Macalester AAUP Annual Report, 2022-2023

The Macalester Chapter of the AAUP is an inclusive and democratic organization whose goal is to promote academic freedom and shared governance on campus, and to be an advocate for matters that concern the faculty. The principle of academic freedom and the institution of tenure, and the principle of shared governance, have been introduced into American higher education as the direct outcome of the AAUP’s advocacy and organizing since 1915. Faculty handbooks across the country today reflect the AAUP’s policies and values, and enshrine these principles. The history of the AAUP at Macalester goes back to the 1930s; the current chapter was established in 2019. 

Membership is open to all faculty and librarians; our current membership is 30. The work of the chapter is driven by member initiative, either brought to the attention of the membership at a general meeting or communicated directly to the chapter officers. While there are some tasks that officers take on without publicity, especially assistance and support to individual faculty, most of the chapter’s direction is a result of member request. As we describe below, the AAUP seeks to work through the elected committees of the faculty to achieve its objectives, but on occasion, under certain circumstances, also works on its own. Members of the AAUP also serve on elected committees of the faculty in their individual role as faculty members.

This report summarizes the work of the chapter during the academic year 2022-23. Much of our work centered on governance issues, mostly driven by the failure of the administration on a number of occasions to observe procedure as laid down in the faculty handbook. Our members also acted as formal advisers, according to procedure, for faculty colleagues involved in disciplinary measures. We also organized events to facilitate faculty discussion of matters of shared interest and concern.  

Governance Issues

1. Faculty Handbook language on disciplinary procedures. The AAUP has been working since the summer of 2019 to revise and re-order the disciplinary procedures for tenured and tenure track faculty in the faculty handbook. This work was brought to a successful conclusion at the faculty meeting of March 7, 2023. In 2019, the AAUP discovered that the Handbook contradicted itself at several points on procedure, made reference to sections that did not exist or had been mislabeled, made reference to external documents (the AAUP policy) whose language the faculty did not control, and in general was structured in such a way as to make it difficult to determine its meaning. An AAUP committee worked on revising the Handbook’s language to bring order and clarity to it, and we also advocated that the AAUP’s language on disciplinary procedures be incorporated into the Handbook. We submitted these proposals to EPAG in the Fall of 2019, which brought them, after additional revision, to the faculty in two stages. On May 11, 2021, the faculty voted to adopt language clarifying the procedure to be followed, and to adopt language defining what constituted cause for termination of tenured faculty (which had been lacking in the Handbook). On March 7, 2023, the faculty voted to make the AAUP’s disciplinary procedures part of the language of the Handbook itself, thus bringing that language under the control of the faculty.

2. MNI issue. In January 2022, Macalester announced a $1 million Mellon grant to support the Macalester Native and Indigenous (MNI) Initiative, a highlight of which would be four postdoctoral scholars, with the “long-term goal [. . .] to retain [them] through appointment to tenure-track positions.” On June 17th 2022, an announcement was circulated to all faculty describing the application procedures for the first two of the four postdocs. However, that announcement suggested a connection between the postdocs and future tenure-track allocations that bypassed the procedures for allocating tenure-track positions established in the faculty handbook. Information provision, relevant elected committee deliberation, and all-faculty consideration of this major curricular addition were either inadequate or missing. 

The AAUP raised its concerns in a memorandum sent to members of the administration as well as EPAG and FAC.  The concerns, available in more detail in the memorandum, included: (1) the process through which the lines were requested and approved; (2) the use of EPAG to approve allocations, rather than the Allocations Committee to recommend them; (3) the approval of future allocations when the availability of such allocations was not yet known; and (4) the scale of the commitment of resources in ways that bypass the normal governance process that gives the faculty primary responsibility for curricular decisions.

The issues detailed in our memo were extensively discussed by EPAG, which announced at the December 2022 faculty meeting that the MNI post-docs would be decoupled from the allocations process, the decisions on post-docs being made by the provost and the steering committee of the MNI grant with no promise of a TT position to follow. Departments that had received post-docs would be free to request an allocation in the usual way.  

3. Criminal Background Check Policy. During Fall 2022, following an email message announcing that the college was adopting a new criminal record check policy, the AAUP developed material analyzing the potential consequences of this policy, which it shared with members of the faculty and administration. A majority of full professors on campus signed on to a letter expressing many of our concerns. Subsequently, the policy’s implementation was put on hold and a series of discussions followed. In May 2023, after ongoing discussions, the policy was revised. 

