ensure conformity with system regulations. By letter of June 3, the LSU Health Sciences Center administration reported receipt of assurance from LSU’s general counsel that the modifications are in compliance with the system regulations and that no further action is required.

Committee A commends the LSU Health Sciences Center administrative and faculty officers for their good work. It welcomes not having to make any recommendation to the Ninety-fourth Annual Meeting regarding the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center.

Removal of Censure

Committee A adopted the following two statements recommending action to remove institutions from the censure list. The Council concurred in the recommendations, and the Ninety-fourth Annual Meeting voted in both cases to remove censure.

Philander Smith College (Arkansas) (.pdf). The Association’s 2004 annual meeting imposed censure on the Philander Smith College administration. The censure followed an investigating committee’s report on the dismissal and banishment from campus of a professor who had informed a reporter about the president’s directive stating that faculty contacts with the media without her prior approval would constitute insubordination, resulting in immediate dismissal. The report concluded that the dismissal violated the professor’s academic freedom and that the academic freedom of every member of the college faculty was threatened by the very issuance of the directive.

Litigation initiated by the professor failed when the federal district court ruled that an annual employment contract signed by faculty members gave the president unfettered authority in implementing a dismissal, whatever the faculty handbook might appear to require.

Within a year after censure was voted, a new president of the college took office. At the suggestion of the Association’s staff, he promptly rescinded the directive on contact with the media, referring the faculty to the provision in the 1940 Statement of Principles on public utterances as “a fair guideline that we can all support.” His consultations with the staff about additional actions regarding college policies that were needed to bring the Association’s censure to closure led in 2007 to his issuing a new employment contract, approved by the board of trustees and the faculty senate, ensuring that termination or nonrenewal of faculty appointments would be governed by the faculty handbook’s applicable provisions. Finally, as to the faculty handbook itself, the board voted in February 2008 to reaffirm provisions adopted by a previous board regarding dismissal and nonreappointment that adhere respectively to those in the joint 1958 Statement on Procedural Standards in Faculty Dismissal Proceedings and in the 1971 Statement on Procedural Standards in the Renewal or Nonrenewal of Faculty Appointments.

As to the issue of redress for the dismissed professor, she told the AAUP staff that she was quite content, for herself, with the knowledge that AAUP-recommended standards have been adopted at the college. Beyond testimony that this has been accomplished, she asked only that the unjust dismissal be cleared from college records and that her banishment from the college premises be ended. The president wrote in February to notify her that her personnel file had been cleared, that she can certainly feel free to visit the campus any time that suits her, that he is “proud to be the president who helped to bring some kind of justice to an unfortunate situation,” and that he looks forward to meeting her on some future occasion.

The officers of the Philander Smith College Faculty Senate and of the AAUP’s Arkansas conference have written in support of removing the censure.

Committee A recommends to the Ninety-fourth Annual Meeting that Philander Smith College be removed from the Association’s list of censured administrations.

Southern University at New Orleans (pdf). Among the five institutions investigated by the Association’s Special Committee on Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans Universities, the hurricane caused the greatest damage at Southern University at New Orleans, that city’s branch of Louisiana’s historically black Southern University system. SUNO’s buildings, flooded by ten feet of water, have remained unusable for nearly three years now, with temporary trailers being used as classrooms, laboratories, administrative offices, and student housing. SUNO reopened after four months, in January 2006, with a student body reduced by more than one-third and with a curriculum imposed by the state’s board of regents that suffered from the elimination of nineteen degree programs in the arts and sciences, only a few of which are now being restored.

