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While this academic year saw the largest one-year increase in full-time faculty members’ average salaries in over three decades, that still wasn’t enough to stop their real wages from falling due to inflation, the American Association of University Professors noted Thursday alongside its latest salary survey data.
They are preliminary data for the 2022–23 academic year; AAUP plans to release the final data in July. You can see trend data at this link.
According to the preliminary data, the 6.5 percent increase in the Consumer Price Index for all urban consumers was enough to turn the 4.1 percent average salary increase into a 2.4 percent drop in real wages—the third consecutive year of real-wage declines for all full-time faculty.
The decline last year was worse, when a 7 percent increase in the Consumer Price Index—the fastest inflation since 1981—dropped real wages 5 percent, per the AAUP. The organization said that was the largest real-wage decrease on record since it began tracking in 1972.
For this year’s survey, nearly 900 U.S. colleges and universities provided data for about 370,000 full-time and 90,000 part-time faculty members, the AAUP said. Over 500 institutions also provided data on senior administrators, it said.
Glenn Colby, the organization’s senior researcher, said the regular changes between the preliminary and final data amount to “nothing that moves the overall findings.”
He said, “Typically, maybe 20 or so institutions submit data late to us and we add those, and then maybe another 20 make some corrections because some of the data is estimates that people come up with” and later find the actual values.
According to the AAUP data, the average full-time full professor makes $149,600 (these averages include all kinds of institutions except associate’s degree–focused institutions that lack standard faculty ranks).
The average for these full-time full professors at public colleges and universities was $140,400, while it was $188,400 at private, nonprofit, non–religiously affiliated institutions.
The average full-time assistant professor makes about $88,600. The average for the public variety was $87,300, while the average for the private, nonprofit, non–religiously affiliated kind was $100,600.
Salaries averaged much lower for full-time, generally non-tenure-track faculty members: $73,000 for lecturers and $66,300 for instructors. Colby cautioned that sometimes institutions offer tenure to lecturers or use the term “instructor” nontraditionally. He also noted visiting faculty are counted as instructors in the data.
The data also show significant gender disparities: male full-time faculty averaged $117,800 compared to $96,900 for female full-time faculty.
Looking again just at full-time full professors, men averaged $156,800 while women averaged $136,500. There were far more male full professors than female.
The male-female gap persisted, but was much narrower, among the lower faculty ranks.
For example, male assistant professors averaged $93,000, compared to $84,800 for female assistant professors. Closest to gender parity were instructors: $68,800 for men, $64,500 for women.
The data aren’t broken down by race.
Beyond full-timers, AAUP says its annual “Faculty Compensation Survey is the largest source of data on part-time adjunct faculty members and draws attention to the appallingly low rates of pay and benefits offered to them at many institutions.”
These part-time data are reported from a smaller set of institutions, 352, and they are from last academic year instead of this one, “to enable institutions to report data for an entire academic year,” the AAUP says. They show part-timers only averaged $3,900 for each standard course section (generally three credit hours) they taught.
Colby said 48 percent of faculty nationwide are part-timers.
“It’s hard to eke out a living doing that,” he said.
The College and University Professional Association for Human Resources has reached broadly similar conclusions about the pay trend this academic year.
“Median pay for employees across the higher education workforce increased substantially from 2021–22,” the association said on its website. “Raises were the largest seen in the past seven years, and all position types experienced an increase of at least 1.11 percentage points compared to the previous year.”
But, it said, “Tenure-track and non-tenure-track teaching faculty continued to receive the smallest pay increases,” and “This year, pay increases for all employee categories again fell markedly short of the persistently high inflation rate, even though these are the largest increases seen in the past seven years.”
“Across higher ed, employees are still being paid less than they were in 2019–20 in inflation-adjusted dollars,” the association said. “Tenure-track faculty salary increases have not kept pace with inflation for any year depicted (i.e., from 2016–17 through 2022–23), and non-tenure-track salary increases last met or exceeded inflation in 2016–17, so full-time faculty in general continue to be paid less every year in inflation-adjusted dollars. High inflation has only exacerbated the gaps in pay increases faculty experience in relation to other higher ed employees.”
While this academic year saw the largest one-year increase in full-time faculty members’ average salaries in over three decades, that still wasn’t enough to stop their real wages from falling due to inflation, the American Association of University Professors noted Thursday alongside its latest salary survey data.
They are preliminary data for the 2022–23 academic year; AAUP plans to release the final data in July. You can see trend data at this link.
According to the preliminary data, the 6.5 percent increase in the Consumer Price Index for all urban consumers was enough to turn the 4.1 percent average salary increase into a 2.4 percent drop in real wages—the third consecutive year of real-wage declines for all full-time faculty.
The decline last year was worse, when a 7 percent increase in the Consumer Price Index—the fastest inflation since 1981—dropped real wages 5 percent, per the AAUP. The organization said that was the largest real-wage decrease on record since it began tracking in 1972.
For this year’s survey, nearly 900 U.S. colleges and universities provided data for about 370,000 full-time and 90,000 part-time faculty members, the AAUP said. Over 500 institutions also provided data on senior administrators, it said.
Glenn Colby, the organization’s senior researcher, said the regular changes between the preliminary and final data amount to “nothing that moves the overall findings.”
He said, “Typically, maybe 20 or so institutions submit data late to us and we add those, and then maybe another 20 make some corrections because some of the data is estimates that people come up with” and later find the actual values.
According to the AAUP data, the average full-time full professor makes $149,600 (these averages include all kinds of institutions except associate’s degree–focused institutions that lack standard faculty ranks).
