American Association of University Professors

The AAUP has conducted surveys for its Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession and is now publishing some results on their Academe Blog. Earlier we had linked to their first post from that data, which examines the impact the COVID-19 pandemic has had on faculty salaries and benefits for both tenure-line and non-tenure-track faculty.

Their second post based on that report is now up and it explores contingency and administrative growth. “The steady rise of contingent faculty appointments and the growth of administration in higher education present a significant threat to academic freedom and shared governance.”

The AAUP has conducted surveys for its Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession and is now publishing some results on their Academe Blog. Their first post based on the report examines the impact the COVID-19 pandemic has had on faculty salaries and benefits for both tenure-line and non-tenure-track faculty.

“Key findings include:

• 55 percent of institutions implemented salary freezes or reductions.
• 28 percent of institutions eliminated or reduced some form of fringe benefits.
• Almost 5 percent of institutions terminated the appointments of at least some full-time tenure-line faculty members.
• Almost 20 percent terminated the appointments of or denied contract renewal to at least some full-time non-tenure-track faculty members.”

AAUP plans future Academe Blog posts based on the annual report over the next two weeks, on topics such as contingency, administrative bloat, and institutional debt.

USD is a private institution and so is not bound by the First Amendment, but it is required to live up to its promises to abide by the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure. USD law professor Tom Smith is being investigated by his university for posting and online comment criticizing the Chinese government on his personal blog. Details are at theFire.org.

Just weeks after the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) filed suit against Haskell University President Ronald Graham for refusing to approve the newspaper as a student organization and for shorting its account over $10,000 in funding following critical coverage of the university, FIRE now reports that President Graham has attempted to limit free speech rights of faculty, by forbidding them from expressing opinions about the school’s administration. Details are available in a Fire Newsdesk article.

The protection and furtherance of academic freedom is a core value of the AAUP. We must always be wary of attempts to silence those who may disagree with us,regardless of how inane, illogical, unscientific, fantastic, or politically unpopular (or popular) their views may be.

In today’s Academe Blog, John K. Wilson discussed a recent controversy concerning the Hoover Institution, a partisan political think-tank at Stanford University. The controversy erupted after three conservative members of the Hoover Institution asked that the faculty and the student newspaper be prevented from publishing views contrary to their own. They wanted censorship.

Wilson provides a thoughtful view of the issue, emphasizing that censorship can work both ways, i.e., blocking those with whom we agree, and those with whom we do not agree, from speaking out. Speech inciting riots should be censored, and laws exist to do so. But for many of us in academia (most?), it is vexing to endure the constant dissemination of lies and immoral and unethical views spewed out daily by the Trump administration, as well as by groups such as the Proud Boys and the believers of QAnon. Nevertheless, as vexing as this may be, the First Amendment to the Constitution protects the rights of these groups to do so. 

Wilson’s balanced discussion of the Stanford incident is one that we all should consider.

An AAUP investigating committee looking into governance issues at eight institutions has now concluded interviews with the principal parties at each institution and is drafting its report. As reported in Academe Blog, the first finding they will report is that we are in the midst of the worst crisis in academic governance in decades.

The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Public Affairs Advisory Committee is preparing to bring scientist’s concerns to lawmakers and administration officials next year. In preperation for that work, thwy are conducting a survey to more clearly understand what those concerns are.

Please take a few minutes to complete the online survey before January 15th.

BY RUDY FICHTENBAUM (March 10, 2020)

AAUP president Rudy Fichtenbaum issued the following statement today on the coronavirus (COVID-19).

As we are learning, COVID-19 (the coronavirus) has the potential to present a serious challenge to the health and safety of our campus communities. At this time, campuses in Washington State, New York State, California, Nebraska, and elsewhere have closed or moved to all-online teaching, and a number of study-abroad programs have been cut short or suspended altogether.

Administrations are taking the potential health impact of the virus seriously, and we applaud their efforts to do so. The safety of the students, the staff, and the faculty should be everyone’s primary concern. We are hearing from AAUP members, however, that decisions to close campuses or to move to an all-online model for the short term are being made without adequate faculty involvement in decision-making. The AAUP’s 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities makes clear that “the faculty has primary responsibility for such fundamental areas as curriculum, subject matter and methods of instruction, . . . and those aspects of student life which relate to the educational process.”

