Investigations

Academic Freedom and Tenure: Bennington College

Report dealing with a declaration of financial exigency as justification for terminating the appointments of presumptively tenured faculty.

Terminations of Tenured Faculty Appointments at SUBR

An AAUP investigating committee’s report on Southern University, Baton Rouge, focuses on the termination of nineteen tenured faculty appointments in spring 2012. The actions followed a declaration of financial exigency in October 2011 by Southern University’s board of supervisors in response to a budgetary shortfall and a concurrent plan to reorganize SUBR by reducing the number of its colleges from nine to five.

Mass Terminations of Full-Time Faculty Appointments at NLU

An AAUP investigative report on National Louis University deals with the administration’s actions in spring 2012 to discontinue nine degree programs and five nondegree certificate programs, to close four departments in the College of Arts and Sciences, and to terminate the appointments of at least sixty-three full-time faculty members, sixteen with tenure. Administrators cited financial problems and the likelihood of deficit budgets for 2012 and 2013, but at no point did they assert that a condition of financial exigency existed.

Academic Freedom and Tenure: Northeastern Illinois University

The administration of Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago violated principles of academic freedom when it denied tenure to a candidate who had opposed its wishes in a dispute between linguistics faculty and teachers of English as a second language (TESL), concludes an AAUP investigating committee in this new report.

Academic Freedom and Tenure: Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, A Supplementary Report on a Censured Administration

This supplementary report raises questions about the dismissal of professor Teresa Buchanan from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, which has been on the AAUP’s list of censured administrations since 2012. Professor Buchanan, a specialist in early childhood education with an unblemished eighteen-year performance record, was being evaluated for promotion to full professor when a district school superintendent and an LSU student filed complaints against her for occasional use of profanity and bawdy language. Her dean immediately suspended her from teaching, and eventually, despite a faculty hearing committee's unanimous recommendation against dismissal, the LSU board of supervisors accepted the administration's recommendation that she be dismissed. The faculty senate at LSU also condemned the administration's actions, and, represented by attorneys from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Professor Buchanan has filed a lawsuit against the university, for which the AAUP Foundation has provided financial assistance.

AAUP Investigates Dismissal of Part-Time Faculty Member

In March, the AAUP published online an investigating committee’s report on the fall 2016 dismissal of Nathanial Bork, a part-time instructor of philosophy at the Community College of Aurora in Colorado. Bork’s section of Introduction to Philosophy was in its fourth week when the administration notified him of the termination of his appointment, ostensibly because he had failed adequately to implement curricular changes designed to improve pass rates in entry-level general education courses.

Pages

Subscribe to Investigations