The average for these full-time full professors at public colleges and universities was $140,400, while it was $188,400 at private, nonprofit, non–religiously affiliated institutions.
The average full-time assistant professor makes about $88,600. The average for the public variety was $87,300, while the average for the private, nonprofit, non–religiously affiliated kind was $100,600.
Salaries averaged much lower for full-time, generally non-tenure-track faculty members: $73,000 for lecturers and $66,300 for instructors. Colby cautioned that sometimes institutions offer tenure to lecturers or use the term “instructor” nontraditionally. He also noted visiting faculty are counted as instructors in the data.
The data also show significant gender disparities: male full-time faculty averaged $117,800 compared to $96,900 for female full-time faculty.
Looking again just at full-time full professors, men averaged $156,800 while women averaged $136,500. There were far more male full professors than female.
The male-female gap persisted, but was much narrower, among the lower faculty ranks.
For example, male assistant professors averaged $93,000, compared to $84,800 for female assistant professors. Closest to gender parity were instructors: $68,800 for men, $64,500 for women.
The data aren’t broken down by race.
Beyond full-timers, AAUP says its annual “Faculty Compensation Survey is the largest source of data on part-time adjunct faculty members and draws attention to the appallingly low rates of pay and benefits offered to them at many institutions.”
These part-time data are reported from a smaller set of institutions, 352, and they are from last academic year instead of this one, “to enable institutions to report data for an entire academic year,” the AAUP says. They show part-timers only averaged $3,900 for each standard course section (generally three credit hours) they taught.
Colby said 48 percent of faculty nationwide are part-timers.
“It’s hard to eke out a living doing that,” he said.
The College and University Professional Association for Human Resources has reached broadly similar conclusions about the pay trend this academic year.
“Median pay for employees across the higher education workforce increased substantially from 2021–22,” the association said on its website. “Raises were the largest seen in the past seven years, and all position types experienced an increase of at least 1.11 percentage points compared to the previous year.”
But, it said, “Tenure-track and non-tenure-track teaching faculty continued to receive the smallest pay increases,” and “This year, pay increases for all employee categories again fell markedly short of the persistently high inflation rate, even though these are the largest increases seen in the past seven years.”
“Across higher ed, employees are still being paid less than they were in 2019–20 in inflation-adjusted dollars,” the association said. “Tenure-track faculty salary increases have not kept pace with inflation for any year depicted (i.e., from 2016–17 through 2022–23), and non-tenure-track salary increases last met or exceeded inflation in 2016–17, so full-time faculty in general continue to be paid less every year in inflation-adjusted dollars. High inflation has only exacerbated the gaps in pay increases faculty experience in relation to other higher ed employees.”
Faculty members and academic support professionals began striking Thursday at another public Illinois university, after fellow faculty walked out at Chicago State University Monday.
The newly striking Eastern Illinois University chapter of the University Professionals of Illinois represents a bargaining unit of 450 employees, said Jennifer Hill, media director for the affiliated Illinois Federation of Teachers.
Members of the University Professionals of Illinois also launched the continuing Chicago State University strike, and the same union is poised to walk out at Governors State University next week.
University Professionals of Illinois president John Miller said the academic support professionals are mostly advisers. He said the walkout issues include workload and compensation, saying salary increases haven’t kept up with inflation.
“Salaries are not competitive,” Miller said.
In a statement on its website, Eastern Illinois University said it “remains committed to reaching a good-faith resolution that sensibly balances its employees’ needs with the opportunity, accessibility and quality education all EIU students and families have come to expect.”
A university spokesman said in an email that the institution is “unable to share any details surrounding its ongoing negotiations.”
Faculty members and academic support professionals began striking Thursday at another public Illinois university, after fellow faculty walked out at Chicago State University Monday.
The newly striking Eastern Illinois University chapter of the University Professionals of Illinois represents a bargaining unit of 450 employees, said Jennifer Hill, media director for the affiliated Illinois Federation of Teachers.
Members of the University Professionals of Illinois also launched the continuing Chicago State University strike, and the same union is poised to walk out at Governors State University next week.
University Professionals of Illinois president John Miller said the academic support professionals are mostly advisers. He said the walkout issues include workload and compensation, saying salary increases haven’t kept up with inflation.
“Salaries are not competitive,” Miller said.
In a statement on its website, Eastern Illinois University said it “remains committed to reaching a good-faith resolution that sensibly balances its employees’ needs with the opportunity, accessibility and quality education all EIU students and families have come to expect.”
A university spokesman said in an email that the institution is “unable to share any details surrounding its ongoing negotiations.”
The Texas Supreme Court has ruled 6 to 2 that the University of Texas and the Texas State University systems can revoke degrees that graduates received through academic misconduct.
“The only difference between expelling a current student for academic misconduct and revoking the degree of a former student for the exact same academic misconduct is one of timing,” Debra Lehrmann, the court’s senior justice, wrote on the majority’s behalf. “That distinction is immaterial to the issue presented and erroneously hinges the university’s bare authority to address its students’ academic misconduct on when that misconduct is discovered.”
Two graduates, referred to by the initials K.E. and S.O. in the ruling, sued the universities after their advisers reported that the graduates earned their doctorates through fraud in their dissertations and the universities attempted to revoke their degrees. The advisers said they learned about the alleged fraud while working with the graduates after they graduated, the ruling says—S.O.’s adviser retracted his own article that had used S.O.’s data after another graduate student’s experiments indicated some of the data were inaccurate.
K.E.’s adviser “found inconsistencies in K.E.’s dissertation research data that led the adviser to believe K.E. had manipulated the data,” while S.O.’s adviser “brought a complaint against her for academic misconduct relating to some of the data reported in her dissertation,” the ruling says.
