Auburn Board of Trustees Under Attack

After trustees told William Muse, Auburn’s president, that his contract would not be renewed, he accepted an appointment as president of East Carolina University. He had planned to finish out the academic year at Auburn before starting his new job in August. But four days after Muse accepted the job, the trustees removed him from the presidency and relegated him to a small office on campus. He had been instrumental in achieving Auburn’s removal from the AAUP’s censure list in 1993.

Simultaneously, the governor announced the appointment of two new trustees. Auburn’s board is made up of twelve appointed members plus the state school superintendent and the governor. Critics charge that trustee Robert Lowder essentially runs the board and that most of the twelve appointed members have financial ties to him. Lowder is chair and chief executive officer of a prominent Alabama banking company.

The two new trustees are also perceived as being cronies of Lowder’s; one worked with him to push through a slate of officers in the Auburn alumni association. That effort was seen as a move to gain control of the association because of a new rule allowing it to have a voice in appointing trustees.

At board meetings, the trustees are known for making quick and unanimous decisions with little discussion of issues, leading some to allege that they meet privately before open meetings. Former president Muse says that the board regularly bypassed his authority, encouraged administrators and coaches to come directly to the board with their concerns, and instituted athletics policies, arguably a violation of National Collegiate Athletic Association rules.

Faculty at Auburn charge that the board has been inappropriately involved in other matters, including pressuring Muse’s predecessor to back off from awarding tenure to a distinguished Catholic theologian, developing a policy allowing students to have poor grades erased from their records, eliminating a Ph.D. program against the recommendation of a faculty committee, and merging two departments in what may have been an act of retaliation against one of them. Most recently, trustees have been criticized for their handling of the search for a new president after they initiated a process that included limited faculty participation.

Protests over the board’s actions have involved an unusually large number of constituents. The Auburn University Senate, composed of faculty, staff, and administrators, issued a unanimous vote of no confidence in the board, as did several separate staff and faculty organizations, the student government’s senate, and the alumni association’s board of directors. The University Senate, the Auburn AAUP chapter, and the editorial staff of the student newspaper have also called on the entire board to resign. In addition, two thousand Auburn students rallied in protest against the new trustees, and a group of local newspapers filed suit against the board, charging it with having violated Alabama’s open-meetings law by conducting a secret session before each open board meeting.

Board members have barely responded to the public outcry; no legal mechanism to remove them exists. An ad hoc committee of members of various campus constituencies, headed by the chair of the University Senate, has sent a letter of formal complaint to the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, the regional accrediting body, asking it to look into possible violations of accreditation criteria.

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