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Adelphi and the AAUP
By Jordan E. Kurland
The current effort by the Adelphi University AAUP chapter to obtain equitable salaries for faculty women is but the latest episode in a turbulent seventy-five-year history of AAUP concerns with administrative deficiencies. The chapter was founded in 1933, at what was then a women’s college with barely more than three hundred students, as a means of resisting presidential mismanagement. A series of financial crises culminated in the president’s employing a “quick fix” in 1939 by summarily dismissing four of the most senior and highly paid professors. The result was an AAUP investigation and censure, imposed in 1941 and removed in 1952 upon adoption of a tenure system as called for in the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure.
In 1965, a new Adelphi president improperly suspended a Marxist assistant professor, leading to another AAUP investigation. The published report that ensued in 1967 occasioned prompt acceptance of national and local AAUP recommendations for redress in the faculty member’s case and additional safeguards in official policies, thus avoiding another censure. In 1972, the AAUP chapter at Adelphi achieved certification as the faculty’s exclusive representative for collective bargaining. The contract it negotiated, in its provisions on academic freedom and governance, has been a model for faculty bargaining agreements.
The year 1985 marked the arrival of an Adelphi president who was to prove to be far more high-handed than his predecessor presidents in the late 1930s and middle 1960s. He quickly came to dominate the board of trustees, obtaining membership on it for the nation’s highest-paid university president and gaining its approval for himself becoming the second highest-paid president. His administration made repeated inroads into areas of academic decision making that had long been the faculty’s responsibility, resulting in a 1990 investigation of governance issues by the national AAUP. Upon seeing a draft of the investigating committee’s report, the administration drew back from its encroachment into most of these areas, and the report was not published. Scarcely another year went by, however, before the situation at Adelphi worsened sharply. While student enrollment was dropping and debts were rising, the trustees purchased a luxury condominium in Manhattan as a second home for the president, whose lavish lifestyle had been featured in both the New York tabloids and the New York Times.
Administration-faculty relations were not helped by a senior administrator’s public statement as the 1994–95 academic year began that “there will be three deaths this year at Adelphi: the death of the Faculty Senate, the death of tenure, and the death of the AAUP.” New assaults on faculty prerogatives resulted in the launching of another national AAUP investigation of governance issues. The faculty called for the dismissal of the president by a vote of 131 to 14. The AAUP chapter and the senate were instrumental in forming the Committee to Save Adelphi (a coalition of faculty, students, parents, and alumni), which petitioned the New York State Board of Regents to remove the trustees from office for having misused their authority. The regents did so, an action unprecedented for a university, and a new board of trustees began its duties by obtaining the president’s resignation. The AAUP’s 1997 annual meeting witnessed the Adelphi chapter’s receipt of the Beatrice G. Konheim Award for outstanding chapter performance, truly an obvious choice.
— Jordan E. Kurland
AAUP Associate General Secretary
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