AAUP@FHSU

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A Strike, Investigations, and a Fight for Quality Teaching

Greetings!

AAUP members make higher ed work, and as many campuses approach the end of the spring term, we wanted to take a moment to highlight what a strong year it has been so far.

Here’s a video highlighting our work. Click to watch it on YouTube.

The Year So Far AAUP video

Want to share the video on Facebook? Here’s the link.

A few quick highlights:

Faculty fought to protect quality teaching over corporate profit, making gains against privatization efforts at Purdue, Eastern Michigan, and George Mason Universities.

In Ohio, the Wright State AAUP chapter won a hard-fought contract after a 20-day strike, maintaining solidarity in the face of enormous pressure. Full-time faculty and graduate employees at Rutgers settled a historic contract last month, winning significant gains just ahead of a planned strike. As of this writing, the chapter representing part-time faculty at Rutgers is still fighting for a fair contract.

The AAUP/AFT chapter at the University of Illinois-Chicago has tentatively agreed to a new contract with pay raises, increased minimum salaries, and more job protections for non-tenure-track faculty, after a year of hard-fought bargaining.

We investigated violations of academic freedom at Nunez Community College, where the dismissal of a professor who disagreed with the administration over an accreditation report was likely retaliatory, violating his academic freedom. We also released an investigative report examining how partisan ideology and political ambition motivated drastic changes by the board to institutional decision-making processes at Maricopa Community Colleges.

The thread uniting all this work? AAUP members like you. We hope to see many of you at the Annual Conference and the Summer Institute! Thank you for being a member of the AAUP.

To a solidarity-filled summer!

The AAUP


Report Finds Partisan Ideology and Political Ambition Motivated Changes at Maricopa

An AAUP investigation released today finds that the governing board of the Maricopa Community Colleges was motivated by a desire to bust the faculty union when it decided in February 2018 to repeal the entire faculty manual, restrict the faculty’s participation in institutional decision making, and terminate a “meet-and-confer” process. That process had been used for more than forty years to establish institutional policies related to faculty matters and to make recommendations on salary and budgets.

The board also eliminated the role of the only district-level representative faculty governance body. This also served as the governing body of the faculty association, an organization that was incorporated as a union, but which did not have collective-bargaining rights under state law. In short, the board’s actions destroyed what had been an effective system of shared governance.

Our investigating committee—Bethany Carson of Santa Fe Community College, Emily M.S. Houh of the University of Cincinnati, and I—found that the governing board acted in disregard of normative standards of academic governance, as laid out in the Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, which was jointly formulated by the AAUP, the American Council on Education, and the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges.

We also found evidence, based on correspondence obtained through open records requests, which strongly suggests that the board’s intervention was an engineered performance of political theater motivated by the partisan ideology of two former Republican members of the Arizona House of Representatives—one who served as chair of the board and the other as a member.

Join me for a Facebook Live discussion of the report tomorrow at 12 ET. RSVP here.

AAUP investigating committees are appointed in a few select cases annually in which severe departures from widely accepted principles and standards of academic freedom, tenure, or governance have been alleged and persist despite efforts to resolve them. Governance investigations are an important tool in our work to protect and advance the faculty’s voice in decision making; they shine a light on egregious practices and are intended to motivate institutions to improve these practices.

In this case, improvements came quickly. Not long after the visit of the investigating committee, three new members were elected to the Maricopa governing board and the existing board president announced his resignation. After the AAUP shared our findings with the administration, the board passed a proposal that rescinded the earlier changes and will eventually restore many of the shared governance mechanisms that the old board had terminated.

You can read the full report here.

Best,
Irene Mulvey,
Chair of the Investigating Committee,
Professor of Mathematics, Fairfield University

P.S.–You can support governance and academic freedom investigations by donating to the AAUP Foundation today.