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The American Association of University Professors’ governing council has placed the administrations of both Texas’ Collin College and Kansas’ Emporia State University on its censure list, the association announced Tuesday.
AAUP says it publishes its censure list “for the purpose of informing association members, the profession at large and the public that unsatisfactory conditions of academic freedom and tenure have been found to prevail at these institutions.”
On May 1, the AAUP issued a report condemning Emporia State for “unilaterally terminating the appointments of 30 tenured and tenure-track faculty members.”
“The absence of meaningful faculty involvement in developing and approving the administration’s ‘Framework for Workforce Management,’ in ‘realigning’ curricular programs and in terminating faculty appointments demonstrates that conditions for shared governance at Emporia State University are deficient,” the report said.
An Emporia State spokeswoman wrote in an email Tuesday that “The AAUP is not a governing body for Emporia State University and their activities have no impact on our plans for the future. Emporia State does not agree with the allegations for many reasons, not the least of which are the factual errors within the report. The university did not participate in the review because legal and personnel rules and regulations protect much of the information requested.”
Her email didn’t specify what the report’s errors were.
On April 24, the AAUP published a report on Collin College’s dismissal of three professors.
“The investigating committee found that the Collin administration’s actions involved ‘egregious violations’ of all three faculty members’ academic freedom to speak as citizens and to criticize institutional policies, and, in the case of [Michael] Phillips, of academic freedom in teaching,” Tuesday’s AAUP announcement said.
A Collin College spokeswoman said, “We are disheartened to see the continued refusal by the American Association of University Professors to acknowledge the inherent responsibility of an institution to uphold both a set of academic duties and academic rights, according to its own specified policies, and that tenure and academic freedom are not unqualified privileges that can be extorted by external groups for their own purposes.”
