AAUP Sanctions

At its February meeting, the AAUP’s governing Council voted unanimously to add New Col­lege of Florida and Spartanburg Community College to the Associa­tion’s list of institutions sanctioned for substantial noncompliance with widely accepted standards of aca­demic government. The Committee on College and University Gover­nance had recommended that the Council impose sanctions based on the findings in two reports—the report of a special committee, Political Interference and Aca­demic Freedom in Florida’s Public Higher Education System, and the report of an ad hoc investigating committee on Spartanburg Com­munity College.

The special committee report details, among other events, the unprecedented, politically moti­vated takeover of New College of Florida followed by the imposi­tion of an aggressively ideological agenda, which the report described as “one of the most egregious and extensive violations of AAUP principles and standards at a single institution in recent memory.” In January 2023, Governor Ron DeSantis appointed six new members to the college’s board of trustees, who, according to the special committee, disregarded their fiduciary responsibilities and instead promoted the governor’s political goals. After the ouster of then president Patricia Okker, the board and new administration restructured the college’s academic offerings without meaningfully involving the faculty and failed to provide academic due process to multiple faculty members denied reappointment. They also elimi­nated the college’s gender studies program, abolished its Office of Outreach and Inclusive Excel­lence, revised admission standards, and created new athletic pro­grams—again without meaningful faculty involvement. The special committee found that these actions not only violated long-standing AAUP-supported principles of shared governance but also seri­ously impaired, if not irreparably damaged, the governance func­tions of the New College faculty, as defined in the Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities.

The report of the investigat­ing committee for Spartanburg Community College describes the administration’s abrupt and unilat­eral abolition of the faculty senate, an action taken, the investigating committee concluded, to prevent the senate from voting to oppose the administration’s implementa­tion of a controversial policy. The administration then replaced the senate with an academic council of its own devising. That new governance body included adminis­trators among its members and was governed with bylaws that restricted its deliberations. The investigating committee found that these actions contravened widely accepted governance standards, including the requirement articulated in the Statement on Government that the agencies for faculty gover­nance should be designed and implemented by joint action of the faculty, administration, and governing board. The committee also found that dissolution of the faculty senate was a “direct attack on academic freedom.”