Last week, the higher education community reeled from the shock of a new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) ruling that bars international students from being in the United States if they are enrolled in institutions that will only offer online instruction this fall. This news came at a time when many colleges and universities had already made announcements about the new academic year, which meant that plans for remote learning made with public health in mind would have the unintended effect of excluding international students.

Yesterday, the AAUP released a statement about the ruling. It begins,
The Department of Homeland Security’s July 6 ruling regarding international students and the upcoming 2020–21 academic year is but the latest example of the Trump administration’s callous cruelty, especially toward immigrants and those it deems “other.” The American Association of University Professors thus joins many other higher education organizations and colleagues in the labor movement in calling on the 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.Read the full statement.

The AAUP also joined over seventy other higher education organizations yesterday in submitting an amicus brief, prepared by the American Council on Education (ACE), in support of a legal challenge filed by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology against the DHS in the US District Court in Massachusetts. The challenge seeks to prevent the DHS directive 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. The amicus brief notes that “with the stroke of a pen, the global standing of our nation and its preeminent higher educational system will needlessly suffer again from exclusionary policies that—contrary to long-held national values of openness and interconnection—single out international students and arbitrarily threaten their eligibility to collaborate, learn, and share their many talents at American colleges and universities.” You can find the amicus brief and a summary here.

On Friday the AAUP, along with dozens of other higher education organizations, signed on to a letter from ACE president Ted Mitchell to Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. The letter states, “We urge the administration to rethink its position and offer international students and institutions the flexibility necessary to safely navigate resuming their educational activities in the midst of this crisis in ways that take into account the health and safety of our students and staff in the upcoming academic year.” Read the full letter.

The national AAUP will continue to work with other higher education organizations, our organizing partner AFT, and our chapters and state conferences to ensure that campuses can move forward in the fall with reopening plans that are safe for and inclusive of all members of the higher education community.

If you're not already a member, you can support work like this by joining the AAUP today.

In solidarity,
Julie Schmid
Executive Director
P.S. On Friday we also released early an article from the upcoming Journal of Academic Freedom with a pertinent analysis of how US immigration laws influence campus and impose enforcement roles on colleges and universities. Read Abigail Boggs’s “On Borders and Academic Freedom: Noncitizen Students and the Limits of Rights.”

This week marked the kickoff of our Summer Institute Online, with webinars focusing on issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic. We hope you join! Read on for more on SI Online, our new statement on shared governance during times of crisis, and how you can take action now to urge Congress to fund aid to states and higher education.

Summer Institute Online
The AAUP Summer Institute Online is now underway. Join hundreds of AAUP members from around the country in our special series of training webinars focused specifically on the challenges facing higher education today. Running through August 4, the virtual summer institute features two webinars each week. Our 90-minute sessions will cover a wide range of topics, from campus decisions about reopening to supporting student protests to pushing back against austerity budgets. In addition, hour-long breakout sessions after the governance and organizing webinars will provide a special opportunity for smaller groups of attendees to brainstorm about how to apply the guidance to their chapter’s circumstances. There is also a special plenary panel that will highlight the experiences of frontline health-care providers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
You can view the complete schedule and register for these webinars today.

Principles of Academic Governance during the COVID-19 Pandemic
The AAUP Committee on College and University Governance has released a new statement affirming the principles of academic governance in the face of growing concern over unilateral actions taken by governing boards and administrations during the pandemic. “During this challenging time,” the statement reads, “the committee calls upon administrations and governing boards, in demonstrated commitment to principles of shared governance, to maintain transparency, engage in ‘joint effort,’ and honor the faculty’s decision-making responsibility for academic and faculty personnel matters as the most effective means of weathering the current crisis.”
You can read the full statement here.

Send a Letter to Your Member of Congress
Many of our states and communities continue to face mounting and very serious financial shortfalls as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The ability of states to provide adequate funding for higher education and other public goods will be dependent upon the inclusion of relief for state and local governments in the next federal stimulus package. If you haven't already, you can to write to your US congressional representative and your senators and urge them to include relief for state and local governments in the next stimulus package. Here’s the link to send a letter now.

We’ll be in touch with another COVID-19 update in August. Stay strong, stay safe.

In solidarity,
Julie Schmid
Executive Director, AAUP

VIA ELECTRONIC MAIL
Dr. David Andrews
President
National University
La Jolla, CA 92037

Mr. Thomas Clevinger
Interim Chair
Board of Trustees
National University
La Jolla, CA 92037

By this letter, the California Conference of the American Association of University Professors (CA-AAUP) formally communicates its objection to the continuing violations of shared governance by the administration of National University over the past several years.

These violations have recently culminated in President Andrews’ announcement on May 22, 2020 of the unilateral rescinding of the agreed-upon Faculty Policies and all full-time faculty contracts on June 15 and June 30, 2020 respectively.

These violations, detailed below, show a consistent pattern of unilateral decision-making by the Boards of National University and the National University System* in areas that should involve faculty input and participation according to the principles and guidelines of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the nation’s leading authority on policies of shared governance and academic freedom. As a “vendor support organization,” the System Board should not be making decisions on curriculum or anything related to faculty work and welfare.

Full-time faculty at National University, of whom there are approximately 240, are not tenured but have long-term contracts of between 2 and 10 years (depending on rank) renewable through a reappointment process detailed in the Faculty Policies. The terms of the appointment letter and the Faculty Policies constitute the faculty member’s contract. The Faculty Policies include detailed requirements for shared governance in accordance with the 1966 AAUP Statement on the Governance of Colleges and Universities, as well as outlining faculty rights and responsibilities, including processes for terminating faculty and due process protections. Violations of shared governance have occurred over the last several years.
As the most recent of these are the most egregious and the most threatening to faculty welfare, we focus on them:

1. Rescinding of All Full-time Faculty Contracts
On May 22, 2020, National University’s President Andrews sent an e-mail to all full-time faculty in which he informed them that their contracts would be unilaterally terminated and rewritten with a start date of July 1, 2020. The letter also stated that these new contracts “would not be covered by” the existing Faculty Policies, which up to now have been incorporated by reference as part of the faculty contract through the faculty appointment letters, and which have been agreed to and voted upon by the National University Faculty Senate, the National University faculty, and the National University Board of Trustees in a process of deliberative shared governance. In place of existing faculty policies, the President’s letter projects that “this new contractual relationship will include an Interim Faculty Handbook, which will be available on June 15, 2020.”

Faculty were not consulted about this decision. Article 10.2 of the agreed upon Faculty Policies sets limits on how the administration can reduce positions and allow early termination of individual faculty appointments after seeking to find new positions for faculty, and Article 16 sets out a shared governance process for amending the Policies. Neither the faculty appointment letters nor the Faculty Policies permit wholesale nullification of faculty contracts nor the rescission of the Faculty Policies themselves.

The President claims that these actions follow from a “charge” from the National University Board of Trustees. These actions were not the result of any shared governance processes as required by WSCUC, the National University Faculty Policies, and the 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities. In fact, faculty contracts are being violated by these failures to include faculty in “academic decisions.”

The Faculty Senate has repeatedly sought to hold the administration to the requirements of Faculty Policies 10.2 with regard to program closures and the elimination of faculty positions but to no avail. The Senate’s request for formal documentation of the conditions that necessitated the administration’s actions taken pursuant to Article 10.2 as well as the plan developed to reassign the affected faculty members required by Article 10.2.1 went unheeded.

Section 2c of the 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, which the AAUP formulated in cooperation with the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (AGB) and the American Council on Education (ACE), maintains that “The allocation of resources among competing demands is central in the formal responsibility of the governing board, in the administrative authority of the president, and in the educational function of the faculty. Each component should therefore have a voice in the determination of short- and long- range priorities, and each should receive appropriate analyses of past budgetary experience, reports on current budgets and expenditures, and short- and long-range budgetary projections... It should here be noted that the building of a strong faculty requires careful joint effort in such actions as staff selection and promotion and the granting of tenure.” Section 3 notes, “In order to fulfill these duties, the board should be aided by, and may insist upon, the development of long-range planning by the administration and faculty.”

2. Unilateral Change to the “Academic Model” of the University
In his letter of May 22, 2020, President Andrews also informed faculty that the most fundamental decisions about reshaping the university’s curriculum and the faculty’s role in governance and curriculum will be taken out of faculty control: “National University’s academic model will be reorganized. The goal of this reorganization is to... move beyond the traditional classroom model. The academic reorganization will have a substantial impact on the faculty  model, program offerings, modality, curriculum development and approval... The delivery model will use a ‘learning team’ approach, with full-time faculty members as subject-matter experts supported by a team of andragogy and student support experts.” There was no consultation with faculty or with faculty shared-governance bodies in making these changes which directly and profoundly affect instruction and student learning throughout the University.

Section 5 of the 1966 Statement affirms that “The faculty has primary responsibility for such fundamental areas as curriculum, subject matter and methods of instruction... The... [faculty’s] judgment is central to general educational policy.”

3. Merger of System Management Group (SMG) Affiliate Libraries
On March 9, 2020, the Chancellor of the National University System informed the faculty that all System affiliate libraries were being merged into one central library. Eleven librarians, including the Director (who had been with NU for 40 years) were laid off. This merger occurred without consultation with the faculty. This action has significant implications for academic program quality, the use of library resources in courses, and faculty and student research efforts. The Faculty Senate asked that the President of National University provide the required Service Level Agreements for the Library, Enrollment Management, Information Technology and Human Resources. These Agreements have not been provided.

Important considerations, in addition to those in Section 2c of the 1966 Statement quoted above, are, “Effective planning demands that the broadest possible exchange of information and opinion should be the rule for communication among the components of a college or university. The channels of communication should be established and maintained by joint endeavor. Distinction should be observed between the institutional system of communication and the system of responsibility for the making of decisions.”

Finally, the Joint Statement on Faculty Status of College and University Librarians by Association of College and Research Libraries, the Association of American Colleges (now the Association of American Colleges and Universities), and the AAUP contends that, “The character and quality of an institution of higher learning are shaped in large measure by the nature and accessibility of its library resources as well as the expertise and availability of its librarians. Consequently, all members of the faculty should take an active interest in the operation and development of the library. ...the scope and character of library resources should be taken into account in such important academic decisions as curricular planning and faculty appointments...” Continuing, “Librarians perform a multifaceted role within the academy [by] providing access to information, whether by individual and group instruction, selecting and purchasing resources, digitizing collections, or organizing information. In all of these areas, librarians impart knowledge and skills to students and faculty members both formally and informally and advise and assist faculty members in their scholarly pursuits. They are involved in the research function and conduct research in their own professional interests and in the discharge of their duties. Their scholarly research contributes to the advancement of knowledge valuable to their discipline and institution.”

4. Closure of Academic Centers
National University is a distributed institution with academic centers, where classes were offered and faculty assigned, throughout the State of California and in Henderson, Nevada. In late March, all University buildings were closed due to the COVID-19 outbreak, and several significant centers were closed permanently. These permanent closures occurred without notice or faculty consultation. President Andrews in a Zoom Town Hall on April 9, 2020 noted that while “Some of these decisions [like the closing of academic centers] were being considered  prior to the COVID-19 outbreak but were accelerated by the crisis... Our traditional timeframe for faculty consultation and shared governance was truncated on a number of these issues.” He also acknowledged in the same Town Hall that “Upon closing the Stockton and Bakersfield campuses two years ago, we agreed to a process of sharing information and intentions to close future campuses with faculty and faculty leaders as leases came due.”

That information-sharing did not happen. It is also not credible that there was a careful analysis of each location in a few weeks and that there was no time to consult with the faculty at the locations or with Senate officers to get their input. In fact, with COVID-19, consultation using and conferencing technologies is quite simple and transparent and does not carry the burden of travel.

CA-AAUP believes that administration is using the COVID-19 pandemic as a smokescreen to carry out plans already developed without shared governance, such as but not limited to Academic Center closures, cutting library services and staff, and terminating faculty. This announcement just made what had been an improper de facto practice of violating shared governance de jure.

A joint administrative-faculty taskforce worked hard in Spring 2019 to come up with a clear process by which center closures would be considered and decided upon, including a timeframe for when faculty would be notified of impending closures. This agreed-upon process has been completely ignored by the administration and Academic Center closures were only announced after they were a fait accompli. In a recent faculty meeting, one faculty member learned from colleagues that her center had been closed - nobody in the administration notified her that her office was no longer accessible.

At this recorded town hall, President Andrews also confirmed that the university was in good financial shape, with over $500 million of “reserve”; the University also recently received an unprecedented and widely publicized gift of $350 million dollars from a single donor.

Section 2c of the 1966 Statement recommends that “A second area calling for joint effort in internal operation is that of decisions regarding existing or prospective physical resources. The board, president, and faculty should all seek agreement on basic decisions regarding buildings and other facilities to be used in the educational work of the institution.”

5. “Emergency Powers” Delegated by SMG to Affiliate Presidents
Ahead of President Andrews’ April 9, 2020 Town Hall with faculty, he distributed a Resolution from “the NU and NUS Boards authoriz[ing] Chancellor [of the System] Cunningham to take more definitive action, and to delegate the same authority to affiliate presidents.” The System Management Group (SMG) is not empowered to make decisions for National University. The SMG is a service provider to NU and explicitly does not operate under shared governance, but its Board and Chancellor often make decisions for NU and “system” affiliates, as in the cases noted above.

Section 2a of the 1996 Statement argues that “The variety and complexity of the tasks performed by institutions of higher education produce an inescapable interdependence among governing board, administration, faculty, students, and others. The relationship calls for adequate communication among these components, and full opportunity for appropriate joint planning and effort.”
 
In addition, “AAUP Principles and Standards for the COVID-19 Crisis” lays out AAUP principles when it comes to universities dealing with the COVID-19 crisis and maintaining shared governance and academic freedom. They may be accessed at https://www.aaup.org/aaup-principles-and-standards-covid-19-crisis. In particular the principles state that “The COVID-19 pandemic should not become the occasion for administrations to circumvent widely accepted principles of academic governance, as some faculty members have reported has happened at their institutions.” Quoting the Statement on Government it notes that, “The structure and procedures for faculty participation should be designed, approved, and established by joint action of the components of the institution. Faculty representatives should be selected by the faculty according to procedures determined by the faculty.”

6. Termination of Academic Programs in Violation of Board-Approved Shared Governance Processes
In 2018-19, at the President’s request, a joint Small Program Planning Task Force (SPPT), comprised of faculty and administrators was convened to develop a process for evaluating the viability of and making recommendations for small programs. The Task Force recommended a process that involved careful consideration of multiple factors and discussion with program faculty before deciding whether to terminate small programs or continue to offer and attempt to grow them.

At his April 9, 2020 Town Hall, the President announced that the process would be revived and expedited to generate recommendations for program terminations by June 30, 2020. The process is attempting to short circuit the final report and recommendations developed by the SPPT. No consultation occurred with program faculty. Instead Academic Program Directors (APDs) reported that they are being informed that their programs are slated for termination based solely on annual Students in Program (SIP) numbers. In the climate of expected layoffs, faculty serving as APDs of programs with fewer than 500 student majors are under pressure from Deans to agree to program closures; faculty are discouraged from appealing the decision to the faculty governing bodies, and are informed that the Provost will have the final say in deciding whether to submit programs for termination. Many APDs believe that he has already decided the ones he wants to close before the process is completed. These actions violate the work of the joint administrative and faculty taskforce that spend six months last year developing the process and criteria for closing or reviving small programs.

Section 3 of the 1966 Statement advises, as a best practice, that “The governing board of an institution of higher education, while maintaining a general overview, entrusts the conduct of administration to the administrative officers—the president and the deans—and the conduct of teaching and research to the faculty. The board should undertake appropriate self-limitation.”

Conclusion
In conclusion, CA-AAUP believes that the University administration, the SMG, and their respective (and identical) Boards have repeatedly violated the requirements of shared governance set forth in the University’s own Faculty Policies as well as in the AAUP’s standards. These actions have been accompanied and facilitated by sudden announcements of radical changes to faculty work and the academic structures and processes at the University, such as the President’s letter of May 22, 2020. Though faculty were repeatedly assured by the President that the University is in strong financial shape, these measures have frequently been justified under the guise of financial concerns.

We believe these actions will result in irrevocable, serious, and unnecessary harm to National University and to its faculty and students. In addition, these actions diminish the value of  faculty, and the work they do, as well as the value of higher education whose effective contribution is essential to the economy and society. These one-sided decisions will create a vicious downward cycle.

Accordingly, we strongly recommend that National University comply with its own standards of shared governance and those of the general academic community. This requires the immediate revocation of the President’s letter of May 22, 2020 in its totality and all related announcements and unilateral management plans.

Sincerely,

Steven Filling, President
Jesse Drew,Vice President, University of California
Diane Klein, Vice President, Private Colleges and Universities
Rosalinda Quintanar, Vice President, California State University
Katie Graham, Vice President, California Community Colleges
Jennifer Eagan, California Faculty Association Delegate to CA-AAUP
Kirti Sawhney Celly, California Faculty Association Delegate to CA-AAUP

_____________________
* The legal name of the National University System is the System Management Group, Inc. (SMG). National University is defined as an “affiliate” of that entity. However, the membership of the Board of Trustees of the System and the Boards of Trustees of National University and other affiliate System universities are identical. As a result, the affiliates (such as National University) do not have a genuine separate existence.

The two largest protests in San Francisco and Oakland didn’t involve crowds gathering in front of buildings or marching side-by-side through city streets while chanting and waving colorful signs. Demonstrators instead climbed into cars and trucks, or mounted bikes and other vehicles and formed caravans to parade their way through cities and sometimes surround government buildings or businesses.

The new approach allowed the region’s active social justice movements to continue the May Day tradition of celebrating workers’ rights while complying with physical distance guidelines put in place to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Organizers encouraged people to stay in or on their vehicles, wear masks or face coverings and use hand sanitizer that protest planners provided.

Protesters in Oakland called for protective equipment for essential workers, free health care, equitable education, the withholding of rent and mortgage payments and the release of prisoners at risk of being infected by coronavirus.

The AAUP continues to update the AAUP's coronavirus resources page with new information from the national AAUP, local AAUP chapters, and other organizations. Please write to smink@aaup.org to share news about how your chapter has adapted its organizing work to respond to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Thank you for the work you are doing.

Webinars
Keep up-to-date on AAUP's latest webinars, including the webinar on financial exigency and program elimination, held last week. Slides and links to all past webinars can be found here.

The CA-AAUP is delighted to announce that the Loyola Marymount University AAUP chapter has been granted an AAUP advocacy charter.  The LMU AAUP Advocacy Chapter was founded in March 2020 to advocate for higher education, defend academic freedom, strengthen shared governance, and promote the interests of faculty of all ranks and contracts at Loyola Marymount University and throughout California, in partnership with our colleagues within the CA-AAUP. We look forward to organizing together!

You can find us at: lmuaaup.org.

Hans-Joerg Tiede was quoted in The Daily Beast on Turning Point USA’s new plan for exposées of liberal bias.

An academic freedom case at Emory University has been resolved with support from the AAUP. Paul Zwier’s lawyer says the AAUP’s intervention was “instrumental” in helping the faculty hearing committee reject the administration’s argument for Zwier’s dismissal.

Committee A chair Henry Reichman received the Intellectual Freedom Round Table's 2020 Eli M. Oboler Memorial Award—which recognizes the best published work in the area of intellectual freedom—for his book The Future of Academic Freedom.

We are pleased to announce the publication of Volume 10 of the AAUP's Journal of Academic Freedom. The journal features recent scholarship on academic freedom and its relation to contemporary crises of austerity, shared governance, tenure, and collective bargaining. This year's contributors draw connections between the multiple frequencies of bullying present on our campuses and the principles and practice of academic freedom and shared governance.

The volume’s eleven essays address a wide range of topics, including the use of discourses of civility and student evaluations of teaching to bully faculty, threats from on and off campus to the academic freedom of faculty of color, and the troubling legacies of historical infringements on academic freedom and shared governance. Follow the links to each article in the table of contents below or access the complete volume at https://www.aaup.org/JAF10.

We are also excited to share a new call for papers, “Academic Freedom on the Managed Campus," for the eleventh volume of the journal, scheduled for publication in September 2020.

—Rachel Ida Buff, Faculty Editor
The Journal of Academic Freedom is supported by funding from the AAUP Foundation.

Table of Contents

Editor's Introduction
By Rachel Ida Buff

Compulsory Civility and the Necessity of (Un)Civil Disobedience
By Judy Rohrer

A Vision for Scholar-Activists of Color
By John Streamas

The Danger of Campus Bans on Bullying
By John K. Wilson

The Weaponization of Student Evaluations of Teaching: Bullying and the Undermining of Academic Freedom
By Jason Rodriguez

Endangered and Vulnerable: The Black Professoriate, Bullying, and the Limits of Academic Freedom
By Lori Latrice Martin, Biko Mandela Gray, and Stephen C. Finley

The Tale of Professor X
By Sherryl Kleinman

Postwar Recovery and Student Academic Freedom in Côte d’Ivoire
By Alfred Babo

"Book Burning" in Japan
By Frank Baldwin

No Sanctuary: Japanese American Internment and the Long Arc of Academic Freedom and Shared Governance
By William Kidder, Judy Sakaki, and Daniel Simmons

Dear Administrators: To Protect Your Faculty from Right-Wing Attacks, Follow the Money
By Isaac Kamola

Speech, Academic Freedom, and Privilege
By John F. Covaleskie

Dear Fellow AAUP Members,

Greetings! My name is Christopher DeWeese. I am a poet, an Associate Professor of English at Wright State University, and a proud AAUP member here.

You may have heard about how last month, over 300 members of our union went on strike for 20 days after the WSU administration imposed a horrible contract on us, a contract that would have undermined the educational mission of our university. Our strike was the second longest strike in US higher ed history, and we were out on the lines through the coldest part of the winter here in Ohio. It was a hard-fought battle, and we won a much better contract than the one that had been imposed (maintaining current workload, retrenchment language, and continuing appointments for Non Tenure-Track faculty) but this came at a cost: each member who was on strike is now out 7.2% of their annual salary, as the Wright State admin refused to grant us back pay for days missed on strike.

I'm writing to you today in the hopes that you might spread the word among your colleagues and your union chapter that we have launched a gofundme in order to help our members recoup some of their missing salary. As our AAUP chapter represents NTT faculty in addition to TT, many of our members who are the most precarious are in extremely difficult financial situations. Any help that you or your colleagues can provide would be much appreciated- every little bit helps!
Here is a link to the fundraiser: https://www.gofundme.com/aaupwsu-strike-fund

If you would like to read more about our strike, here is a good interview in Jacobin with our strike leader, Professor of History Noeleen McIlvenna: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/02/wright-state-university-strike-noeleen-mcilvenna and here's another interview with a member of our EC, Sirisha Naidu: http://socialistworker.org/2019/01/30/striking-for-the-soul-of-the-university. Finally, here's a piece from the Chronicle: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Now-Comes-the-Hard-Part-/245668

Thank you for considering passing this message along.
All best,
Chris DeWeese