I Am Ashamed

Amarillo College has been on the AAUP (American Association of University Professors) list of censured institutions since 1968. All of the principals who violated an Amarillo College faculty member's due process rights in an arbitrary dismissal case are deceased. There are few faculty members at Amarillo College today with first-hand memory of the darkest moment in the College's history. Nearly 40 years later, I am ashamed to be associated with an institution that has done nothing to remove this black mark. As the president of the University of Central Arkansas says within this report: ..."I personally believe that there is a national stigma that is associated with being on the censure list," he says. "The first reaction is 'Why?' Any inquisitive, intelligent person is not going to dismiss it. Any prudent faculty member applying at a university is going to ask why." And that is what I ask:
WHY?

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July 11, 2003

Censure, Be Gone

By SCOTT SMALLWOOD

Getting blacklisted by the American Association of University
Professors does not usually make college presidents quake in their boots -- at least not publicly.

Professors would love it if a censure imposed by the nation's leading faculty group prompted immediate change. But college presidents are more likely to call the association biased and misguided. They complain that the association doesn't really
have the right to be investigating and censuring anybody.

When Savannah College of Art and Design was censured in 1993, administrators said the "AAUP is out of the mainstream of modern American thought." Five years later, when Brigham Young University was censured, a spokesman complained that the group had "a history of antipathy toward religious colleges."

Then, last year, in comments that were blunt even for a college president whose institution was about to be put on the blacklist, George Kidd Jr., of Tiffin University, said the censure was meaningless. The AAUP is "a very old-fashioned group that is still dealing with a 1940 book of rules," said Mr. Kidd, who retired shortly afterward after 21 years as president. "Education has moved beyond the AAUP in spite of
their desire to prevent progress."

So forgive the professors at the University of Central Arkansas for being a bit surprised when their new president last year said his absolute first priority was to get the institution off the censure list. For Lu Hardin, a former state senator and previously a tenured professor at Arkansas Tech University, the censure was far from meaningless.

"I personally believe that there is a national stigma that is associated with being on the censure list," he says. "The first reaction is 'Why?' Any inquisitive, intelligent person is not going to dismiss it. Any prudent faculty member applying at a university is going to ask why."

Now, after just a year with Mr. Hardin in charge, and just three years after the censure was imposed, the AAUP can't stop praising Central Arkansas, calling the new faculty handbook a model. And at its annual meeting last month, the association removed the institution from the list of academic bad boys.

No Advisory Role

The trouble began back in the late 1980s, professors at Central Arkansas say. That's when Winfred L. Thompson took over as president.

Rebecca Williams, an English professor who has taught at the university since 1975, says that the faculty's influence waned under Mr. Thompson. Professors had less say on promotion decisions and on changes like the consolidation of departments, she says.

In 1994, Mr. Thompson lost a vote of confidence by the faculty, but it didn't faze him. According to one professor, the president often said he cared about only four votes -- the four that constitute the majority of the seven-member Board of
Trustees. "If faculty didn't agree with the administration, they were ignored," says Mike Schaefer, an English professor and former president of the Faculty Senate. "We had lost our advisory role."

Clint Johnson, an economics professor and member of the local AAUP chapter, says Mr. Thompson "approached the university from a lawyer's perspective, essentially an adversarial perspective." During his 14 years at the helm, Mr. Thompson never upheld a faculty grievance committee decision, according to Mr. Johnson.

The former president, who is now the chancellor of American University of Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates, did not respond to requests for an interview.

Despite all the criticism, Mr. Thompson did have a positive effect on the university in some ways, say faculty members. Mr. Johnson, for instance, praises the improvement of the music and art programs, as well as the former president's
aesthetic eye. "The campus looks great," he says. But Mr. Thompson's relationships with the faculty members fell apart.

Frustrations came to a head in 1998. That's when Mr. Thompson proposed a system in which he would give new faculty members the ability to choose a tenure-track job or a higher salary without tenure. While the plan earned national attention for being innovative, faculty members derided it as an attempt to
destroy tenure.

That same year, the university fired a tenured English professor for his disruptive behavior, including growling and spitting at colleagues. The AAUP investigated that case after concerns about due process were raised. The association also
investigated the case of a professor who had been denied tenure but was kept on in a different position. The association found that one underlying element in the decision of her tenure committee was how many other tenured professors
were in her department -- a motivation that violates an AAUP guideline.

Finally, the association examined the cases of two lecturers who, after eight years at the university, were told they would not be hired for a ninth year.