“Indeed, if timing were as significant as K.E. and S.O. suggest, we struggle to determine when a university passes the point of no return,” Lehrmann wrote in the ruling dated March 31 but released Wednesday. “Is it at the graduation ceremony? When the diploma memorializing the conferral of the degree is printed? When the last box is checked on an administrative form indicating that all requirements have been satisfied? When a doctoral student completes the defense of her dissertation?”
”A degree is not merely a piece of paper; it is a ‘university’s certification to the world at large of the recipient’s educational achievement and fulfillment of the institution’s standards,’” she wrote, quoting a previous opinion.
Lehrmann wrote that “the university officials do not claim, and for good reason, that they may take such action against K.E., S.O., or any other former student based on conduct occurring after a degree is conferred. Instead, they argue that they may rescind a degree upon determining that it was not earned—and thus should not have been awarded—in the first place.”
She wrote, “While precedent on the specific issue presented is nonexistent in Texas and sparse elsewhere, courts applying similarly worded grants of (state legislative or state constitutional) authority (in other states) have uniformly determined that public universities have degree-revocation power.” She noted Maryland, Michigan, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Tennessee and Virginia.
Justice Jimmy Blacklock wrote a dissent, which was joined by Justice John Phillip Devine.
“Many will be surprised to learn from the court’s decision that they hold their college degrees not permanently, as their own property, but contingently, only so long as their alma maters continue to believe they should have received them,” Blacklock wrote. “I would have thought that after I graduated and left the University of Texas, the school retained no authority whatsoever over me or my property. I can find no such power over the rights of graduates mentioned in the voluminous Texas statutes governing universities. Universities certainly have abundant statutory authority to manage their own internal affairs, but they have no power to manage the affairs of their graduates. If the Legislature wanted state universities to possess the extraordinary power to unilaterally adjudicate the rights of graduates, surely it would say so. It has not.”
David Sergi, an attorney for S.O., said his client would appeal.
“We agree with the dissent,” said Sergi. “We think the decision is flawed and we will be filing a motion for rehearing because, you know, the court has turned your degree into a revocable license.”
Neither S.O. nor K.E. currently has a revoked degree, but the university systems could now move forward using the Supreme Court’s authority. The university systems declined to comment on the ruling Wednesday.
The Supreme Court majority did say graduates must be afforded due process in degree-revocation proceedings.
“Frankly, I think we’d win in the disciplinary hearing,” Sergi said of possible future action by the University of Texas. “My client has absolutely nothing to be ashamed of.”
Syracuse University graduate student workers have successfully unionized.
Syracuse Graduate Employees United, affiliated with the Service Employees International Union, said in a news release that the vote was 728 to 36, with 90 contested ballots.
The union will represent graduate assistants, research assistants and teaching assistants paid via stipends, said Amanda Beavin, a graduate assistant. She told Inside Higher Ed that graduate employees who are paid hourly aren’t included but are “actively organizing” in what would be a different bargaining unit.
In a news release, the union said graduate workers have cited low pay, high workloads, poor health-care benefits and lack of support for international and marginalized employees.
“This win sets an important precedent for our relationship with the administration, giving us a voice in our working conditions,” said Nathan Pérez-Espitia, another graduate assistant, in the release. “Over time, I’m confident that it will make Syracuse University a better place to learn and work.”
Gretchen Ritter, Syracuse’s provost and chief academic officer, said in a statement that the union will represent 1,124 graduate students.
“We will negotiate in the spirit of partnership and respect that have been the hallmarks of our labor-management relationships to date,” Ritter wrote. “In the meantime, we remain committed to ensuring a positive, rewarding and successful experience for all our graduate students. Finally, I want to thank our graduate students, union representatives and all members of our community for engaging in a constructive and respectful union election.”
A Roman Catholic professor who publicly renounced identifying as gay says Western Michigan University chose to not renew his contract after a quarter century there due to his religious views on homosexuality.
Daniel Mattson on Monday sued the university’s president, its College of Fine Arts dean, its School of Music director and a former director. His lawsuit, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan, says he is a “world-class trombonist” who worked as an adjunct professor and performer for the university since 1999.
He also wrote the 2017 memoir Why I Don’t Call Myself Gay: How I Reclaimed My Sexual Reality and Found Peace. For First Things, he wrote the 2018 article “Why Men Like Me Should Not Be Priests.”
“In the fall of 2021, campus activists discovered Mr. Mattson’s writings on Catholicism and same-sex attraction,” his lawsuit says. “They claimed that his Catholic views were offensive to homosexual students and protested his continued affiliation with the school. In short order, the school administration removed Mr. Mattson from a student-faculty ensemble, and did not renew his annual contract. Even though Mr. Mattson never expressed his religious views at Western Michigan University, he was maligned and punished solely for holding to and expressing orthodox Catholic teaching elsewhere.”
Mattson is alleging violations of his federal constitutional rights to freedom of speech, religion and equal protection. His lawsuit seeks, among other things, financial damages and his job back.
A university spokeswoman told Inside Higher Ed Thursday that “As this is a matter of pending litigation, I cannot comment on it.”
A Roman Catholic professor who publicly renounced identifying as gay says Western Michigan University chose to not renew his contract after a quarter century there due to his religious views on homosexuality.
Daniel Mattson on Monday sued the university’s president, its College of Fine Arts dean, its School of Music director and a former director. His lawsuit, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan, says he is a “world-class trombonist” who worked as an adjunct professor and performer for the university since 1999.