With respect to the faculty, fifty-five professors, thirteen with tenure, were placed on unpaid furlough at the end of 2005. The actions were taken under a new “force-majeure” policy adopted by the board of supervisors of the Southern University system to supersede, at SUNO, the system’s existing financial-exigency policy, which is by and large consistent with AAUP-supported standards. The new SUNO policy closely resembled the “force-majeure” policy adopted at approximately the same time by the Louisiana State University system board of supervisors for the LSU Health Sciences Center in New Orleans. It denied the faculty any significant role in determining how many, and who in particular, would be furloughed. An appeal against placement on furlough could be made only to the administrative officers who had issued the notifications of furlough. A few tenured professors filed appeals, claiming in part that courses they were qualified to teach were being assigned to nontenured faculty members. The report of the investigating body concluded that the furloughed professors had been denied academic due process as called for in Regulation 4 of the Association’s Recommended Institutional Regulations on Academic Freedom and Tenure and that the appropriate faculty role in decisions fundamentally affecting academic programs and faculty status, as set forth in the Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, had been disregarded.

Committee A was scheduled to report to the 2007 annual meeting on the SUNO investigation, and prior to that time the SUNO administration indicated interest in dealing with the Association’s stated concerns. The concerns were discussed at a May 2007 meeting of administrators and faculty senate officers, with constructive exchanges that both parties found to be a welcome step toward sound academic governance. Seven cases of furloughed tenured professors that by then were still unresolved were reviewed, with particular attention to three that the AAUP staff had recommended for corrective action. The attorney for SUNO informed the group of an intention to abandon the “force-majeure” policy after potential resolutions of the remaining cases had been pursued further.

A May 29, 2007, letter from SUNO’s chancellor informed the Association of the adoption of a process to consider further reinstatements. His letter expressed hope that the process would be completed, and the “force-majeure” policy thereby discontinued, by the close of the calendar year. With Committee A about to convene for its spring 2007 meeting, its staff pressed the chancellor and the administration’s attorney for a prompt statement on the procedures to be followed if additional tenured professors were to be released before the “force-majeure” policy was officially lifted. The attorney’s firm replied that it was not in a position to address the matter. Committee A stated in its report to the 2007 annual meeting that it could not “countenance the possibility of the ‘force-majeure’ procedures, as applied at SUNO in December 2005, being applied again,” and the annual meeting voted to impose censure.

Committee A is happy now to report to the 2008 annual meeting that the year since censure was voted has witnessed developments at SUNO that substantially resolve the Association’s remaining concerns. By last winter, all of the cases of furloughed professors in which the Association’s staff had recommended corrective action had resulted in offers of return to tenured SUNO positions. Most have already returned or have arranged to do so beginning with the academic year 2008–09. Two who have declined offers have explained that they appreciated getting them but that they are better off in their current positions than in any position that would be available at SUNO. As to the official policy on financial exigency, the system’s board of supervisors voted in October to accept a joint administration-faculty SUNO proposal that the “forcemajeure” policy be terminated. The termination became official in November, and in March the chancellor confirmed that the SUNO policy on financial exigency, which had been temporarily superseded, is again the Southern University system policy.

The executive committee of the AAUP’s Louisiana conference, including in its membership a representative of the SUNO faculty, has voted without dissent to support removal of the censure.

Committee A recommends to the Ninety-fourth Annual Meeting that Southern University at New Orleans be removed from the Association’s list of censured
administrations.

Conclusion

Committee A remains active in both its judicial and its policy work. The removal of two institutions from the list of censured administrations and the resolution of lingering issues at the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center demonstrate again that the Association can be very effective in gaining adoption of its recommended standards and in obtaining meaningful resolutions for individual faculty members. We continue to identify significant current issues affecting academic freedom, to establish subcommittees that prepare thoughtful drafts on these issues, and, often after substantial committee discussion and revision, to publish reports that have broad influence. When appropriate, Committee A works with other organizations. I reported last year on the meeting funded by the Open Society Institute to discuss the policy statement, Academic Freedom and Outside Speakers, which Committee A had approved for publication. The meeting was attended by members of Committee A, other AAUP leaders, and members of the AAUP staff as well as representatives of many higher education organizations, some of them university presidents. Based on consensus achieved at that meeting, the participants distributed a list of recommendations that largely followed the points made in the AAUP policy statement. This year, as I reported, Committee A established a subcommittee in collaboration with the Canadian Association of University Teachers to address issues raised by American universities that establish campuses abroad.

