Report of an AAUP Special Committee: Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans Universities
Source: American Association of University Professors (AAUP)
From press release:

In a report released today, the Special Committee on Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans Universities of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) finds that there was “nearly universal departure from (or in some cases complete abandonment of) personnel and other policies” by five New Orleans institutions―the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, the University of New Orleans, Southern University at New Orleans, Loyola University New Orleans, and Tulane University―as they contended with the disaster that befell the city and its universities.

The report identifies several specific areas of widespread dereliction:

• The number of faculty terminations “exceeded the inescapable or minimal needs of the institution, sometimes substantially.”
• The notice and timing of personnel actions “also failed to meet AAUP standards and created needless, even at times unconscionable, uncertainty.”
• Alternative placement of affected faculty “universally fell below AAUP standards, but also fell short of the institutions’ apparent capacity to mitigate the harshest effects of inevitable personnel reductions.”
• The opportunity for internal review of adverse judgments “failed to meet most accepted standards of due process as well as the institutions’ own established review procedures.”
• Faculty tenure (which all these institutions had previously recognized and by and large respected) “received far less deference than AAUP policy and prior practice [on these campuses] would have required.”

Download in sections (PDFs).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 16th, 2007 at 6:15 pm and is filed under Education, Ethics, Labor, Postsecondary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.