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Over the past 25 years, eight historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have been censured by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) for violations of academic freedom and shared governance—representing 21 percent of all colleges and universities so censured. Each of these cases was initiated by faculty members at the HBCUs. The most recent case is particularly troubling, since it involves an attack on academic freedom, shared governance, and tenure.
On February 6, 2009, the president of Clark Atlanta University, an historically black institution in Atlanta, Georgia, terminated 55 full-time faculty members without notice. Many of these faculty members had tenure. These individuals, some of whom had worked at the university for over 15 years while making $45,000 a year as associate professors with tenure, were told to leave the institution immediately. Although Clark Atlanta University president Carlton E. Brown said the terminations were financially motivated—the result of an “enrollment emergency”—he refused to claim “financial exigency”: a situation in which an institution's finances are so unstable that it is deemed appropriate to take action in the form of eliminating tenured faculty positions without ample warning.
As a result of President Brown's actions and at the request of Clark Atlanta University's current and fired faculty, the AAUP investigated the situation, eventually placing the Atlanta-based university on the organization's censure list. I was asked to be a part of the investigation committee due to my extensive research on HBCUs. Over the course of my career, I have been a staunch supporter of these colleges when my research supported such a position.
Marybeth Gasman is an associate professor of higher education in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), philanthropy and fundraising within diverse contexts, and African-American leadership. She is the author of Envisioning Black Colleges: A History of the United Negro College Fund (Johns Hopkins, 2007) and the lead editor of Understanding Minority Serving Institutions (SUNY, 2008); she also currently comments on HBCUs for The Chronicle of Higher Education and Diverse Issues in Higher Education.
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