He also wrote the 2017 memoir Why I Don’t Call Myself Gay: How I Reclaimed My Sexual Reality and Found Peace. For First Things, he wrote the 2018 article “Why Men Like Me Should Not Be Priests.”
“In the fall of 2021, campus activists discovered Mr. Mattson’s writings on Catholicism and same-sex attraction,” his lawsuit says. “They claimed that his Catholic views were offensive to homosexual students and protested his continued affiliation with the school. In short order, the school administration removed Mr. Mattson from a student-faculty ensemble, and did not renew his annual contract. Even though Mr. Mattson never expressed his religious views at Western Michigan University, he was maligned and punished solely for holding to and expressing orthodox Catholic teaching elsewhere.”
Mattson is alleging violations of his federal constitutional rights to freedom of speech, religion and equal protection. His lawsuit seeks, among other things, financial damages and his job back.
A university spokeswoman told Inside Higher Ed Thursday that “As this is a matter of pending litigation, I cannot comment on it.”
Last month, “After nearly two years of my resistance,” wrote a University of Houston Downtown professor, his department published an “anti-racist statement” on its website.
Adam Ellwanger, a tenured English professor, wrote this on Campus Reform, a conservative website where he’s a higher education fellow. By Monday, as Campus Reform and Fox News previously reported, the antiracist statement was gone.
“I resisted such a statement largely because I am not a leftist and I know that the anti-racists’ claims about society are false,” Ellwanger wrote in Campus Reform.
That sentence in his column links to a racist column—and not a type of racism that requires understanding current antiracism discourse or diversity, equity and inclusion or debates over recent definitions of racism. The column advances the argument that Black people are intellectually inferior to whites.
“I’m not really interested in getting bogged down in arguments about why this or that is or isn’t racist,” Ellwanger told Inside Higher Ed in an email Wednesday. His university’s student body in the fall was 19 percent Black and 55 percent Hispanic, according to the university’s website.
“Given the left-wing slant of Inside Higher Ed, I don’t really trust that my comments on this matter would be faithfully or positively represented,” he wrote, declining an interview.
Campus Reform didn’t respond to questions about whether Ellwanger or a Campus Reform editor inserted the link.
The column Ellwanger linked to, by John Staddon, a James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University , is titled, “Kendi’s Fallacy and Its Consequences” and subtitled, “Are humans really all the same?”
“On average, short people tend to have lower IQs than tall people,” Staddon writes for the Claremont Institute’s American Mind. “Nobody really knows why this is the case, nor has it caused any social problems—‘tall’ and ‘short’ people don’t usually identify themselves by their height so the average IQ difference goes unremarked. On the other hand, as demonstrated by [The Bell Curve author] Charles Murray, skin color and IQ are also correlated: people who are black tend to have lower IQs than whites or Asians. That might not be a problem either except that IQ is also correlated with some significant outcomes like wealth and health. Causality is always difficult to determine, but there is no doubt that high-IQ individuals tend to be richer and higher-status than the not so smart.
“One would suppose that the difference in average social status between whites and Asians compared to blacks would have generated research that could provide other explanations for this phenomenon,” Staddon writes. “For example, in addition to IQ differences, differences in childhood environment, education, culture and biology, etc. Perhaps some talents are complementary: are people bad at math and logic better at art, writing or speaking, for example? Did [Black Canadian jazz pianist] Oscar Peterson have a high IQ? Who cares, he was a brilliant musician.”
Staddon then criticizes Ibram X. Kendi, a Boston University professor and author of How to Be an Antiracist, for being, in that book, “interested in none of these questions, because he has a single answer to all of them: Racism is the cause of all black-white disparities.”
“Moral equality does not translate into equality in other dimensions such as ability, cultural background, interests or other traits that influence one’s prospect of success,” Staddon writes. “Kendi’s claim that all individuals, hence all groups, are equal in these characteristics is an untruth … Obviously, black-white wealth differences depend on several things: yes, racist policies but also behavioral and biological differences between groups.
“Kendi is willing to accept that blacks are generally darker than whites but says nothing about other biological differences such as their susceptibility to sickle-cell anemia,” Staddon writes. “People and hence groups are different. Many of these differences are irrelevant to social factors like wealth and criminality. Others are not.
“The book repeatedly claims that all racial groups are really the same,” Staddon writes. “Not just morally and legally the same but the same in every dimension—history, culture, strength, beauty, talents, interests and abilities—which is nonsense but allows him to blame all existing differences on ‘racist policies.’”
“Please try to look at facts as true or false and don’t give them a moral value,” Staddon told Inside Higher Ed, referring to average IQ disparities among self-identified groups. Other professors have disputed such IQ arguments and their use in the public sphere.
As for Ellwanger, his column didn’t state that the English Department’s “anti-racist statement” was part of hiring, promotion, continued employment or posttenure review criteria. But he expressed concern that it could affect such things.
“Although the attempts to attach left-ideological activism to tenure and promotion may have stalled, the activists haven’t given up: they’ve just begun to pursue their goals by different means,” he wrote. “Anti-racism statements are a covert way to justify lowering dissenting professors’ annual scores in the existing categories of teaching, scholarship and service, which could ultimately assist in purging the faculty of political dissidents.
“Given that the department has now stated openly that the promotion of these values should be manifested in ‘our work as teachers and scholars,’ how might this effect [sic] my annual evaluation scores in the categories of teaching and scholarship?” he wrote.
“Although the rubrics that officially determine annual evaluation scores within the categories of teaching, scholarship and service don’t (yet) reference the anti-racism statement, I doubt this would prevent activist faculty from taking it into account in my performance review,” he wrote. “The anti-racism statement—on my campus and others—is a covert, cowardly measure used to accomplish this punishment until a formal mechanism can be added to policy.”
