Monday, January 22, 2007

By PIPER FOGG

A special committee of the American Association of University Professors sharply
criticizes several New Orleans universities in a draft report of its
investigation of layoffs, program cuts, and other steps the institutions took
in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

The report, which has not yet been released to the public but was obtained by
The Chronicle, assails actions taken by the five universities the committee
investigated: the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, the
University of New Orleans, and Southern University at New Orleans, all of which
are public; and Tulane University and Loyola University New Orleans, both of
which are private.

In the report, the committee says that while chancellors of the public
institutions met with the committee's members when they visited New Orleans
last summer, the presidents of Tulane and Loyola declined to meet with the
committee before receiving the report (The Chronicle, August 15, 2006).

The committee's goal was to examine whether the universities had followed their
own policies and procedures, as well as AAUP guidelines, in laying off tenured
faculty members and cutting academic programs in cases of financial exigency or
under reorganization plans. Committee members also examined whether faculty
members had an adequate say in those decisions.

Each university has defended its actions as necessary for its survival in the
devastating aftermath of Katrina.

Following are highlights of the report:

Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center

The AAUP criticizes the center for discarding its own financial-exigency
procedures and instead adopting a "force majeure" plan. The plan declared the
institution's right, in an emergency, to dispense with the protections of
tenure and various rights concerning termination. The report says the
administration unilaterally decided whom to furlough, and did not try to
relocate faculty members into other suitable positions, denying some professors
academic due process.

University of New Orleans

The report faults the university for placing faculty members on furlough without
academic due process and without respect to the rights of tenure. And it says:
"A disturbing abundance of cases suggested a propensity to take advantage of
the downsizing by removing someone who was simply no longer wanted, whatever
the personal reason and no matter the academic merits and needs."

Southern University at New Orleans

The committee says the university eliminated and added degree programs,
fundamentally altering the educational program without faculty consultation. It
also furloughed faculty members, and in accordance with a newly adopted "force
majeure" plan, allowed faculty members just a five-day window to appeal only to
the very administrators who had ordered the furloughs. The committee considers
those actions a denial of due process that "manifested flagrant disregard for
the faculty's appropriate role in academic governance."

Loyola University New Orleans

The report says Loyola "proceeded in gross disregard" of its own policies when
it fired 17 tenured faculty members on stated grounds of program discontinuance
without trying to place them in alternative positions. It also criticizes
university officials for creating a top-down reorganization plan without proper
consultation with the appropriate faculty bodies. And it faults them for not
responding to calls from the faculty for cooperation following faculty votes of
no confidence in the administration.

Tulane University

The report criticizes the administration's "refusal to provide any but the most
generic evidence with respect to the declared state of financial exigency." By
doing so, it deprived more than 200 terminated faculty members of the ability
to assess how such evidence applied to their particular cases. In declining to
relocate faculty members into alternative positions, the report says, Tulane
violated its own policies. In splitting the Faculty of Liberal Arts and
Sciences into separate schools without faculty consultation, it violated
faculty bylaws and AAUP policies. Its "recent and ambitious plans for
rebuilding," it states, "undercut its own claims of continuing financial
exigency" (The Chronicle, May 26, 2006).

The report says that the findings have been reviewed and approved for
publication, and that the AAUP's Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure
will report on those findings at the association's next annual meeting, in
June.