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Political Interference and Big Data (podcast)

As campus protests across the country are met with an often violent, militarized response, in a timely new episode of AAUP Presentswe discuss the escalation of attacks on academic freedom, tenure, DEI and higher ed as a common good. Professors Jennifer Ruth and Isaac Kamola discuss how political interference in higher ed has grown in scale and evolved over the past four years, leaping from state-level interference to full-on federal attacks, in the first of two new episodes of the podcast.

In this timely episode on political interference in higher ed, Kamola details the existence of what he calls the “Koch donor network”– a group of deeply integrated, exceptionally wealthy individuals who are committed to imposing their libertarian, anarchocapitalist worldview on the rest of us and have developed a model of social change that starts with the academy. Kamola, an associate profes­sor of political science at Trinity College in Connecticut and director of the AAUP’s newly established Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, further discusses the history and expansion of political interference in academia with Ruth, a professor and associate dean at Portland State University.

Ruth says for activist members of Congress, “higher education is their test study. We saw it move [in Congressional hearings] from presidents getting fired to faculty being offered up as sacrifice.”

Check out the podcast here.

After you listen to that episode, stay tuned for our second new pod, a deep dive into how data, educational technologies (or “EdTech”), and other technological forces are shaping and sometimes harming higher education. My guests for this episode are Martha Fay Burtis, an associate director of the Open Learning and Teaching Collaborative at Plymouth State University, and Jesse Stommel, a faculty member in the writing program at the University of Denver and cofounder of Hybrid Pedagogy: The Journal of Critical Digital Pedagogy.

In a recent article for Academe magazine, Burtis and Stommel explain how “increasingly, technology companies are treating educational institutions as conglomerations of data, reducing the human teachers, staff, and students to bits and binary. Too many of these companies are more interested in selling solutions to problems of data than they are in genuinely supporting the people represented by those data.” They further examine the reach and evolution of EdTech and discuss why it’s important to examine its role in higher ed through a critical lens.

Listen here.

We’ll have more episodes soon – be sure to subscribe on your preferred podcast platform so you’ll be updated when new episodes are released.

Thanks for listening to AAUP Presents! Next week we’ll have a special episode on the campus protests. Be sure to check it out.

Mariah Quinn, digital organizer, AAUP

Host, AAUP Presents

P.S. We’ve got a bonus episode for you in case you missed it. I recently talked to two of the organizers of the April 17 Day of Action, which saw faculty and other groups on over 100 university campuses hold coordinated counterprotest against the sustained right-wing assault on American higher education. Listen here.

Graphic showing the two new podcasts.


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Crisis on Campus!

At this point, more than 2,000 students and faculty members have been arrested, often with disturbing force. Eyewitness reports and experiences of the brutality are incredibly valuable, and the hypocrisy with which some institutions promote past history of student activism as a marketing tool while cracking down on present student activism is breathtaking. It is a moment of crisis for higher education that has been years in the making, and it is our responsibility as faculty to demand accountability even as our work protecting peaceful student activism continues. All chapters and other organizational allies are invited to sign on to our statement from earlier this week, “In Defense of the Right to Free Speech and Peaceful Protest on University Campuses.”

The AAUP has been clear that antisemitism and hate have no place on our campuses or anywhere. On many campuses, criticism of a war and the policies of governments and institutions, including criticism by Jewish students, is being conflated with antisemitism. Suppressing speech or silencing peaceful protest in the name of safety is antithetical to the mission of higher education to promote free and open expression, inquiry, and debate. Administrators who immediately called in or allowed militarized law enforcement on campus to violently break up largely peaceful demonstrations failed completely in their duty to their students and their campus communities. We applaud institutions who worked with students to ensure that demonstrations would remain peaceful and educational. We are heartened to see agreements reached at Northwestern University, Brown University, Evergreen State College, and Rutgers University, where administrations listened to student concerns about how their institutions are implicated in world events and used negotiations as a tool of education to reach agreements. All of higher education will be watching to see that the agreements are followed.

A larger issue is the shameless and inappropriate pressure on university leaders by the nation’s politicians, by the universities’ most powerful donors, and by other interest groups aiming to shape higher education to a partisan political agenda. It is astonishing how quickly we have seen institutional leaders capitulate to that pressure and abandon the principles of shared governance and academic freedom that are necessary to protect colleges from outside influence and are largely responsible for the global preeminence of American higher education. At this critical time, the primary job for any college president is to provide a full-throated and robust defense of academic freedom for faculty and for the rights of free speech and freedom of assembly for all. If fundamental freedoms are not upheld in times of stress, then these freedoms do not exist.

If your AAUP chapter or faculty group has issued a statement or taken any action on these issues, we want to know about it. Please send your chapter’s statements, letters to the editor, resolutions, and the like to us at communications@aaup.org. We will collect and amplify our chapters’ work in order to connect us with each other’s good ideas and build solidarity. In addition, if you have thoughts to share with us on what would be particularly helpful to you or to the movement at this moment, send them to me at that address.

In solidarity,
Irene Mulvey
AAUP President


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AAUP Members Pushing Back Against Anti-DEI attacks

The assault on diversity, equity, and inclusion in American higher education is dominating higher-ed news in 2024, with new attacks coming out of multiple state legislatures and university administrations. Nationwide, AAUP members are helping to lead the fight to protect equal access to higher education and the freedom to learn, teach, and conduct research. Below is a round up of recent press clips documenting these efforts.

As always, to stay up to date on all things AAUP, please follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Threads.