Dagmar Scharold, the Houston Downtown English department chair, deferred comment to a spokeswoman for the university. That spokeswoman sent an emailed statement.
“The University of Houston Downtown (UHD) is committed to fostering a learning environment where free inquiry and expression are encouraged,” she wrote. “The university believes that the content of its website should only be related to UHD’s mission and vision and provide information for students and the general public on its academic programming, services and university operations. Furthermore, UHD’s faculty hiring and promotion practices are based solely on merit.”
The former chair of Harvard University’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology who was convicted of lying to the U.S. government about his Chinese connections and Chinese money has retired from the university.
Charles M. Lieber retired from his professor position Feb. 1, the university said. Torrey Young, one of Lieber’s attorneys, told Inside Higher Ed Friday that he chose to retire “after 30 years of devoted service to Harvard.”
Lieber hasn’t yet been sentenced for his December 2021 convictions for knowingly making false statements to the federal government, willfully filing false tax returns and willfully not disclosing that he had authority over a Chinese bank account.
He was set to be sentenced March 2, but that is being rescheduled.
After his conviction, Lieber asked a judge to acquit him or call for a new trial. But Rya W. Zobel, a U.S. District Court judge for the District of Massachusetts, shot down that effort in September.
“From 2011 to 2015, defendant developed a relationship with Wuhan University of Technology (WUT) in China and participated in the Chinese government’s Thousand Talents Program (TTP),” Zobel wrote. “His relationship with WUT, and specifically his participation in the TTP, was the subject of investigations by two U.S. agencies that periodically provided substantial grant money to fund defendant's laboratory and research at Harvard.”
Those agencies were the U.S. Defense Department and the National Institutes of Health.
The former chair of Harvard University’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology who was convicted of lying to the U.S. government about his Chinese connections and Chinese money has retired from the university.
Charles M. Lieber retired from his professor position Feb. 1, the university said. Torrey Young, one of Lieber’s attorneys, told Inside Higher Ed Friday that he chose to retire “after 30 years of devoted service to Harvard.”
Lieber hasn’t yet been sentenced for his December 2021 convictions for knowingly making false statements to the federal government, willfully filing false tax returns and willfully not disclosing that he had authority over a Chinese bank account.
He was set to be sentenced March 2, but that is being rescheduled.
After his conviction, Lieber asked a judge to acquit him or call for a new trial. But Rya W. Zobel, a U.S. District Court judge for the District of Massachusetts, shot down that effort in September.
“From 2011 to 2015, defendant developed a relationship with Wuhan University of Technology (WUT) in China and participated in the Chinese government’s Thousand Talents Program (TTP),” Zobel wrote. “His relationship with WUT, and specifically his participation in the TTP, was the subject of investigations by two U.S. agencies that periodically provided substantial grant money to fund defendant's laboratory and research at Harvard.”
Those agencies were the U.S. Defense Department and the National Institutes of Health.
The faculty director for a California college’s Office of Equity, Social Justice and Multicultural Education says she’s being terminated after she questioned antiracist “orthodoxy,” objected to the college’s land acknowledgments for an Indigenous tribe, tried to bring a “Jewish inclusion” event to campus, declined to join a “socialist network,” refused to use the gender-neutral terms “Latinx” and “Filipinx,” inquired why the word “Black” was capitalized but not “white,” and allegedly disrespected a founder of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Tabia Lee also wrote, in a narrative explaining her situation, that “I no longer participate in gender pronouns because I find that the same toxic ideologies around race ideologies are now being advanced under gender ideologies; I also find that the constant obsession with pronouns and declaration of pronouns causes deep discomfort for individuals who identify as gender fluid or who struggle with gender dysphoria.”
Lee (at right) 
is Black. She said an employee in her office accused her of “white speaking,” “whitesplaining” and supporting white supremacy.
Leaders and employees at De Anza College, the community college where Lee has been working on contract as a tenure-track faculty member, didn’t comment Thursday. A spokeswoman for the community college district that includes both De Anza and Foothill College wrote in an email that the district “has an obligation to protect privacy in personnel matters.”
“Without commenting on any specific matter, we can share that faculty members have comprehensive due process and appeals rights both under the law and negotiated through their bargaining unit,” the email said.
Cheryl Jaeger Balm, De Anza’s Academic Senate president and one of the people Lee accuses of working against her, wrote in an email that “we have been instructed to refer your inquiry” to the district spokeswoman.
Though she hasn’t yet filed a lawsuit—she told Inside Higher Ed she hasn’t “ruled it out”—Lee is now receiving support from the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR).
That organization filed an amicus brief in favor of the plaintiffs in the U.S. Supreme Court lawsuit who are trying to end affirmative action in college admissions. Megyn Kelly, Steven Pinker and Thomas Chatterton Williams are on its Board of Advisers.
“Our mission is to advance civil rights and liberties for all Americans,” said staff attorney Leigh Ann O’Neill, “and I guess the way we approach that is by promoting our common humanity, so we often refer to it as the pro-human approach.”
“In Dr. Lee’s case specifically, what I think is so important about the work she is doing is she is fostering open inquiry and diverse viewpoints and discussions among the people she is teaching,” O’Neill said. “And that is very much in line with FAIR’s approach. We don’t think that there’s one right way to do most things. It takes understanding different approaches, different viewpoints to find the right path forward.”
“We are often asked to support lawsuits,” O’Neill said, “so if she chooses to pursue legal action, we will be very eager to support her.”