As many readers of this report already know, Jonathan Knight retired from the AAUP staff on June 30, 2008. Jonathan devoted himself to our programs in academic freedom, tenure, and governance from the time he joined the AAUP staff in 1977. During these thirty-one years, Jonathan handled over a thousand individual cases and complaints, staffed thirty-two formal investigations, and worked on virtually every major policy statement issued by Committee A. Although he has served the AAUP in many capacities, ranging from book review editor of Academe to director of its member benefits programs, Committee A has been the main beneficiary of his high intelligence, excellent judgment, and devotion to principles of academic freedom. Among the many highlights of his work with Committee A, Jonathan was a principal staff officer for the post-9/11 Special Committee on Academic Freedom and National Security in a Time of Crisis, played a major role in developing our statement on academic boycotts, and drafted many letters protesting the difficulties faced by foreign scholars both in their home countries and in trying to enter the United States. At a dinner honoring Jonathan during the June 2008 Committee A meeting, I read warm tributes to him from every living former chair of the committee. During the six years Jonathan and I overlapped when I was counsel on the AAUP staff, we worked closely on many issues, particularly at the intersection of academic freedom and the law. Our relationship came full circle two years ago when I became chair of Committee A and Jonathan, as director of its programs, helped initiate me into my new responsibilities. It was a personal and intellectual pleasure to work with him. Jonathan received a well-deserved standing ovation from participants in the 2008 annual meeting after they adopted a resolution honoring his career at the AAUP. Though it is difficult to imagine the AAUP without him, we wish Jonathan and his wife, Judy, the active retirement they will undoubtedly enjoy.

Fortunately, Gregory Scholtz has agreed to become the new director of the Committee A program as of September 1, 2008. A professor of English at Wartburg College, Greg has been an active AAUP member at the local, state, and national levels, especially in matters involving academic freedom and tenure. In addition to  chairing the Iowa conference Committee A, he has been the liaison from the Assembly of State Conferences to the national Committee A. Moreover, he has served on five Committee A investigating committees. Already extremely familiar with the AAUP as an organization and with the work of Committee A in particular, Greg is obviously well prepared for his new position. I look forward to working with him.

David M. Rabban (Law),
University of Texas, Chair

Cases Settled through Staff Mediation

The three brief accounts that follow serve to illustrate the nature and the effectiveness of the mediative efforts of Committee A’s staff in successfully resolving cases during the 2007–08 academic year.

A new department chair at a state university in the upper South, wishing to use an existing budget line for graduate research, issued notice of nonreappointment to a nontenured instructor, attributing his action to “programmatic changes.” The instructor, who had been a student in the department, had continued as a non-tenure-track faculty member for thirty-five years, teaching elementary and intermediate courses. Asked for its assistance, the AAUP staff communicated with the university’s chief academic officer, asserting that the instructor and others similarly situated, because they had served well beyond any reasonable period of probation, were entitled under AAUP-supported standards to the protections that accrue with academic tenure. The chief officer maintained, however, that a policy change adopted thirty years earlier “shielded” the instructor and six others from virtually certain release because they lacked doctoral credentials. The subject faculty members, most of them by now retired, responded that the understanding reached in the 1970s called for their retention until retirement.

After several months without evident progress toward a resolution, the Association’s general secretary authorized an investigation. The university’s chief officer thereupon informed the Association that the instructor was being appointed to teach the following year in a new university program and “is therefore likely to serve us in this capacity for many years to come.”

The administration did not reply directly to the staff but instead initiated discussion with the faculty member and reached a settlement with her. “I would have been completely lost without the AAUP,” she wrote to the staff, “and I shall certainly spread the word about its good work.”