Special Report: COVID-19 and Academic Governance.

All parties agree that after the May and July boardmeetings, the faculty felt betrayed; faculty membersinterviewed by the committee repeatedly used the terms"derailed" and "hijacked", seeing the board's actionnot as a legitimate disagreement between the faculty,on the one hand, and the administration and board oftrustees, on the other, but as an unwarranted substitutionof one set of criteria with another, a wholesale andunilateral change in the rules of the game. The committee, which consists ofthe academic vice president, the three academic deans,and eight elected faculty members, declined to makea recommendation on the terminations because twopreconditions spelled out in the faculty handbook hadnot been met: the college's budget committee had notdocumented "compelling budgetary reasons" for theterminations and the administration had not providedthe faculty senate with the required financial information. The attorneys informed the staff member that thecollege, as a Jesuit institution, wished to "do the rightthing" and was therefore attempting to reach whatthey characterized as generous financial settlementswith the affected faculty members.12 The staff memberwelcomed the news but hastened to point out thatbecause the investigation was being conducted underthe aegis of the Committee on College and UniversityGovernance, not Committee A on Academic Freedomand Tenure, it primarily concerned alleged departuresfrom AAUP-recommended principles and standardsof academic governance. [Extracted from the article]