AAUP Top Clips:

In solidarity,

Kelly Benjamin
AAUP Media and Communications


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Decision for Faculty Tenure Rights in Tufts Medical School Case

Last week, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court issued an important decision in Wortis v. Trustees of Tufts College that recognizes academic freedom and economic security—two concepts central to the AAUP’s 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure—as “important norms in the academic community.” The case concerns Tufts University School of Medicine’s unilateral introduction of a compensation plan that required faculty to raise a portion of their salaries by obtaining external grant funding. When the plaintiff faculty members did not meet those requirements, Tufts inflicted punitive salary cuts, reductions in lab space, and reduced their employment status from full to part time. The faculty members sued, claiming that Tufts violated the terms of their tenure contracts, which included documents that incorporated language pertaining to academic freedom and economic security, taken verbatim from the AAUP’s 1940 Statement.

Reversing in part a lower court decision dismissing the professors’ breach-of-contract claims, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court wrote that “academic freedom and economic security are not hortatory concepts but important norms in the academic community.” After noting that the central contractual language at issue in the case was taken word-for-word from the 1940 Statement, the court echoed crucial points made in the AAUP’s amicus brief, explaining in particular that “academic freedom is essential to the common good” and that the purpose of tenure is to safeguard academic freedom and ensure the economic security of faculty members.

The court concluded that economic security “is an important substantive provision of the tenure contracts” between Tufts and the professors. It observed that “permanent or continuous tenure would seem to be a hollow promise if it came without any salary commitment” and that “there is a reason champagne corks pop when tenure is awarded, and economic security is one of those obvious reasons.” The court therefore reversed the lower court’s dismissal of the professors’ breach-of-contract claims concerning their salary and employment status reductions, sending those claims back to the lower court for the development of further evidence regarding the application of the economic security provision, “including the practices and customs at TUSM and other similarly situated institutions.” The court noted that the 1940 Statement is “an appropriate guide for interpreting tenure contracts” because it is evidence of customs and norms in the academic community.

The AAUP’s full brief and the court’s decision is available here.

This decision highlights the importance of AAUP principles and statements and reinforces the AAUP’s continuing fight to ensure that these principles are honored in practice.

Sincerely,

Risa Lieberwitz, AAUP General Counsel


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AAUP Files Brief Supporting Faculty Tenure Rights

This week, the AAUP filed an amicus brief in an important legal case concerning the ability of a college to terminate tenured faculty appointments due to the institution’s purported financial difficulties. Our brief continues the AAUP’s work to protect tenure and should help the court reach a decision that prevents colleges and universities from reneging on their contractual obligations to faculty members.

The AAUP filed its brief on behalf of four individuals who were tenured professors at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York. The college’s faculty handbook expressly incorporated language from the AAUP’s 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure concerning tenure and financial exigency. Among other things, the handbook stated that faculty “should have permanent or continuous tenure, and their service should be terminated only for adequate cause . . . or under extraordinary circumstances because of financial exigencies,” and that “[t]ermination of a continuous appointment because of financial exigency should be demonstrably bona fide.” In July 2020, the college notified the professors that their employment would be terminated due to expected budget deficits. It is disputed whether a genuine financial exigency existed at the college, but it is not disputed that the college, in imposing the terminations, did not fully consult with the faculty and that it did not allow for adequate input or appeal of the termination decisions. The professors sued the college for breach of contract in New York state court, but the trial judge rejected their suit, ruling that the college was not required to declare financial exigency in order to terminate them and discounting the procedures required by the 1940 Statement. The case is now on appeal in the Fourth Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court.

The AAUP’s amicus brief argues that when the college granted the professors tenure, it “bound itself as a matter of contract law to not terminating [their] service except under certain narrow circumstances recognized by the longstanding custom and practice of the academic community.” As the brief explains, AAUP statements provide authoritative guidance regarding the content of that custom and practice, and courts routinely recognize that the AAUP is a leading authority on the meaning of tenure and related principles.As the 1940 Statement and several later AAUP statements explain, a tenured faculty appointment may be terminated “under extraordinary circumstances because of a demonstrably bona fide financial exigency.” Substantively, this requires severe financial difficulties that “cannot be alleviated by less drastic means” than the termination of faculty appointments. Procedurally, faculty terminations due to financial exigency require processes that safeguard basic due process rights and that maintain respect for the principle of shared governance by ensuring meaningful participation by the faculty. At a bare minimum, the brief emphasizes, such processes “must feature meaningful involvement by the faculty in assessing whether the claimed financial exigency actually exists and whether it necessitates faculty terminations, as well as faculty participation in questions concerning the implementation of any truly necessary terminations.”

The brief urges the appellate court to recognize that close adherence to these basic substantive and procedural requirements is essential to the preservation of tenure, which in turn safeguards academic freedom and ensures that colleges are able to fulfill their purpose of furthering the common good. Leaving decisions regarding the termination of tenured faculty appointments due to “financial exigency” to the unfettered discretion of college administrations would render tenure an empty promise and would have disastrous consequences for higher education. In the case of Canisius College, the college never adequately demonstrated that its purported financial difficulties met the exacting requirements necessary to justify the plaintiffs’ termination. In addition, the college failed to respect basic procedural requirements before terminating the plaintiffs, including by failing to properly declare and demonstrate the existence of a bona fide financial exigency.

A longer summary of the case with the full brief is available here.

Please consider supporting our legal work by making a donation to the AAUP Foundation’s Legal Defense Fund. Through this fund, the Foundation supports faculty members in cases at the trial and appellate levels that implicate important legal rights, involve legal issues of national significance in higher education, and affect the careers of academics.

Sincerely,
Risa Lieberwitz, AAUP General Counsel