Despite the policy revisions, several concerns about the policy remain. The concerns include: 

• a lack of transparency about what insurers require and why; 
• that the policy treats faculty as if they were at-will employees; 
• that the policy could exclude from employment people who have not been convicted of crimes; 
• that the policy does not mitigate the harms of excluding people with criminal records from employment by using the protections that are offered to employers under Minnesota law; 
• that the policy retains language that would allow for withdrawal of employment on the basis of a subjective judgment about reputational risk which is contrary to AAUP guidelines; 
• and that the policy contains unnecessarily ambiguous language.  

A fuller discussion of these concerns is available here. AAUP members continue to work to address these concerns productively in ways that will protect both the college and faculty, staff, and applicants. 

4. Faculty appointment letter. The AAUP issued a statement pointing out that the two conditions laid down in the faculty appointment letter of May 31, 2023 regarding annual salary increases were not supported by Minnesota law nor by the Faculty Handbook. We urged the administration to withdraw this attempt to make salary increases contingent on (a) a supposed legal requirement to sign the notification, and (b) on acceding to a criminal background check. The administration accepted our position and did so.

5. Course cancellation policy. The AAUP wrote to the Dean of the Faculty to share concerns about the college’s course cancellation policy. We pointed out that the practice threatened in the past of arbitrarily reducing the salary of record of a member of the faculty in the event of canceling their class (followed or threatened by the previous administration, although, as far as we know, not by the current one) was likely illegal under federal law, which prohibits singling out an individual or individuals for a reduction of salary (see Fair Labor Standards Act) and by the provisions of the Faculty Handbook, which contains no provision that allows the administration to penalize an individual faculty member for failing to reach a minimum enrollment target set by the administration. We also shared concerns about the policy from a pedagogical and equity standpoint.

6. Title IX and disciplinary issues. Members of the AAUP were approached to act as advisers to faculty in (1) a Title IX process resulting from student harassment of a faculty member, and (2) in a disciplinary hearing. Two members of the AAUP served as an adviser to each of the faculty members concerned. Both issues were satisfactorily resolved.

Issues related to Academic Freedom and Speech on campus

7. Censoring the Taravat exhibition. The AAUP issued a statement expressing our concern about the administration’s censoring of the Taravat exhibition at the Lew Warschaw Gallery. In the spring semester of 2023, following an incident at Hamline University where an instructor was falsely accused of Islamophobia, some students at Macalester complained about an art exhibit on campus by the Iranian American artist Taravat Talepasand, whose work responds to the contemporary uprising by Iranians against that country’s theocratic regime. Those students found some of the material on display objectionable and lobbied to have the exhibition closed. In response, the college “paused” the exhibit for several days and veiled the glass walls of the gallery with black curtains to prevent people seeing in. The college thereafter re-opened the exhibit, with the curtains removed, but replaced by other barriers to prevent people outside the exhibition space from seeing the offending art “non-consensually.” We were concerned by the disregard for our own artistic/conceptual vision in the gallery’s open design that the administration’s actions indexed, and by the administration’s disregard for the principle of artistic freedom and the freedom of speech, which should be a pre-eminent value in any institution of higher education. As an institution of higher learning, it is Macalester’s responsibility not only to promote debate and the untrammeled exchange of ideas, but to model how that should take place for all members of its community and for the public at large. We believe that in this instance, Macalester’s actions undermined both those goals.

Other activities

8. Disability Services. We invited the new Director of Disability Services Shamma Bermudez to attend a monthly meeting to present and answer questions on the topic of accommodations in Fall 2022. We are grateful to Director Bermudez for attending.

9. The AAUP organized an Academic Freedom and Identity Politics Reading Group during the spring semester to read and discuss two recent books: Olufemi Taiwo’s Elite Capture: How the Powerful took over Identity Politics (and everything else) and Julia Schleck’s Dirty Knowledge: Academic Freedom in the age of neoliberalism. Fifteen people participated.

10. Meetings: we held meetings monthly during the academic year, on the Wednesday following the faculty meeting (meetings are at 4:45 p.m. in Carnegie 06A), with a slowly-rising attendance. Administratively, we created the digital infrastructure for the branch’s record-keeping: we created an independent email and google drive account with our chapter’s files secured off-site. We created the google discussion list and the wordpress website, and began posting content to the site. The highest weekly site visit we had was 276.

11. Social Events. We organized two social events at Sea Salt, in Minnehaha Park, in the Fall and Spring for faculty and staff to meet, socialize, and discuss matters of shared interest. Members of the faculty and librarians are invited to join us for the next AAUP social on September 24 at Sea Salt at 5:30 p.m. Learn about the AAUP and share your ideas and concerns.