Academic freedom and tenure--University of the District of Columbia: Massive terminations of faculty appointments

Academe, May/Jun 1998 by Steiner, Peter O, Bergmann, Barbara R, Poston, Muriel E

Academic Freedom and Tenure University of the District of Columbia: Massive Terminations of Faculty Appointments ppo e ts

I. Introduction

The subject of this report is the action taken in February 1997 by the administration of the University of the District of Columbia (UDC) to terminate the appointments of 125 members of the faculty with six weeks of severance salary.

UDC, whose main campus is located in northwest Washington, was established by Congress in 1977, through the merger of three existing public colleges with widely different missions, academic programs, faculties, and student bodies. The three predecessor institutions were District of Columbia Teachers' College, a four-year institution that had been founded in 1955 through a merger of two previously segregated women's normal schools which traced their origins to the nineteenth century; Washington Technical Institute, a two-year vocational college which had opened in 1968; and Federal City College, a four-year liberal arts institution, also first opened in 1968, the year the two institutions attained land-grant status. At the time of its founding, UDC was an agglomeration, not a true consolidation, of these three institutions. All of the faculty and staff of each institution were assured of continuance in the new university.

The university, the only urban land-grant institution in the country, was founded with a noble mission. It was intended to provide open access to higher education, at affordable levels of tuition, to all high school graduates residing in the District of Columbia. The potential demand was there. When Federal City College opened a decade earlier it had attracted so many applicants that students had to be selected by lottery. The goal of open admissions was retained. By fall 1979, UDC enrolled more than fifteen thousand full- and part-time students, and while that number declined somewhat over the next decade, enrollment seemed to have stabilized by the early 1990s, with roughly twelve thousand students.2

In its first year of operation, UDC's full-time faculty numbered 670, nearly half of whom came from Federal City College; most of the remainder were from the Washington Technical Institute. The faculty is organized for the purpose of collective bargaining with the UDC Faculty Association, an affiliate of the National Education Association (NEA), as the bargaining agent. A fourth master agreement between the Faculty Association and the university, dated February 15, 1989, comprises sixty-four pages of detailed provisions, including many concerned with faculty status and issues relating to potential terminations of the kind that in fact occurred. (The five-year term of the agreement expired on October 1, 1993, and no successor agreement was negotiated. The actions of those in authority in 1996 and 1997, however, were predicated on the assumption that the provisions of the agreement remained in effect and had to be dealt with.)

Under an academic reorganization which took effect in 1995, and eliminated or merged dozens of undergraduate and graduate programs, UDC currently consists of a College of Arts and Sciences, with Schools of Arts and Education and of Science and Mathematics, and a College of Professional Studies, with Schools of Business and Public Administration and of Engineering and Applied Science. In accordance with its land-grant status, the university also maintains a Cooperative Extension Service, its largest department, through which it offers a number of specialized programs. It also has had a law school since 1995, as a result of having taken over the former Antioch Law School.

UDC describes itself as offering degrees in a wide range of traditional academic areas, as well as in many others that are less traditional carryovers from the programs of its predecessor institutions. As of the 1996-97 academic year, the university's catalogue listed twenty-two associate, forty-five baccalaureate, and eight master's degree programs, as well as the juris doctor program in the law school. Owing to the university's open admissions policy and to the poor state of elementary and secondary education in the District of Columbia, a large proportion of the students who enter UDC lack certain basic skills and take remedial or developmental classes before being admitted to college-level course work. This is particularly true in English and mathematics, where remedial courses are said to account for as much as 70 percent of the student enrollment.

Dr. Julius F. Nimmons, Jr., was appointed acting president of the university in late November 1996. He replaced Dr. Tilden J. LeMelle, UDC's fifth president (not counting three previous acting presidents), who resigned after serving since 1991. At the time of his appointment, Dr. Nimmons was the university's provost and academic vice president, a position he had held since 1993. In October 1997, Dr. Nimmons named Dr. Beverly Anderson, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, as acting provost and vice president for academic affairs, when the acting incumbent, Dr. Samuel Sullivan, resigned his administrative position.