Developments Relating to Association Censure

Every spring the Association’s staff prepares brief accounts of significant developments during the previous year at institutions on the Association’s censure and sanction lists. Members of the staff, acting on behalf of Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure and of the Committee on College and University Governance, communicate annually with the administrations of listed institutions, offering assistance in taking the steps necessary for removal. Below, the staff reports on favorable developments at two institutions currently on the list of censured administrations.

For information about the status of other institutions on our censure and sanction lists (printed elsewhere in this issue), please contact the Association’s Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance at [email protected].

Albertus Magnus College (Connecticut), 2000

The investigating committee found that the administration’s decision not to renew the appointment of a nontenured faculty member—and the administration’s subsequent decisions to suspend and effectively dismiss the same faculty member—were taken without any semblance of the due-process protections called for by AAUP standards and the college’s own regulations. The investigating committee also concluded that, in taking these actions, the Albertus Magnus administration had “acted in disregard of [the faculty member’s] academic freedom.”

For more than two decades, the AAUP’s staff received few substantive responses from the college’s administration to its annual letters inviting discussion on potential removal of censure. Because the former faculty member had reached a legal settlement with the college in fall 2000, the only remaining issue was a deficiency in the college’s regulations noted by the investigating committee, or so it seemed. In March 2024 the administration did respond substantively to a staff letter and, after correspondence through the spring, the vice president for academic affairs sent the current version of the faculty handbook to the AAUP in July. At a meeting with her in August, the staff noted with pleasure that the probationary period for faculty at Albertus Magnus is now seven years instead of the previous ten, which was the only policy shortcoming the investigating committee’s report had identified. However, the staff also discovered that the college’s regulations governing dismissal no longer comported with AAUP-recommended standards. Immediately following the meeting, the staff recommended revisions to the college’s dismissal policy that would bring it into essential conformity with the 1958 Statement on Procedural Standards in Faculty Dismissal Proceedings and Regulation 5, “Dismissal Procedures,” of the Recommended Institutional Regulations on Academic Freedom and Tenure.

In September, the vice president for academic affairs notified the AAUP’s staff that the administration had accepted its recommendations. The staff then met with members of the college’s AAUP chapter to inform them of this development, provide an overview of the censure removal process, and answer questions. The following month, the vice president for academic affairs sent the staff the new version of the faculty handbook, which had already gone into effect. Upon confirming that the new version of the handbook incorporated the staff’s recommended revisions to the college’s dismissal policy, the staff immediately began arranging for an AAUP representative to visit Albertus Magnus to assess the climate for academic freedom on campus.

The representative’s campus visit, which took place in February, involved interviews with elected faculty leaders and administrative officers. The report produced by the Association’s representative states in part, “I received a consistent message from all of these meetings: Both the faculty and the administration are anxious to have AMC removed from the censure list, and both report the atmosphere to be excellent with regard to academic freedom.” The report closes by “recommend[ing] that AMC be removed from the censure list.”

At its in-person meeting at the end of May, Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure will discuss these developments and formulate a recommendation to the Association’s governing Council regarding removal of censure at Albertus Magnus College.

Talladega College (Alabama), 1986

Censure followed from an investigating committee’s finding that the administration had dismissed two full-time faculty members without having afforded them an adequate dismissal procedure, in violation of the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure and the 1958 Statement on Procedural Standards in Faculty Dismissal Proceedings. The investigating committee also found that the administration had made the decision not to renew the appointment of a third full-time faculty member without having afforded her timely notice or an opportunity to appeal the decision to an appropriate faculty committee, in disregard of the Association’s Statement on Procedural Standards in the Renewal or Nonrenewal of Faculty Appointments. The administration’s actions against these three faculty members, the investigating committee further concluded, were “based significantly on its displeasure with conduct by them that should have been protected under commonly accepted principles of academic freedom” and therefore violated their academic freedom.

In March 2024 the Talladega administration responded favorably to the AAUP staff’s annual letter inviting discussion on potential removal of censure. Following a productive April meeting between a staff member and the college’s president and executive vice president, the staff member sent both officers suggestions for revising the college’s dismissal and nonrenewal policies to bring them into accord with Association-recommended standards. In August, the administration sent the staff a draft proposed revision of the faculty handbook that incorporated the recommended revisions.

After several months of subsequent correspondence, the president of the college’s faculty senate wrote in February to inform the AAUP that the senate had voted to approve the proposed new handbook. Shortly thereafter, the college’s interim president, who had taken office in June 2024, advised the staff that the board of trustees would vote on whether to approve the revised handbook at its April 2025 meeting.

The Association’s staff will continue to monitor these promising developments.