Lee provided a letter that O’Neill wrote Friday to the community college district’s Board of Trustees. The letter urges the board to reject a recommendation by Judy Miner, the district’s chancellor, to not re-employ Lee next academic year.
Nevertheless, in another letter that Lee provided Inside Higher Ed, Miner notified her Tuesday that the board had voted Monday not to re-employ her “as a contract employee.”
Miner wrote that the reasons included Lee’s “Persistent inability to demonstrate cooperation in working with colleagues and staff,” her “Unwillingness to accept constructive criticism” and “No expectation on the part of the Tenure Review Committee after completion of Phases I and II that improvements in these two critical areas can ever be achieved.” Miner wrote that the board wouldn’t publicly report the decision until Lee exhausted her appeals.
“In all of the teacher education things I’ve done and been exposed to in more recent years, there are lots of ideologies being pushed—lots of time a single one, but no one names what it is,” Lee told Inside Higher Ed.
“I was told that [I] was supposed to only advance what at that time I was calling a third-wave antiracism ideology,” Lee said.
Lee’s page on the De Anza College website includes a link to a Feb. 28 essay that uses that term. The essay was published on a Substack website called the “Journal of Free Black Thought.”
Lee also provided a narrative of the alleged backlash at De Anza, beginning shortly after she started the position in August 2021. Lee said her Tenure Review Committee was reconstituted because she filed a grievance after being told she wouldn’t be recommended for continuance—before the Tenure Review Committee had handed down the decision.
“While the main or initial harasser resigned at the end of the 21-22 school year, the damage was already done,” Lee wrote. “One of his mentors—the same individual who invited me to the socialist network and accuse(d) me of disrespecting [Black Lives Matter co-founder] Alicia Garza—was seated on my Tenure Review Committee until she was removed as part of a grievance settlement.
“But her longtime friend, the dean of equity and engagement remained seated on the phase II committee and the games continued,” Lee wrote. “So, reconstituting the committee and replacing the old players with similarly aligned players didn’t stop me from encountering some really ugly opposition from third-wave antiracist woke activists who don’t care too much for me because I have not uncritically supported their narratives or ways of knowing/working.”
Lee also wrote that “I had to battle with my dean and my core team to bring the Jewish Inclusion and Antisemitism Summit to De Anza.” She wrote that the student government “passed a resolution condemning Israel for human rights abuses … and made no condemnation of other countries that are known human rights abuse offenders—but there is no issues here, right?”
“I was accused of ‘not being gender inclusive’ for not using the terms Latinx and Filipinx,” she wrote. “I explained to folks that I had served for decades in Latino communities and grew up in the Central Valley and that those terms did not originate in the working class communities I had served and worked with; in addition, I found these terms to be linguistic imperialism and an inappropriate attempt to make beautiful languages conform to English speaking social norms.”
She also said the college was acknowledging the wrong tribe for the land acknowledgments.
“I was called a ‘bitch’ and ‘dictatorial’ for calling for a moratorium on our land acknowledgement practices until we could incorporate changes suggested by Tribal Nations for real action and so that we could properly recognize the Tamien Nation as indigenous to De Anza College land,” Lee wrote.
“These exercises are done with a pseudo-religious flavor and they demand the compliance and agreement of all who are in attendance,” Lee wrote. “This is one of the reasons why I no longer engage in or encourage others to engage in Land Acknowledgments, Labor Acknowledgments, or Trauma/Victim/Survivor Acknowledgments.”
She said, “another evaluator asked me why I was telling people about race ideologies and didn’t I think that it’s a dangerous idea to promote the ideas of Sheena Mason.” Mason is an assistant professor at the Oneonta campus of the State University of New York who wrote “Theory of Racelessness: A Case for Antirace(ism).”
“I argue to undo racism we have to undo our belief in race and our practice of racialization,” Mason said Thursday.
“That imposition of me seeing you as a fill-in-the-blank person, that practice automatically puts us in antagonistic relationship with each other which is then magnified depending on our politics,” Mason said.
“I love Lee,” Mason said. “I think she makes—I think she has a lot to learn, like any of us, and I think that because she’s aligned herself with my ways of thinking about race, in terms of my philosophies or my conclusions, that she makes the mistake of wanting to skip to the good part in some ways, like this idea that we can just automatically get rid of affinity groups.”
Lee doesn’t go that far in her narrative, but she provided a video of a community college district board meeting in which De Anza College groups representing Asian and Latino people criticize her.
“It is alarming that, not only is Dr. Lee refusing to do the work she was hired to do, she is actively seeking to undo the years of hard work toward antiracism that so many of us have painstakingly contributed to,” one speaker in the video said.
“I was very honest about who I am when I interviewed and I was supposedly selected because I was the strongest candidate and because the ‘wokeism’ from my office had slowed down equity progress on the campus because they were using divisive techniques like calling out people for ineffective teaching but not offering any solutions or suggestions to them and accusing them of being racist or not woke enough,” Lee wrote in her narrative.
Mason said Lee was put in “to be the token Black woman” but was expected to think one way.
“So you’re Black, so you’re supposed to think one way?” Mason said. “How is that not dehumanizing?”
Lee said, “I don’t have ideological or viewpoint fidelity to anyone. I’m looking for what’s going to help people and what will help our students and how we can be better teachers and our best teaching selves.”
The faculty director for a California college’s Office of Equity, Social Justice and Multicultural Education says she’s being terminated after she questioned antiracist “orthodoxy,” objected to the college’s land acknowledgments for an Indigenous tribe, tried to bring a “Jewish inclusion” event to campus, declined to join a “socialist network,” refused to use the gender-neutral terms “Latinx” and “Filipinx,” inquired why the word “Black” was capitalized but not “white,” and allegedly disrespected a founder of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Tabia Lee also wrote, in a narrative explaining her situation, that “I no longer participate in gender pronouns because I find that the same toxic ideologies around race ideologies are now being advanced under gender ideologies; I also find that the constant obsession with pronouns and declaration of pronouns causes deep discomfort for individuals who identify as gender fluid or who struggle with gender dysphoria.”
