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The American Association of University Professors’ Governing Council voted unanimously over the weekend to sanction New College of Florida and Spartanburg Community College in South Carolina. That means the AAUP concluded that each institution’s leadership is in “substantial noncompliance with widely accepted standards of academic government,” according to a news release from the group.
In both cases, AAUP investigations found that college officials ignored faculty members’ input in making decisions that affected them.
Last year, the AAUP released a report from a special committee investigation into threats to academic freedom, tenure and shared governance and other issues at Florida public institutions during Ron DeSantis’s governorship. A large portion of that report focused on New College.
The AAUP release on the sanctions says DeSantis’s six January 2023 appointees to the New College Board of Trustees “dedicated themselves to ignoring their fiduciary responsibilities to the institution in favor of pushing the governor’s political goals.” The release notes that the board and the New College administration axed the diversity, equity and inclusion office and the gender studies program; it also says they “attacked tenure and imposed new admission standards and athletic programs absent meaningful faculty involvement.”
“The special committee received ample evidence that these actions have seriously impaired, if not irreparably damaged, the collective and individual functions of the New College faculty,” the AAUP noted, adding that the committee concluded that the takeover of the college “stands as one of the most egregious and extensive violations of AAUP principles and standards at a single institution in recent memory.”
In December, the organization released a report on Spartanburg Community College, which said that the college’s now provost, Lisa Satterfield, who was then chief academic officer and vice president of academic affairs, sent a facultywide email—just hours before a Faculty Senate meeting on a controversial policy—saying the Senate would be replaced with an “Academic Council.”
“In its message announcing the dissolution, the administration declared that ‘there is no shared governance’ at the college outside of curricular and instructional matters,” the AAUP news release says. Of the Academic Council’s 33 members, 13 were administrators, it noted, and the “bylaws restricted its deliberations to academic policy.”
The AAUP says it sanctions institutions to inform “association members, the profession at large, and the public that unsatisfactory conditions of academic government exist at the institutions in question.”
A spokesperson for the college said in response to the sanction that “Spartanburg Community College does not recognize the AAUP” and that academic governance there “has never been stronger since the faculty’s establishment of the Academic Council.”
The sanction list—which currently includes a dozen institutions, starting with Elmira College dating back to the ’90s—is separate from the AAUP’s censure list, which currently includes 60 institutions. The AAUP censures institutions for “unsatisfactory conditions of academic freedom and tenure.”
