|
« AAUP Homepage
|
Nameless, New Haven, and Nicholls
Three recent AAUP cases demonstrate the vulnerability of non-tenure-track faculty.
By Jordan E. Kurland
Over the last year and a half, three cases involving the dismissal of a senior non-tenure-track member of the faculty were deemed sufficiently severe in their disregard of Association-supported standards to warrant AAUP investigations. The most recent case resulted in the investigating committee’s report, published elsewhere in this issue, on Nicholls State University, a regional public institution in Louisiana. Preceding Nicholls was an investigating committee’s report, published in the May–June 2008 issue of Academe, on the University of New Haven, a private institution in Connecticut. In the first of the three cases, an investigation was authorized in April 2007 at a public university located roughly halfway between Louisiana and Connecticut. Upon the announcement of an investigation, the administration withdrew its dismissal action, thus resolving the matter of immediate concern. The issues in the case merit discussion in this article, but the institution will be called “Nameless” instead of being identified.
The applicable AAUP standards are these. AAUP policies do not recognize full-time non-tenure-track appointments. With the exception of temporary appointments for a fixed term, the policies require all full-time appointments to be either with tenure or probationary for tenure. In each of the three cases, because the faculty member had been retained beyond the maximum seven-year probationary period, she (all three are female) had tenure under the policies. Tenured appointments are subject to termination only upon the administration’s demonstration of cause for dismissal before a faculty hearing body or its demonstration under appropriate procedures that termination was necessary because of financial exigency or discontinuance of program. For probationers, AAUP policies require that institutions provide reasons for nonrenewal of appointment upon request and opportunity to appeal to a faculty body. The policies require that all full-time faculty members, after two years of service, receive, in the event of termination or nonrenewal of appointment, a year of notice or severance salary.
Nameless University
The faculty member at Nameless University began her affiliation with that institution more than forty years ago, when she enrolled as an undergraduate. She majored in mathematics, received a master’s degree, and, in 1970, commenced full-time non-tenure-track service as an instructor in the mathematics department. Changes in the university’s tenure regulations in 1978 included an “up or out” decision within seven years for those at the instructor rank. The instructor in the case being discussed, together with six other instructors, was exempted from the seven-year requirement through a “grandparenting” clause under which she could be retained indefinitely under renewable-term appointments. She continued on the faculty without incident for an additional thirty years. Although two successive department chairs conveyed their assumption that she had the protections of tenure during their time in office, nothing seems to have been stated in writing about tenure rights for the grandparented seven.
The current department chair, differing from his predecessors, looked upon the veteran instructor’s status as year by year, renewable at the chair’s discretion. Interested in engaging research mathematicians for a potential doctoral program, he saw freeing the instructor’s budget line as a step in that direction. Accordingly, in late October 2006 he told her that because of “programmatic changes” her appointment for that academic year, her thirty-seventh on the Nameless University faculty, would be terminal. She asked for written notice with reasons, and he replied by e-mail as follows: “Your letter of appointment clearly specifies the length of your current appointment and constitutes full and timely notice of nonreappointment when that term expires.”
In ensuing correspondence with the university’s chief administrative officer, AAUP staff emphasized that the termination of the instructor’s services after decades was in disregard not only of AAUP-supported standards but also of the university’s own standards for faculty appointments within the tenure system. The chief administrative officer, supported by university counsel, countered with the argument that each annual appointment put the faculty member who accepted it on notice that the appointment was for that year only and provided no basis for expecting renewal. The staff replied that being reappointed thirty-six consecutive times should lead to an expectation of indefinite retention. Whether because the administration came to concur in this or because it simply wished to avoid a published report and potential censure, the announcement of an investigation led it to rescind the notification and retain the instructor as a full-time mathematics teacher, although henceforth in a continuing education program rather than in the mathematics department.
University of New Haven
The non-tenure-track faculty member at the University of New Haven, a teacher of English, started at the university on a part-time basis in 1993 after more than two decades of experience at several other institutions. Her initial full-time appointment, at the rank of lecturer, was for the 1999–2000 academic year. She was reappointed annually through the academic year 2006–07. During the fall of that year, her eighth as a full-time member of the faculty, the tenured members of the English department evaluated her performance and unanimously recommended multiyearreappointment and promotion to the rank of senior lecturer.
At the same time, the office of the dean of her college was acting to remove her from the faculty. A new dean, having received a complaint from a student who was unhappy with the lecturer after a dispute over class attendance, learned about a file of earlier student complaints against her that the associate dean had kept. Concluding that the lecturer had shown a pattern of inappropriate behavior, the dean determined that she should not be retained and that he had the authority to deny reappointment. The lecturer, notified on November 30 of nonretention beyond that academic year, filed grievances against the deans. The faculty grievance committee, after holding hearings and examining abundant documentation that the dean’s office provided on the student complaints, found unanimously for the lecturer and recommended that she be offered multiyear reappointment. The university president rejected the committee’s findings and recommendations, whereupon the Association proceeded with an investigation.