Lee (at right) is Black. She said an employee in her office accused her of “white speaking,” “whitesplaining” and supporting white supremacy.
Leaders and employees at De Anza College, the community college where Lee has been working on contract as a tenure-track faculty member, didn’t comment Thursday. A spokeswoman for the community college district that includes both De Anza and Foothill College wrote in an email that the district “has an obligation to protect privacy in personnel matters.”
“Without commenting on any specific matter, we can share that faculty members have comprehensive due process and appeals rights both under the law and negotiated through their bargaining unit,” the email said.
Cheryl Jaeger Balm, De Anza’s Academic Senate president and one of the people Lee accuses of working against her, wrote in an email that “we have been instructed to refer your inquiry” to the district spokeswoman.
Though she hasn’t yet filed a lawsuit—she told Inside Higher Ed she hasn’t “ruled it out”—Lee is now receiving support from the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR).
That organization filed an amicus brief in favor of the plaintiffs in the U.S. Supreme Court lawsuit who are trying to end affirmative action in college admissions. Megyn Kelly, Steven Pinker and Thomas Chatterton Williams are on its Board of Advisers.
“Our mission is to advance civil rights and liberties for all Americans,” said staff attorney Leigh Ann O’Neill, “and I guess the way we approach that is by promoting our common humanity, so we often refer to it as the pro-human approach.”
“In Dr. Lee’s case specifically, what I think is so important about the work she is doing is she is fostering open inquiry and diverse viewpoints and discussions among the people she is teaching,” O’Neill said. “And that is very much in line with FAIR’s approach. We don’t think that there’s one right way to do most things. It takes understanding different approaches, different viewpoints to find the right path forward.”
“We are often asked to support lawsuits,” O’Neill said, “so if she chooses to pursue legal action, we will be very eager to support her.”
Lee provided a letter that O’Neill wrote Friday to the community college district’s Board of Trustees. The letter urges the board to reject a recommendation by Judy Miner, the district’s chancellor, to not re-employ Lee next academic year.
Nevertheless, in another letter that Lee provided Inside Higher Ed, Miner notified her Tuesday that the board had voted Monday not to re-employ her “as a contract employee.”
Miner wrote that the reasons included Lee’s “Persistent inability to demonstrate cooperation in working with colleagues and staff,” her “Unwillingness to accept constructive criticism” and “No expectation on the part of the Tenure Review Committee after completion of Phases I and II that improvements in these two critical areas can ever be achieved.” Miner wrote that the board wouldn’t publicly report the decision until Lee exhausted her appeals.
“In all of the teacher education things I’ve done and been exposed to in more recent years, there are lots of ideologies being pushed—lots of time a single one, but no one names what it is,” Lee told Inside Higher Ed.
“I was told that [I] was supposed to only advance what at that time I was calling a third-wave antiracism ideology,” Lee said.
Lee’s page on the De Anza College website includes a link to a Feb. 28 essay that uses that term. The essay was published on a Substack website called the “Journal of Free Black Thought.”
Lee also provided a narrative of the alleged backlash at De Anza, beginning shortly after she started the position in August 2021. Lee said her Tenure Review Committee was reconstituted because she filed a grievance after being told she wouldn’t be recommended for continuance—before the Tenure Review Committee had handed down the decision.
“While the main or initial harasser resigned at the end of the 21-22 school year, the damage was already done,” Lee wrote. “One of his mentors—the same individual who invited me to the socialist network and accuse(d) me of disrespecting [Black Lives Matter co-founder] Alicia Garza—was seated on my Tenure Review Committee until she was removed as part of a grievance settlement.
“But her longtime friend, the dean of equity and engagement remained seated on the phase II committee and the games continued,” Lee wrote. “So, reconstituting the committee and replacing the old players with similarly aligned players didn’t stop me from encountering some really ugly opposition from third-wave antiracist woke activists who don’t care too much for me because I have not uncritically supported their narratives or ways of knowing/working.”
Lee also wrote that “I had to battle with my dean and my core team to bring the Jewish Inclusion and Antisemitism Summit to De Anza.” She wrote that the student government “passed a resolution condemning Israel for human rights abuses … and made no condemnation of other countries that are known human rights abuse offenders—but there is no issues here, right?”
“I was accused of ‘not being gender inclusive’ for not using the terms Latinx and Filipinx,” she wrote. “I explained to folks that I had served for decades in Latino communities and grew up in the Central Valley and that those terms did not originate in the working class communities I had served and worked with; in addition, I found these terms to be linguistic imperialism and an inappropriate attempt to make beautiful languages conform to English speaking social norms.”
She also said the college was acknowledging the wrong tribe for the land acknowledgments.
“I was called a ‘bitch’ and ‘dictatorial’ for calling for a moratorium on our land acknowledgement practices until we could incorporate changes suggested by Tribal Nations for real action and so that we could properly recognize the Tamien Nation as indigenous to De Anza College land,” Lee wrote.
“These exercises are done with a pseudo-religious flavor and they demand the compliance and agreement of all who are in attendance,” Lee wrote. “This is one of the reasons why I no longer engage in or encourage others to engage in Land Acknowledgments, Labor Acknowledgments, or Trauma/Victim/Survivor Acknowledgments.”
