News coverage of the faculty letter:
See the full UNC-CH AAUP statement calling on Chancellor Guskiewicz and Provost Clemens to support free speech supportive of Palestine.
]]>The special committee focused in-depth on UNC‒Chapel Hill as the flagship campus, but also examined events across the entire system. Through interviews with more than fifty individuals across the UNC system, the report details the pattern of political interference from the legislature and unilateral decision-making from university leadership that has increasingly come to affect the entire UNC system, with clear violations of AAUP-supported principles of academic governance set forth in the 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities.
See the recording of the press conference at UNC Chapel Hill announcing the release of the report.
The report has received local and national press coverage:
In other news, outgoing UNC-Chapel Hill Provost Robert Blouin has announced that the funding of the UNC Library will be cut by $2 million in the current academic year and by $3 million the following year. The UNC-Chapel Hill AAUP chapter strenuously objects to such cuts at an R-1 research university of UNC-Chapel Hill’s stature, which these cuts would put at risk. We call on the UNC Board of Governors (BOG) to rescind the austerity cuts inflicted on Chapel Hill by the BOG’s own business model. We further call on our campus administration to exhaust every remedy before proceeding to cut our Library holdings, jeopardizing the achievements of UNC faculty, researchers, librarians, and students, and undermining the national reputation of UNC-Chapel Hill. See the entire UNC-Chapel Hill AAUP statement against cuts to library funding.
Finally, the national AAUP has launched a special committee to investigate a pattern of egregious violations of principles of academic governance and persistent structural racism in the University of North Carolina System. Among several issues the report will discuss is the widely publicized mishandling of the tenure case of New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, the influence of the gerrymandered state legislature on the systemwide board of governors and campus boards of trustees, and how the use of political pressure has obstructed meaningful faculty participation in the UNC system. See the AAUP announcement of its special committee to report on structural racism and violations of shared governance at UNC.
]]>On the agenda:
Zoom URL: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89387480339
Meeting ID: 893 8748 0339
Please invite any interested colleagues. Our meetings are open to all UNC instructors, and you need not be an AAUP member to attend chapter meetings.
For the Zoom password, please email info@unc-ch-aaup.org or DM @unc_ch_aaup, or contact one of the officers below.
Karen Booth karenmbooth@gmail.com
Michael Palm mwpalm@gmail.com
Jay Smith jaysmith711@gmail.com
]]>Now the national leadership of the AAUP has posted a statement on the UNC Board and Nikole Hannah-Jones, calling on the Board “to immediately reverse its mistaken move to withhold tenure and accept the faculty's recommendation that Nikole Hannah-Jones be appointed to the Knight chair with tenure.”
UNC-CH AAUP chapter member Hassan Melehy has written a commentary for the Academe Blog on “The Right-Wing ‘Renewal’ of Higher Education in North Carolina pointing out that the Board’s failure is just the latest example of the influence over the UNC System Board of Governors and the UNC–CH BOT exercised by conservative activist groups like the Raleigh-based James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.
At Slate, UNC-CH professor Alice Marwick and UNC-CH professor and UNC-CH AAUP chapter member Daniel Kreiss have written an article on “The Conservative Disinformation Campaign Against Nikole Hannah-Jones” that puts the situation at UNC-CH in the broader context of “a long-term conservative battle against public higher education and the teaching of American racial history.”
]]>The Chapel Hill chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) objects in the strongest possible terms to this latest egregious attack on the core principles of academic freedom and shared governance. We join the Hussman School faculty in demanding that the BOT immediately reinstate approve Hannah-Jones’s original appointment with tenure.
All UNC system and campus administrators must respect the faculty's central role in hiring and tenuring our colleagues and defining educational programming.
See the full UNC-CH AAUP statement on the revoking of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s appointment with tenure (statement updated June 21, 2021 to clarify that the the BOT did not reject Hannah-Jones’s tenure recommendation but failed to act on it).
The Board of Governors’ recent appointment of Darrell Allison as Chancellor at Fayetteville State University—after a normal search had created an initial list of finalists that did not include him—demonstrates that the current system is in violation of the AAUP’s principles of shared campus governance.
See the full UNC-CH AAUP statement on UNC chancellor searches.
]]>The state AAUP meeting will be held this Saturday, March 13, from 1 to 3PM via Zoom.
The meeting’s agenda will be to discuss how shared governance and academic freedom have fared at different North Carolina institutions during COVID. The plan is to have members of each institution represented in the state conference briefly address the following questions, which relate to issues of institutional governance during the pandemic:
How would you characterize the decision to change course delivery methods in response to the COVID-19 pandemic?
How would you characterize decisions to reopen the campus during the COVID-19 pandemic?
How would you characterize budget decisions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic?
In general, how influential has faculty participation been during the COVID-19 pandemic, and to what degree has faculty participation changed since the COVID-19 pandemic?
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, have academic programs, majors, or minors been eliminated, or have no programs been eliminated?
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, has the administration or board declared a financial exigency or fiscal emergency, or has there been no such declaration? Have there been terminations of faculty appointments, including faculty layoffs, or have there been no such terminations?
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, has the administration or board unilaterally declared existing institutional regulations, such as sections of the faculty handbook, as no longer in force?
Have faculty at your institution faced any academic freedom issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic?
What are other current concerns faculty have at your institution?
If you are interested in attending, please contact Michael Behrent at michaelcbehrent@gmail.com to request the Zoom link. It will be made available to any AAUP member or faculty member who requests it.
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