REPORT OF COMMITTEE A, 2005-06

Academe, Sep/Oct 2006

Committee A on Academic Freedom ami Tenure has acted on a number of challenges during the 2005-06 academic year. Three in particular merit emphasis in this report.

First, in response to the institutional chaos created by the material and social destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, Committee A endorsed the decision of the chair, concurred in by the AAUP's general secretary, to establish a special committee to review and analyze post-Katrina developments that impinge on colleges and universities in the city, on their faculties, and on their academic programs. Members of the special committee conducted site visits and interviews in New Orleans in August. Of particular concern to the special committee is the large number of faculty members who have been notified of release from their positions because of plans by the institutional authorities to restructure university programs and operations.

Second, our staff has worked energetically and creatively with the administrations of a number of institutions on the Association's censure list in the hope of assisting them to get the censure removed. Happily, five of these institutions made demonstrable progress toward the adoption of AAUP principles and procedural standards. Committee A was able to recommend to the Council and the annual meeting that the censure be lifted for these institutions. The committee was especially cognizant of the skill and patience of members of the national staff in achieving these positive results. In this and other ways, their service to the AAUP is exemplary.

Third, in response to ongoing controversies in many parts of the world concerning academic boycotts, Committee A established a subcommittee to explore ways in which the AAUP's objections to academic boycotts could be more widely disseminated and brought into direct and sustained engagement with colleagues in the United States and abroad who are reluctant to see all forms of academic boycotts repudiated. This subcommittee attempted to convene an international conference, but canceled it when conflicts about the role that the case of Israel was to play proved too difficult to resolve. Much of this issue of Academe is devoted to this abortive endeavor. Anyone interested in a detailed account of these events and their consequences is referred to the contributions in this issue by Joan Wallach Scott and Ernst Benjamin, who, along with Robert O'Neil, were members of the subcommittee charged with attending to the boycott issue.

Beyond responding to these three challenges, Committee A has also addressed the needs of part-time faculty for greater protections of their academic freedom, approved publication of a report on the highly problematic practices of institutional review boards, and continued, in a variety of public settings, its defense of the political autonomy of universities against the threats presented by several of the professoriate's critics, including the American Council of Trustees and

Judicial Business

IMPOSITION OF CENSURE

At its June meeting. Committee A considered a case that had been the subject of a report published in the May-June 2006 Academe. The committee adopted the statement below recommending the imposition of censure. The Council concurred in the committee's recommendation, and censure was voted by the 2006 annual meeting.

New Mexico Highlands University. The report of the investigating committee concerns the actions taken by the administration of New Mexico Highlands University in the cases of two faculty members, both of them unsuccessful candidates for tenure.

In the case of the first faculty member, the committee's report found that less than a month after the administration had notified him of the rejection of his tenure candidacy, he was dismissed from the faculty and banished from the campus effective immediately, apparently because of statements lie made in the press and to his colleagues that were sharply and personally critical of actions taken by members of the administration. His dismissal was effected without affordance of a hearing, and payment of his salary ceased with the termination of his services. The investigating committee concluded that the administration acted in violation of the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure in dismissing this faculty member without having demonstrated adequacy of cause in a hearing of record before a faculty committee, and also by failing to provide any notice or severance salary. The committee further concluded that, to the extent that the administration acted to dismiss him because of displeasure with his public criticism of its policies and actions, it violated his academic freedom.

With regard to the second professor, the committee concluded that the administration acted in disregard of the Association's Statement on Procedural Standards in the Renewal or Nonrenewal of Faculty Appointments by not providing him with a statement of reasons for its decision to deny him tenure and by setling aside without substantive comment the judgments of two faculty appeals committees. These committees found that inadequate consideration had been given to his qualifications and that numerous procedural irregularities had occurred in the evaluation of his tenure candidacy. The investigating committee also concluded that the administration disregarded the principles of shared governance articulated in the Association's Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities.