A primary role of an AAUP advocacy chapter is to work for the incorporation of AAUP standards on academic freedom, tenure, and governance into the institution’s faculty handbook. Which of these standards should a chapter focus on and how are they best understood?
We invite you to find out in a webinar just for AAUP chapter leaders. AAUP senior program officer Greg Scholtz will speak from his past experience as a chapter activist and from his most recent experience, since 2008, handling complaints and cases as a member of the AAUP’s Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance.  
Register here for Basics of AAUP Principles & Policies
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 27, 2021 • 3:00 PM • EASTERN STANDARD TIME
We'll be offering two more webinars for advocacy chapter leaders in upcoming months and will send more details and registration information as they get closer.
Advocacy Chapter Management: A Practical Guide, with AAUP associate counsel Nancy Long and director of organizing and services Christopher Simeone. Whether you are just forming an AAUP chapter or you are part of an established one, this session will give you the practical tools you need to manage an effective organization. We’ll review some of key areas of chapter management, from chapter by-laws and finances to officer roles and establishing chapter programs, in addition to answering questions from participants.

Dear Colleague:
This has been a year of unprecedented challenges for higher education. 
The AAUP Foundation—especially its Academic Freedom Fund—needs your support.
As we look toward 2021 with hope for relief, we must remain vigilant about protecting academic freedom and shared governance. Too many administrations and governing boards have used the COVID-19 crisis as an excuse to take unilateral actions that jeopardize public health, the educational mission of colleges and universities, and the economic security of academic professionals. Your tax-deductible contribution to the AAUP Foundation will provide essential funding for the AAUP’s work on behalf of faculty, including many faculty members who have lost their positions during the past year and those who remain vulnerable. 
The AAUP Foundation is funding a sweeping governance investigation that will address the crisis in academic governance that has occurred in the wake of the pandemic. The investigation, currently focusing on eight institutions, comes at a time when the AAUP’s Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance has received numerous complaints about unilateral actions taken, in the words of the department’s director, Gregory Scholtz, “to dictate how courses are taught, to suspend key institutional regulations, to reduce and close departments and majors, to compel faculty members to teach in person, and to lay off long-serving faculty members.” It is the broadest investigation the AAUP has conducted since its 1956 report on attacks on academic freedom at eighteen institutions during the McCarthy era.
Your contribution of any amount will help to sustain the Foundation’s work.
As the charitable and educational arm of the AAUP, the Foundation enables work that membership dues alone cannot fund. The Foundation's Legal Defense Fund supports faculty members involved in appellate litigation that protects academic freedom and professional rights. It also provides funding for the AAUP’s work on amicus briefs in cases with important implications for higher education. The Academic Freedom Fund supports both governance and academic freedom investigations and underwrites publication costs for the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom and for materials related to academic freedom in Academe and the annual Bulletin. It also provides grants to individual faculty members whose academic freedom has been violated.  
If the AAUP Foundation is to continue its important work, we must expand its efforts and strengthen its urgently needed financial resources. Please donate today.
You can also remember the AAUP Foundation in your will and leave a legacy to protect academic freedom in the future. For more information about the Foundation, and about giving options, visit our website.

Henry Reichman
Chair, AAUP Foundation

What’s New with Academe? (the magazine of the AAUP)

December's newsletter offers a preview of selected articles and book reviews from our forthcoming winter issue. Follow the links below or visit https://www.aaup.org/academe to read other highlights from Academe and the Academe Blog.

FEATURES
Do Adjuncts Have Academic Freedom? or Why Tenure Matters
The costs of contingency.
By Henry Reichman
Now What? Adding Accessibility Midstream
Accommodations in the online classroom.
By Martina Svyantek, Scott D. Dexter, and Ashley Shew

BOOK REVIEWS
Diverse Women as Guests in the Academic House
Caroline Sotello Viernes Turner reviews Presumed Incompetent II: Race, Class, Power, and Resistance of Women in Academia edited by Yolanda Flores Niemann, Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, and Carmen G. Gonzalez.
Challenging Merit from a Place of Privilege
Mitchell L. Stevens reviews The Merit Myth: How Our Colleges Favor the Rich and Divide America by Anthony P. Carnevale, Peter Schmidt, and Jeff Strohl.

FROM THE ARCHIVES
Chronic Illness and the Academic Career
The hidden epidemic in higher education.
By Stephanie A. Goodwin and Susanne Morgan

FROM THE BLOG
A Telling Blame Game at UNC
By Jay M. Smith
Another Pandemic Danger—Union Busting
By a Saint Leo University Faculty Member
Blog Survey Seeks Reader Feedback
By Academe Blog
Perspective: Retrenchment Has Been Suffocating My Voice, But I Won’t Let It
By Gretchen McNamara
University of Toronto Facing Censure Over Hiring Scandal
By David Robinson
Administrative Crackdowns on “Appropriate” Faculty Expression during the Pandemic
By Cathryn Bailey
Perspectives and Decisions in a COVID-19 World
By Dane C. Joseph
What Have We Learned? Lessons from the Last Decade
Posted by Jennifer Ruth

For its next volume, scheduled for publication in fall 2021, the Journal of Academic Freedom will consider any original article on the topic of academic freedom, but we are especially interested in the following topics:

• Academic Freedom and Freedom Struggles
  
• Sanctuary Campuses
  
• Pedagogy and Affect
  
• The Material Means of Mental Production
  
• Libraries and Librarians
  
• Internationalist Practices
  

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Electronic submissions of 2,000–8,000 words should be sent to jaf@aaup.org by February 8, 2021, and they must include an abstract of about 150 words and a short biographical note of one to two sentences about the author(s). Authors using pseudonyms must notify the journal at the time of submission, disclose their real names, and explain their reasons for wishing to keep their identities confidential. Please read our editorial policy and the complete call for papers at https://www.aaup.org/about-jaf prior to submitting. We welcome submissions by any and all faculty, staff, graduate students, and independent scholars. If you have any questions, contact faculty editors Rachel Ida Buff at rbuff@uwm.edu or S. Ani Mukherji at mukherji@hws.edu (please do not send submissions to these addresses).

Please visit the AAUP website, where a PDF of the Journal of Academic Freedom call for papers is available for download. We look forward to reading your submissions!

Rachel Ida Buff and S. Ani Mukherji
Faculty Coeditors, Journal of Academic Freedom

Budget cuts, the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing contingency among academic workers—the threats to academic freedom, shared governance, and quality higher education are many. While there are no easy solutions, an AAUP chapter can accomplish a surprising number of things that even the most committed faculty member can’t do alone. Join us for a webinar on how to start an AAUP chapter. 

If you are an AAUP member on a campus without an active chapter, or a potential member interested in what an AAUP chapter can do on your campus, this webinar is for you. You'll learn how to form an AAUP chapter and how a chapter can help you change the status quo. From drafting bylaws to organizing your colleagues to fight for shared governance and better working conditions, we will give you the tools and knowledge you need to start an AAUP chapter at your institution.

Time: Wednesday, November 18, 2020 • 3:30 PM Eastern time

Presenters: Michael Magee is an organizer with the national AAUP. Bethany Letiecq is president of the George Mason AAUP chapter.

Register here: https://actionnetwork.org/events/how-and-why-to-start-an-aaup-chapter
​

"We are pleased to announce the publication of volume 11 of the AAUP's Journal of Academic Freedom. The journal features scholarship on academic freedom and on its relation to shared governance, tenure, and collective bargaining. This year's volume considers the opposing visions of the governed campus and the "managed campus." As the introduction to the volume argues, "in its extreme manifestation, the managed campus is a graveyard for academic freedom. And when the faculty role in decision-making is undermined, it may well lead to the early graves of faculty, staff, and students forced to return to campus without adequate protections."
The volume’s nine essays and a PowerPoint afterword address a wide range of topics, including broad analyses of managerial practices; discussions of their impact on specific populations such as international, first-generation, and low-income students; and case studies that chronicle past and present work to assert the importance of shared governance and that examine threats to, or blatant disregard for, the faculty role in decision-making. While contributors represent a wide range of academic fields, one noteworthy contributor is an adorable stuffed-bear "brand ambassador." Access the complete volume at https://www.aaup.org/JAF11.
We are also excited to share a new call for papers, “Practices of Academic Freedom in Times of Austerity," for the twelfth volume of the journal, scheduled for publication in fall 2021. 
—Rachel Ida Buff, Faculty Editor
The Journal of Academic Freedom is supported by funding from the AAUP Foundation.

We are heading into a new academic year in turbulent times. The coronavirus global pandemic has drastically altered our lives, our jobs, and the lives of our students and our staff colleagues, with no end in sight. The murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, among others, and now Jacob Blake fighting for his life in Wisconsin, have put systemic institutionalized racism in the United States into stark relief.
If you're not a member already, will you join us in mobilizing to ensure that higher education is a public good available to all in this country? In the past few weeks, we have seen a number of colleges and universities move ahead with reopening in person for the fall semester. Rather than relying on scientific expertise regarding the pandemic and the likelihood of transmission in a residential campus environment and its surrounding community, administrations and boards of trustees have engaged in magical thinking. Few institutions appear to be doing enough testing, and, somehow, they expect all students to follow strict rules at all times. Reopening decisions are being driven by the bottom line instead of the health and safety of students, faculty, staff, and all campus workers.
The outcomes from these decisions and the lack of planning behind these decisions was predictable: a spike in cases on campus; the difficulty in feeding and housing students who must quarantine; the deficiency in mitigating risks for others due to a lack of testing and robust contact tracing; and a hasty retreat to remote learning, sending potentially infected students back to their families and communities. For most administrations and boards, the top priority is the bottom line. They continue to embrace the corporate model and to further a decades-long assault on higher education as a common good.
Disturbing instances of blatant police violence against and harassment of Black people, including on our campuses, continues. Just within the last few weeks, a Black faculty member at Santa Clara University reported that campus police knocked on her door and demanded proof that she lives in her own house, after harassing her brother as he worked on a laptop outside.
The problems we face are serious and will not be easily resolved. Some good news is that faculty are mobilizing across ranks and with other academic workers and students to forward antiracist activism and to ensure that hastily implemented austerity measures do not become the new normal. Here are just a few examples of faculty activism that are making me optimistic this Labor Day:

• After a long, intensive campaign by a broad coalition of faculty, students, staff, and alumni at Portland State University, the administration has agreed to disarm campus police.
  
• The national AAUP has convened a working group to draft a report on the role of police on campus, including whether it is appropriate for institutions of higher education to have their own police forces; how systemic racism affects campus policing; changes needed to ensure that campuses are safe and welcoming for diverse peoples, especially Black, indigenous and other peoples of color; and how AAUP chapters and members can best work in solidarity with student groups, community social justice organizations, and unions on this issue.
  
• Our faculty union at Rutgers University has been working closely with a coalition of other campus unions to center racial justice and to ensure health and safety and to negotiate with the administration on proposed cuts. “This is not something that naturally occurred,” one chapter leader told the Chronicle of Higher Education. “It’s a big investment and big strategic change to decide to build power together.”
  
• The George Mason University AAUP chapter brought to light the fact that several Virginia universities entered into no-bid contracts with a company to provide students with COVID-19 tests that are not approved for that use.
  
• New memberships in the AAUP are up this summer, signaling a new wave of campus activism. At our August meeting, the AAUP Council authorized charters for twenty-five new or reactivated AAUP chapters. Will your campus be next?
  

This Labor Day, I ask you to join me and other AAUP members in recommitting to doing the hard work of ensuring that higher education is a public good available to all in this country. You can share our Labor Day graphic to help spread the message that solidarity will see us through.


In solidarity,
Irene Mulvey
AAUP President
P.S. And remember to check out the resources and information on our racial justice and coronavirus pages.

Summer 2020 | Vol. 106, No. 3 
The Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors is published annually as the summer issue of Academe. This year's Bulletin features an academic freedom and tenure investigative report, a statement in defense of knowledge and higher education, and a research report on the adoption of AAUP policies in faculty handbooks and collective bargaining agreements.
Follow the links in this email below or read the whole issue at https://www.aaup.org/issue/summer-2020-bulletin.

ACADEMIC FREEDOM AND TENURE INVESTIGATIVE REPORT
Pacific Lutheran University (Washington)

POLICY DOCUMENTS
In Defense of Knowledge and Higher Education
Association Procedures in Academic Freedom and Tenure Cases
Standards for Investigations in the Area of College and University Governance

RESEARCH REPORTS
Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2019–20
Policies on Academic Freedom, Dismissal for Cause, Financial Exigency, and Program Discontinuance

ANNUAL REPORTS AND OTHER BUSINESS
Report of Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, 2019–20
Report of the Committee on College and University Governance, 2019–20
2020 Biennial Meeting Postponed
AAUP Officers and Council, 2019–20
Officers and Committees of the AAUP-CBC, 2019
Board of Directors and Committees of the AAUP Foundation, 2019–20
Committees of the AAUP, 2019–20
 

As we head into August, we have election results, new research, and a chance to take action on behalf of the members at Akron-AAUP. More below.

Officer and Council Election Results
In a mail ballot election, AAUP chapter and section delegates elected Irene Mulvey of Fairfield University as the new president of the 105-year-old faculty-led organization. Paul Davis of Cincinnati State Technical and Community College was elected as vice president, and Christopher Sinclair of the University of Oregon was elected as secretary-treasurer. Chapter and section delegates also elected Nivedita Majumdar and Glinda Rawls as at-large Council members.
Watch the 2020 AAUP officer and Council candidate campaign speeches here.

Report on Prevalence of AAUP Policies 
The AAUP released a new research report, Policies on Academic Freedom, Dismissal for Cause, Financial Exigency, and Program Discontinuance, that examines the prevalence of AAUP-supported policies in faculty handbooks and collective bargaining agreements at four-year institutions that have a tenure system. The report can be found here: https://www.aaup.org/news/report-prevalence-aaup-policies.

Database Transition 
The AAUP is launching a series of upgrades to our online systems between Friday, July 31, and Monday, August 3. During this time, you will be unable to log in to your account to access member-only content on our website (all other content will be available). Notices about the changeover will also be posted on our website.
The changes are happening because the AAUP is moving to a new member database. All members will receive an email tomorrow about the changeover and another email Monday, August 3, with log-in credentials. At a later date our membership department will be in touch with chapter leaders to discuss how you will interact with our newly updated database system. Stay tuned.

Stand with Akron-AAUP 
The Akron-AAUP needs our help. On July 15, the University of Akron Board of Trustees, at the recommendation of President Gary Miller, terminated 97 full-time faculty positions, 96 of which were part of the Akron-AAUP bargaining unit, and 70 of which were tenured professors. The chapter has launched a letter-writing campaign to the trustees and president telling them to rescind the decision or resign their positions. 
The administration reopened the collective bargaining agreement with the faculty union by invoking the "force majeure" section of the contract. Akron-AAUP has contested the use of force majeure. They also have presented the administration with various alternatives to eliminating these positions, such as reductions in administrative salaries and reforming athletics expenditures. However, the administration rejected such proposals outright.
Send a letter here.

Summer Institute Online 
Our Summer Institute Online webinar series began on July 7 and will continue through August 4, with at least two webinars each week. The 90-minute sessions covered a wide range of topics, from fighting efforts to sideline faculty governance to supporting student protests to pushing back against austerity budgets. There were also two opportunities for attendees to share the challenges they’ve faced and the successes they’ve had in shared governance and organizing in small-group discussions.
The closing plenary on August 4 from 1:00 to 2:30 pm EDT, “Rebuilding Higher Education as a Common Good,” will discuss a vision of various paths forward for higher education: “The COVID-19 pandemic, the looming depression, and the national uprising against systemic racism have shown us that reform in higher education is needed now more than ever. How can we rebuild higher education around the pillars of equity, affordability, and quality? How can we better realize the role of our system of higher education in sustaining democratic society?”
The panelists are: 

• Momin Rahman, Cochair of the Equity Committee for the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT)
• Christopher Newfield, University of California, Santa Barbara faculty and author of The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them
• Annelise Orleck, Copresident of Dartmouth College AAUP
• Todd Wolfson, President of Rutgers University AAUP-AFT
• Moderator: Julie Schmid, Executive Director of the AAUP

Click here to sign up.

AAUP Opposes Exclusion of International Students
The AAUP issued a statement on July 13 about the Department of Homeland Security’s July 6 ruling regarding international students and the upcoming academic year. The statement called on the Trump administration “to allow all international students to obtain or retain visas to continue their education at US institutions, regardless of whether they participate remotely, in person, or through a hybrid model and regardless of whether they are studying inside or outside the United States, during this unprecedented global health crisis.” 
On July 13, the AAUP joined an amicus brief in support of a legal challenge filed by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to prevent DHS’s July 6 directive, which rescinds a prior COVID-19 exemption for international students participating in online education, from taking effect so that thousands of international students can continue to participate in educational opportunities in the United States, even if their course of study is online. Even though DHS agreed to withdraw their July 6 directive, ICE has now issued guidance excluding new international students from entering the US to participate in remote learning at US institutions. AAUP joined 45 other higher education associations, and signed on to a letter last week to Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf seeking assurances that all students with a valid visa will be allowed to enter the country in time for the fall semester.

AAUP Signs on to Rulemaking Petitions 
The AAUP signed onto two petitions to renew as part of the US Copyright Office rulemaking, the process of renewing and/or seeking modification to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The first, a petition by the UCI Intellectual Property, Arts, and Technology Clinic, University of California, Irvine School of Law seeks renewal of the expanded exemption for multimedia e-books which would permit authors of multimedia e-books to circumvent the Content Scramble System on DVDs, the Advanced Access Content System on Blu-ray discs, and encryption and authentication protocols on digitally transmitted video in order to make fair use of motion picture content in multimedia e-books, not just for film criticism.
The second, a petition by the American University Washington College of Law, on behalf of Peter Decherney, professor of cinema studies and English at the University of Pennsylvania, et al. seeks renewal of the exemption for audiovisual works (including excerpts from motion pictures, television programs, music videos, and video games) embodied in physical media (such as DVDs protected by the Content Scramble System) and Blu-ray Discs (protected by the Advanced Access Content System) or TPM-protected online distribution services or streaming media, where the circumvention is accomplished by college and university students or faculty (including teaching and research assistants) for the purpose of criticism or comment.

https://academeblog.org/2020/07/23/anti-faculty-coup-at-national-university
BY ALARMED FACULTY MEMBERS AT NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

This spring and summer of COVID has witnessed a perhaps unprecedented assault on faculty rights, as institution after institution, claiming some sort of exigency, have laid off both contingent and tenured faculty members, restructured programs, and short-circuited established institutions of shared governance.  In many cases the challenges are indeed extraordinary.  But, as the AAUP has noted, “too often administrations invoke broader fiscal collapse as a justification for implementing, without meaningful faculty participation in the decision-making process, a variety of measures that undermine the mission of the institution and threaten the working conditions of faculty, academic professionals, graduate employees, and other campus staff.”  One of the most alarming such cases is at National University in San Diego, California.  There, in a breathtaking series of moves, the administration and board have almost overnight not only reversed years of shared governance experience, but virtually eviscerated the faculty’s power over the curriculum and eroded, if not destroyed, its academic freedom.  National University is not claiming any negative financial impact from the COVID crisis but is nevertheless using the emergency situation created by the crisis to institute the sweeping changes outlined below.  This report from faculty activists at National University is posted anonymously out of fear of retaliation.  

In October 2019, National University (NU) announced that it received a gift of $350 million from T. Denny Sanford. These funds, the University’s administration declared in an article published by the Associated Press, would help the university to better fulfill its mission of expanding access to higher education for adult learners. In February 2020, the University received a 10-year reaccreditation by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, though with warnings about the nature of its governing board structures and its approach to “change management.”

Nevertheless, in the following months, the University has undertaken a series of sudden unilateral moves to cut staff, faculty, and programs; cancel all full-time faculty contracts; and dismantle all existing shared governance structures. The stated justifications for these moves have included a need for greater “nimbleness” in responding to a changing higher education landscape, a need for more efficiency, a desire to reduce tuition costs for students, and (of course) the COVID-19 crisis. It is important to point out that throughout its 50-year history NU has been an extraordinarily “nimble” institution. It has responded to changing conditions by targeting the needs of a diverse adult population offering one course at a time, adopting distance learning in the late 1990s, updating delivery modes with each generation of new technology, innovating in andragogy [the method and practice of teaching adult learners], synchronous and asynchronous delivery, virtual labs, systematic assessment of learning outcomes, building outstanding digital library services, and integrating a dedicated team of part-time faculty. All this was accomplished through a fertile partnership between a full-time and part-time faculty and administration and staff, rendering the excuses for current moves given by administration spurious.
In March, the Chancellor of the National University System, an affiliation of the flagship non-profit National University and several recently-acquired non-traditional institutions, announced that a number of university functions, including student enrollment, information technology, marketing, and the library, would be consolidated with other affiliates. Most of these would be outsourced to National Education Partners, a for-profit entity now-owned by the National University System and run by a former member of the National University Board of Trustees (the University’s Board and the System Board are essentially identical). No faculty were consulted or informed ahead of time of these plans.

Beginning in April, the University also accelerated the cancellation of roughly a third of its academic programs, using a process that bypassed the review and approval processes established in the Faculty- and Board-approved Faculty Policies. Cancellation of a program was one of the grounds under the Faculty Policies for terminating faculty positions, as was faculty “fit” with a reorganized University.

In a series of letters sent to faculty in May, National University President David Andrews announced an imminent “rightsizing” of the full-time faculty (the full-time student to faculty ratio already numbered in the several hundred to one prior to this change). No data was given to define rightsizing. He also announced the cancellation of all existing faculty contracts. Faculty at National University worked without tenure but, in amendments to the Faculty Policies, they had secured long-term contracts of up to ten years based on rank and a reappointment system that operated on a shared governance model. After dozens of faculty took early retirement offers following announcements of these upcoming changes, over 40 additional full-time faculty were summarily terminated without following the criteria or procedures outlined in the Faculty Policies. The effect was a roughly 20% reduction in full time faculty positions. One department alone has lost ten of its thirty-two full time faculty over two years while enrollments are growing significantly.

On May 22, the President announced that all remaining faculty contracts, along with the Faculty Policies and the Faculty Senate, would cease to be honored by the administration as of July 1, when new contracts would come into effect. On June 15, an “Interim Faculty Handbook” was issued. It contained no terms of appointment; no processes for reappointment, promotion or raises; no standards of performance; no mention of academic freedom. It contained no provision for elected faculty governance bodies, including the Faculty Senate and Graduate and Undergraduate Councils, which had overseen faculty work and welfare and curriculum at NU for over twenty-five years. Instead, the Handbook created a University Senate made up of five top administrators and five faculty appointed by the administration to operate as a new shared governance body. A similarly appointed Academic Affairs Committee would oversee the drafting of a permanent Faculty Handbook and become the university-wide curriculum committee, replacing the faculty-elected Graduate and Undergraduate Councils. What it did contain is alarming. In one section it seeks to define a new job description for university professor, relegating the historical role of scholar/teacher to that of providing content and delegating course design and teaching approach to centralized instructional designers not qualified in the field. The document states,
Academic programs will be jointly administered by a program director (full time faculty member) and an andragogy lead (staff or faculty member with appropriate expertise in andragogy, instructional design, and student support). The Program Lead and Subject Matter Experts (full-time faculty) will have authority over program learning outcomes, course learning outcomes, and student learning outcomes. Subject Matter Experts will have the responsibility for assuring program learning outcomes, course learning outcomes, and student learning outcomes are aligned with workforce relevance. Andragogy leads and instructional experts will oversee the design of learning experiences and instructional delivery. The instructor of record for each course will be assigned after the course design and delivery mechanisms have been established.

President Andrews has repeatedly assured the University community that the institution is in sound financial health, and this is undoubtedly true. Even prior to the Sanford gift, the University held over $650 million dollars in reserves (until recently called a “quasi-endowment”) and had total assets of over $1 billion. This financial strength has been taken advantage of by the System: in 2018, the System used the National University reserves as collateral to purchase the for-profit Northcentral University, most of which it converted to a non-profit entity and part of which it converted to the for-profit National Education Partners. In April, National University also received $2.28 million in CARES Act stimulus funds.

While many universities in the U.S. may suffer a decline in enrollments in the upcoming months, this was never a likely scenario at National University. Over 70% of NU courses were held online before the onset of the coronavirus—in-person classes being held in the month of March across California were transitioned to the online format with only administrative adjustments, without a need for redesign or new trainings. In his April communication, the President noted, “We were very fortunate to have extensive experience in distributed work and online learning…. Early indicators suggest we are successfully continuing our core functions with little disruption to students. Students are applying and enrolling, taking courses, and making progress toward degrees and credentials.” In a video message to the faculty on July 10, 2020, the President said, “we are financially strong.” Because it offers classes on a flexible schedule at a reasonable price, NU has historically seen enrollment growth in periods of economic decline. Enrollments at NU are up 20-30% year-over-year. Yet, instead of continuing in a prosperous direction that provided programmatic options and faculty-driven curriculum, the University has moved to a for-profit and precision learning model, while terminating dozens of faculty, rewriting the contracts of those who remain, and abolishing a long-established system of shared governance.

Faculty have been taken by surprise by these attacks. But we have responded and organized. The Faculty Senate, in one of its final actions of the academic year, voted to send a complaint to the regional accreditor, WSCUC. The Faculty Senate conducted new elections and has refused to dissolve as an advisory body that represents the faculty voice at NU. Membership of the NU AAUP advocacy chapter has grown so rapidly that the chapter’s letter to the President garnered a defensive response from the administration that was sent to all faculty.

We believe the actions taken at NU are dangerous on two levels. At the organizational level there are already indications that the changes proposed have created a highly toxic level of uncertainty and demoralization. The institution is already in chaos as contradictions, bad decision, confusion and anxiety mount. Top-down decisions that violate long-established principles of good academic practice undermine the capacity of the institution to serve its students and employees. These moves should be resisted to avoid more systemic damage on a global societal level. The changes being attempted at NU are aimed at redefining the role of the university and deconstructing the professional role of scholars and other knowledge creators. It delegitimizes academic culture which seeks new knowledge and the advancement of society and the public welfare and promotes a commercial culture model aimed at mass production of trained workers as cheaply and profitably as possible. Though NU has until now combined both goals, holding as a core value that opportunities for personal development should not be limited to those who can afford more elite schools, recent and planned moves by administration with no input from faculty at more than window-dressing level make it clear that the academic values held by a committed professional faculty are no longer central to its mission.

We wanted to make public this faculty protest of the actions of the administration and Board of Trustees. Given the recent mass layoffs at NU, the abrogation of our previous long-term, and the lack of a tenure system, we are
​
Alarmed Faculty Members at NU (names not provided out of fear of retaliation)