The investigation led to the university's being placed on the censure list in 2000. The association censures colleges where it believes "conditions for academic freedom and tenure are unsatisfactory." Nearly 200 institutions have been censured by
the association since 1930, and 49 are on the list now. The names of the censured institutions are published regularly in the AAUP's magazine, Academe, and several academic associations mention that a college has been censured when advertising job openings.

"We were pleased that there was going to be a kind of national spotlight on the problems," says Mr. Schaefer. "Obviously you don't want to be censured, but I thought it was helpful that outside people recognized that we had problems here."

However, members of the Board of Trustees, like scores of leaders of blacklisted colleges in the past, dismissed the censure as unimportant. One said the board would "pretty much ignore it." Another called it "a nonevent." And Mr. Thompson
was defiant: "The university's policies, practices, and procedures will not be dictated by the AAUP."

'A Model Case'

While Mr. Thompson may have cared little about the censure, it did get the attention of Lu Hardin, who was then the state's director of higher education. He told a newspaper reporter at the time: "Obviously, I have respect for the AAUP, and you
take any vote like this seriously. The only measure of the effect any vote like this ever has is does it deter faculty from coming."

Two years later, Mr. Hardin got the chance to do something about it when he was appointed president of Central Arkansas following Mr. Thompson's retirement. Throughout the interviews and then when he arrived on the campus in September 2002, he emphasized five goals. The first one was to get off the censure list. Nine months later, he sounds like a spokesman for the AAUP.

"Academic freedom is still one of the most important tenets of a university," he says. "Academic freedom and due process are what we're about. If free speech and due process do not exist without qualification on a university campus, then where do they exist?"

Faculty members and administrators agree that Mr. Hardin deserves much of the credit for improving the relationship with the faculty and getting off the AAUP's blacklist.

"He had his hands outstretched," says A. Gabriel Estaban, the provost. "He's been very open with the faculty, and the faculty have a better sense now that the administration is willing to listen, not just pay lip service."

Immediately after Mr. Hardin took office, a faculty committee -- composed of three members appointed by the Faculty Senate and three from the AAUP chapter -- began meeting with the president and other administrators to discuss the policy
changes that needed to be made.

First, the individual cases that the AAUP was investigating had to be resolved. The fired professor had already settled his lawsuit against the university. The professor denied tenure in 1998 was granted tenure. And the two instructors who
had not been hired were given financial compensation.

But more daunting, the president says, was fixing what he called "an ambiguous and outdated faculty handbook."

The committee and administrators, including the university's general counsel, met every other week for most of the academic year. In the end, they created a handbook -- which publicly states the university's policies toward its faculty -- that
they say greatly strengthens the protections for non-tenure-track faculty members. That group, 160 professors, had grown in recent years, but they had few due-process rights. After seven years of service, they get many of the
same protections that tenured faculty members enjoy. "They can't be fired at will anymore," says Mr. Schaefer.

The university also changed the makeup of the faculty grievance committees. Mr. Thompson had appointed equal numbers of professors and administrators. They are now entirely composed of faculty members again. The controversial program
that gave higher salaries in lieu of tenure -- which very few people ever chose -- has been scrapped. And faculty committees have been established to examine gender equity and equipment needs.

The changes came so quickly that even the AAUP seems stunned. "We consider this a model case," says Jane Buck, the association's president. "This is one of the most dramatic examples that we've seen of a president doing the right thing. ... He has changed that campus from one where almost everything was done wrong to one where everything is done right."

Better Morale

While the changes in the handbook are important, faculty members also point to the much improved morale that has made coming to work enjoyable again.

"The environment is simply different," says Ms. Williams. She was on the faculty committee that worked on the new handbook and was involved in hammering out most of the actual wording with the university's lawyer. "There's a breath of fresh air now. It's been a long time since the faculty could say there has been good faith."

The morale is so much better at Central Arkansas that the local AAUP chapter recently asked the administration if it could help organize a party to celebrate the removal of censure. The two sides plan to hold a special reception in the
fall, when Mr. Hardin gives his annual address to the faculty.

Mr. Hardin says improving the relationship with the faculty will help the university reach other goals, including getting support from the legislature and raising private donations, because even outsiders can sense the changes. Most important,
he says, may be the precedent that has been established. "Long after I'm gone and the faculty members are gone," he says, "we will have a model for the succeeding presidents and faculty members."

Ultimately, most of the colleges placed on the blacklist will still play down the significance, claiming that the AAUP is a bunch of outsiders. At Central Arkansas, though, shame was a powerful motivator. Mr. Hardin says, "I didn't want to be a president of a university on censure."

Copyright 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
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