On the very same day, two faculty members recently and independently called my attention to news reports on two separate universities’ actions for coping with budget problems.  I had seen each report at different times several days earlier, but the nearly simultaneous reminders helped to sharpen the contrast I had previously noticed and then relegated to a dim memory in the midst of normal start-of-term overload.

An excerpt from one report reads as follows:

Imagine yourself in this situation. After the semester has begun, your administration notifies you and some sixty of your colleagues, a quarter of the total faculty, that your positions have been eliminated and your employment has been terminated, effective immediately. You are directed to surrender your ID and keys, shut down your computer, remove all personal effects from your office, and leave the campus within one hour—under escort by security guards. And why? Because you are the victim of an administration that has manufactured a crisis and arbitrarily decided, with no due process, to terminate your position and the positions of scores of your colleagues.

Far-fetched? So it might seem. But that is exactly what the administration of Clark Atlanta University did last spring. Making the bogus claim of an “enrollment emergency,” CAU fired sixty full-time faculty members, egregiously violated tenure rights, trampled on fundamental AAUP principles as well as provisions of the university’s faculty handbook, and ignored the basic concept of academic due process. These are but some of the findings of arbitrary and outrageous administrative behavior revealed by a new AAUP investigating committee report.

The faculty member reminding me of this report from the AAUP said that for a moment he thought he was reading about Florida State University.  There are obviously some important differences between the situation here and Clark Atlanta University, but there are also disturbing similarities.

An excerpt from the second report says:

About 11,000 university employees at the campuses at Urbana-Champaign, Chicago and Springfield  will be affected by furloughs. About 80 administrators, including the president, chancellors and deans, will take 10 days off  from February  to June. Faculty members and academic professionals will take four days off by May.

Some of the university’s highest-paid employees, including physicians and football coach Ron Zook, who is paid more than $1 million a year, will have four furlough days, during which they are not allowed to work.

The plan will save the university about $17 million, a minuscule amount in a $4.7 billion budget. The university spends $11 million a day on average.

[Interim UI President Stanley O.] Ikenberry said faculty members can decide which days to take off, and he hopes they will “exercise good judgment” and make those decisions “in a responsible way,” but he did not prohibit them from taking furloughs on class days.

It’s an interesting contrast for several reasons, and raises some interesting questions, including:

You can find the AAUP report on Clark Atlanta University at:

http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/newsroom/2010PRS/clark.htm

The news consortium report on the University of Illinois is available at:

http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2010/01/u-of-i-staff-faces-furloughs-because-of-state-budget-issues.html

Best regards,

Jack Fiorito, President

United Faculty of Florida

P.S.  The voice of the faculty is only as strong as we make it.  If you are not already a UFF member, you can help build a stronger voice by joining the UFF.