The investigating committee, noting that the lecturer had served full time beyond the seven-year maximum probationary period permitted under the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, found that she was entitled to the procedural safeguards associated with a dismissal for cause. Because the administration had dismissed her without first demonstrating cause before a faculty hearing body, the investigating committee concluded that the administration acted in disregard of applicable Association-supported standards.
As to substantive considerations, the AAUP investigating committee reported that the New Haven deans based their case against the lecturer on her handling of a total of nine student complaints between 1999 and 2006. The deans alleged that she had displayed “a pattern of behaviors that were inconsistent with the common sense notions of professionalism and civility in addressing students and their concerns.” The investigating committee examined the files on the nine complaints and discussed them, orally and then in written exchanges, with the two deans. Only the first of the complaints had been processed through the procedure outlined in the university’s student handbook. The final step was a hearing before the faculty’s grievance committee, which found no fault with the lecturer’s conduct. The next seven complaints were handled by the associate dean, with the English department not consulted or even notified in key instances, and the final complaint, which triggered the lecturer’s dismissal, went to the dean who had just assumed office.
The investigating committee found evidence of unprofessional conduct in only one incident in one of the complaints and certainly no “pattern” of it in the nine complaints over a span of seven years. In the final complaint, the committee characterized the lecturer’s responses to the complainant as “perhaps overly hostile under the circumstances,” but not unprofessional or uncivil and definitely not sufficient to be a “last straw” warranting the lecturer’s dismissal. The committee expressed strong doubt that the New Haven administration would have acted to terminate the lecturer’s services if it did not believe it could do so unilaterally because she held a non-tenure-track appointment.
Nicholls State University
With the full report of the Nicholls State University investigating committee appearing elsewhere in this issue of Academe, the case can be summarized quite briefly here. The faculty member earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Nicholls and began teaching in 1995 as a full-time member of the mathematics department, acquiring the rank of instructor shortly thereafter. In May 2007, one day before the instructor completed her twelfth year on the faculty, the head of the mathematics department told her that she would not be reappointed. She asked the department head orally and then the university president in writing why she had not been reappointed. The head gave two reasons, neither of them having any bearng on the instructor’s fitness and both of them demonstrably inaccurate. The president ruled out another possible reason as being a factor in the decision, while stating that the university’s policies say reasons for nonreappointment need not be provided and in practice Nicholls State University does not provide them.
The investigating committee found consistently meritorious evaluations of the instructor’s academic performance and no hint of personal misconduct. Discussions with five Nicholls administrative officers, with numerous current and former members of the mathematics department, and with the instructor herself led the committee to conclude that the only plausible reason for the instructor’s dismissal lay in the large number of failing grades she had assigned to students in her college algebra courses. College algebra, which constituted a large share of the instructor’s teaching, is a required course at Nicholls. The rate of failures in the course, traditionally substantial, had for a variety of reasons become larger by 2006, leading the administration to bring pressure on the mathematics teachers to reduce the number of failing grades. Some of the teachers reportedly did lower their standards, but the instructor in the case of concern here resisted the pressure (“admirably,” according to colleagues). Her college algebra courses, together with those of a colleague much her junior whose services also were terminated, had the department’s highest failure rate in 2006.
The investigating committee concluded that the instructor, like the non-tenure-track faculty members in the Nameless and New Haven cases, was entitled through length of service to the procedural protections associated with tenure but did not receive them. The committee, while aware that Nicholls policies do not require that advance notice be given, could not obtain an explanation for the administration’s waiting until her next-to-last day to give the instructor notice of termination that, in the committee’s words, was “deplorably scant.” Finally, the investigating committee, noting that a teacher should be free to grade in accordance with his or her best professional judgment, concluded that the administration’s dismissal of her because of its displeasure with her having assigned a large proportion of failing grades violated her academic freedom.
Absence of Safeguards
Non-tenure-track faculty members, serving indefinitely on term appointments renewable at the administration’s discretion, are inevitably more vulnerable than their tenured faculty colleagues to involuntary termination in the event faculty positions are reduced because of financial constraints or reductions in programs. What may not be immediately apparent, however, and what the three cases treated in this article reveal, is that they are also vulnerable to dismissal simply because someone in authority wishes to be rid of them and they lack the procedural safeguards that accrue with tenure.
A new department head at Nameless wanted budget lines for researchers. A new dean at New Haven was displeased with the way a non-tenure-track lecturer reacted to student complaints. An administrator at Nicholls was displeased with the number of students failed by an instructor. It seems quite safe to say that none of these three administrators would have moved to terminate the faculty members’ appointments had the protections of tenure been recognized. It also might be said that non-tenure-track faculty members who are aware of this vulnerability will think twice before engaging in controversial matters, thereby limiting their academic freedom to the academy’s detriment.
Jordan E. Kurland is associate general secretary of the AAUP,
Comment on this article.
|