Report on Dismissal at Pacific Lutheran University

The AAUP published a staff report in January on the dismissal of a part-time faculty member after forty years of service in the Department of Music at Pacific Lutheran University. In November 2018, the faculty member was suspended from her teaching responsibilities for the remainder of her one-year contract and informed that she would not be reappointed for the following academic year. The administration cited as the reason for those actions that she had violated a directive issued by her department chair prohibiting faculty members from accepting payment from PLU students for private music lessons given independently of the university.

Under AAUP-supported procedural standards, a suspension imposed without a prior hearing and not followed by reinstatement constitutes a summary dismissal. The relatively minor nature of the alleged offense, along with the summary nature of the actions taken against her, raised the question whether those actions had been based on considerations that implicated principles of academic freedom. The faculty member had engaged in advocacy for the rights of other faculty members on contingent appointments, including a union campaign some years prior, that had brought her into repeated conflict with her administrative superiors.

Following lengthy correspondence between the Association’s staff and the administration, in which the administration’s representatives repeatedly shifted their characterization of the nature of the actions taken against the faculty member, the administration agreed to afford her a dismissal hearing, as called for under AAUP-recommended standards. At the hearing, which was attended by an AAUP observer, the administration took the position that it was not actually dismissing the faculty member, and the faculty hearing body did not therefore make a determination on whether the charges warranted dismissal. As a result, according to the AAUP observer, the professor was afforded a dismissal hearing in name only.

The report faults the administration for having made the offer of a dismissal hearing in bad faith. It also concludes, with respect to academic freedom, that the summary nature of the action taken against her, combined with the relatively minor stated basis for dismissal, gives credibility to the notion that the actions taken against her may have been based on other considerations, including her activities in defense of her rights and the rights of other part-time faculty members.