In certain situations, it is necessary to close a campus or move to online instruction to safeguard the health of the campus community. Faculty and academic staff—through their shared governance bodies or, when applicable, their unions—should be consulted on how best to implement this decision. In order to ensure full participation, administrations should share information with faculty and seek input from the appropriate faculty bodies. In cases where the institution is moving to an all-online model to avoid virus transmission on campus, it is incumbent on administrations to provide all instructional faculty with the appropriate software and training. Administrations should also consider the needs and limitations of students, who may lack access to the internet or face other obstacles to completing their coursework remotely.

It is hard to know what the ultimate impact of COVID-19 will be on our campuses. The administration should provide the appropriate faculty body—the union or the governance body—with information regarding the impact of COVID-19 on enrollments, revenues, and hiring and renewals. In the spirit of the AAUP’s One Faculty campaign, we encourage our chapters to be especially sensitive to how these closures and any future curtailment of programs could affect our colleagues on full-time non-tenure-track or part-time contingent appointments.

The AAUP has developed a web page with resources on COVID-19. We will continue to update this page as new resources become available. We also ask that chapters share information with us about what is being done on their campus and what the chapter or faculty senate’s role has been in decision-making around campus closures and the implementation of all-online teaching.

AAUP has created a web page, Coronovirus for Higher ED, that provides useful information and links to resources regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. I encourage members to make use of this page.

UCLA AAUP, in cooperation with the UCLA Faculty Association and CUCFA (Council of UC Faculty Associations), has sent the following letter to President Napolitano asking her to begin Spring quarter 2020 two weeks late, on April 13.

March 16, 2020

TO:       President Janet Napolitano

FROM: Council of UC Faculty Associations

We write to ask you to delay the start of spring quarter by two weeks, to begin on April 13 rather than March 30. We came to this solution following an intensive discussion among our members about the challenges of moving to remote teaching, at least through the spring quarter, and gathering information from other universities around the country on how they are adapting to the COVID-19 emergency. Our campus learning centers and instructional technology staff — typically the least funded departments on our campuses — are valiantly trying to make it possible for instructors to remotely deliver the best approximation of the pedagogical quality of our renowned in-person and residential classes. But we all need more time for faculty to get the training we need to adapt our classes, IT departments to increase their bandwidth, staff to support our emergency efforts, and students to get the adequate technology and appropriate settings they need for remote learning. On top of these challenges, we are also aware that we need to create multiple contingency plans for faculty, staff, and students who may get sick.

Universities that are moving to remote learning and are extending the spring break by one or two weeks to allow adequate preparation include Brown University, University of Pennsylvania, Tufts, Stony Brook, Duke University, Ohio State, Northeastern, University of Alaska, University of Wyoming, University of Texas-Austin, and almost twenty other Texas colleges and universities, among many more. Surely the great University of California system can manage to respond as creatively as other universities around the country.

We know that what is most important is to stay in touch with our students, to assure them that we care for them and are doing everything we can to give them a sense of continuity and help them complete their education. For many of our students, the university is their lifeline. We can reach out to the students registered for our classes to let them know that we are using the two-week period to ensure that they and we are ready for the switch to remote learning. We can even get them started on readings and exercises to get them primed for the class, something many of us already do. Using both synchronous and asynchronous delivery systems, we can pack ten weeks of teaching into eight.

We call on our UC leaders to recognize that administrators, faculty, students, and staff — especially IT units — need a breathing space between the hyper emergency end of this quarter and the beginning of the next, so that everything can run as smoothly as possible, given how much unpredictability we are all facing in our daily lives.

Give us the chance to demonstrate the extraordinary effort, compassion, and resilience that UC faculty, staff, and students can bring to the COVID-19 disaster by providing us the time we need to succeed.

Sincerely,
Constance Penley,
President, Council of UC Faculty Associations
and Professor of Film and Media Studies, UCSB

cc:  The UC Campus Chancellors