|
« AAUP Homepage
|
Professors Offered Reinstatement after AAUP Investigation
By Jordan E. Kurland
The AAUP’s 2007 annual meeting on June 9 imposed censure on the University of New Orleans administration for reasons that included notice in May to several furloughed tenured professors of the termination of their appointments upon the expiration of their furloughs that summer. The AAUP investigating committee had concluded in its published report that the administration failed to demonstrate a need for denying any of the professors continuance in a suitable university position.
Having learned of the intended terminations and with a censure vote by the annual meeting in prospect, the AAUP staff reiterated its concern about the necessity of terminations and questioned the adequacy of the hearing procedures for professors contesting the action. The staff asked for a response from the administration before June 1, when the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure would be meeting to formulate its statement on the University of New Orleans for presentation to the annual meeting a week later. (The statement is published elsewhere in this issue, as part of the Report of Committee A, 2006–07.) “Instead of termination proceedings,” the staff wrote, “it hardly needs saying that we would much prefer to be informed of reinstatements or alternative settlements on mutually acceptable terms.” The staff identified four furloughed professors who had said that they would welcome being reinstated. The only response received from the administration prior to the sessions of Committee A and then the annual meeting referred to unaccepted offers of reinstatement to two professors who had not contested placement on furlough because they chose respectively to relocate at another university and to retire. “Should other positions become available for which furloughed faculty members are qualified,” the administration wrote, “UNO will offer reinstatement to those individuals.”
Waiting for the staff upon its return to the AAUP office after the censure vote and the annual meeting’s adjournment was an e-mail dated June 9 from university counsel. She reported that offers of reinstatement to their tenured faculty positions had just been extended to two of the furloughed professors who had been notified of termination. One of them had been identified by the staff as desiring recall, and two days later the staff learned that he was accepting the offer. University counsel also reported that another staff-identified individual, whose faculty position had been discontinued, was likely to be offered a nonfaculty position for which she was qualified, without losing her tenure rights to a suitable faculty position should one become available. A subsequent conversation with counsel indicated that discontinuance of her former faculty position was an impediment to reinstatement in the case of a third individual, but the provost has informed her that he will endeavor to find a suitable nonfaculty position for her if she is interested. As to the last of the four professors whom the staff had identified as desiring reinstatement, she telephoned in early July to report acceptance of an offer reinstating her to her previous department with full tenure rights.
The University of New Orleans and the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center (about which Committee A made no recommendation to the 2007 annual meeting but will report back to the annual meeting in 2008) are parts of the Louisiana State University System, which has regulations on financial exigency that have serious deficiencies when measured against AAUP recommended standards. These deficiencies are currently being addressed as a requisite element for the Association in achieving removal of censure in 2008 in the University of New Orleans case and avoidance of it in the case of the Health Sciences Center.
|