She said, “another evaluator asked me why I was telling people about race ideologies and didn’t I think that it’s a dangerous idea to promote the ideas of Sheena Mason.” Mason is an assistant professor at the Oneonta campus of the State University of New York who wrote “Theory of Racelessness: A Case for Antirace(ism).”
“I argue to undo racism we have to undo our belief in race and our practice of racialization,” Mason said Thursday.
“That imposition of me seeing you as a fill-in-the-blank person, that practice automatically puts us in antagonistic relationship with each other which is then magnified depending on our politics,” Mason said.
“I love Lee,” Mason said. “I think she makes—I think she has a lot to learn, like any of us, and I think that because she’s aligned herself with my ways of thinking about race, in terms of my philosophies or my conclusions, that she makes the mistake of wanting to skip to the good part in some ways, like this idea that we can just automatically get rid of affinity groups.”
Lee doesn’t go that far in her narrative, but she provided a video of a community college district board meeting in which De Anza College groups representing Asian and Latino people criticize her.
“It is alarming that, not only is Dr. Lee refusing to do the work she was hired to do, she is actively seeking to undo the years of hard work toward antiracism that so many of us have painstakingly contributed to,” one speaker in the video said.
“I was very honest about who I am when I interviewed and I was supposedly selected because I was the strongest candidate and because the ‘wokeism’ from my office had slowed down equity progress on the campus because they were using divisive techniques like calling out people for ineffective teaching but not offering any solutions or suggestions to them and accusing them of being racist or not woke enough,” Lee wrote in her narrative.
Mason said Lee was put in “to be the token Black woman” but was expected to think one way.
“So you’re Black, so you’re supposed to think one way?” Mason said. “How is that not dehumanizing?”
Lee said, “I don’t have ideological or viewpoint fidelity to anyone. I’m looking for what’s going to help people and what will help our students and how we can be better teachers and our best teaching selves.”
The faculty committee that criticized the University of Arizona in the wake of professor Thomas Meixner’s murder won’t continue its inquiry.
This comes after Pam Scott, a university spokeswoman, said the committee’s January interim report “reached sweeping conclusions based in large part on misleading characterizations and the selective use of facts and quotations.”
“We encourage everyone to await the comprehensive PAX Group report,” Scott wrote in early February, referring to the group of “outside safety and security experts” the university commissioned for a review.
On Friday, members of the faculty committee wrote a letter to the chair and vice chair of the faculty.
“Our inquiry intended to complement, not duplicate or challenge, investigations of hired security experts who were selected by the university leadership and who report to the university leadership,” they wrote. “The alternative to the committee’s inquiry is exclusive reliance on external experts who were selected by the university leadership, who report to the university leadership, and whose scope of engagement is vague.”
“Together, the university leadership’s dismissive approach to the committee and withdrawal of cooperation with the committee have undermined the committee’s ability to complete its inquiry,” they wrote. “The assumption that [university] employees [with safety responsibilities] feel safe to share their concerns and experiences with experts who report to the university leadership warrants reconsideration.”
“The university leadership has also declined multiple opportunities to diffuse [sic] concerns that service on the committee might result in negative consequences, including hard and soft forms of retaliation,” they wrote.
“It is the duty of the leadership to ensure that the organization has a coherent risk oversight framework and [to] foster a healthy organizational culture,” they wrote. “The university leadership, the committee believes, failed to meet this duty and there are no indications that any steps will be made to address the concerns outlined in the interim report.”
The January report argued that many at the university should have known that an expelled graduate student now accused of the murder was dangerous—long before he allegedly shot Meixner, chairman of the Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences (HAS) Department, multiple times in his own workplace.
Yet, the report said, multiple parts of the university repeatedly failed to effectively respond. It said the alleged killer had harassed “four HAS faculty members, a female undergraduate student and a Dean of Students (DOS) administrator.”
On Wednesday, Scott, the university spokeswoman, provided a statement from Jon Dudas, the university’s senior vice president and chief of staff.
“We appreciate the work the committee put into their report and that the committee’s entire record has been made available to the PAX Group—the third-party safety and security experts conducting an independent review of the events leading up to the tragic killing of our colleague Thomas Meixner and campus security in general,” Dudas said. “The university will continue to implement actions to advance campus safety and security and looks forward to reviewing and responding to the PAX Group’s findings and recommendations.”
Temple University announced Tuesday that it has restored the health insurance benefit it cut for striking members of the graduate student workers’ union.
But the university didn’t say anything about restoring tuition remission for the strikers, who have been asked to pay up by today. Temple’s cutting of their health and tuition benefits drew national media attention.
Temple University Graduate Students’ Association (TUGSA) members have been on strike for better pay and benefits since Jan. 31. Negotiations between it and the university resumed Tuesday and continued Wednesday.
“Because of the good faith effort shown by TUGSA, we are pleased to report that immediately, we will reinstate health-care subsidies for striking TUGSA members,” Ken Kaiser, Temple’s chief operating officer, said in a statement.
TUGSA didn’t provide an interview Wednesday, though members online contested the notion that it hadn’t been acting in good faith before.
A former University of Connecticut professor won a $1.4 million settlement from UConn, Hearst Connecticut Media Group reported Monday at CT Insider.
The article says Dr. Li Wang resigned in September 2019, one day before she was to be fired, after allegedly not disclosing financial affiliations with Wenzhou Medical University and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
In November 2021, the American Arbitration Association ordered UConn to reinstate Dr. Wang and provide back pay, Hearst Connecticut Media Group revealed, citing documents. But UConn told Inside Higher Ed Monday that Wang isn’t an employee and hasn’t been one since September 2019.
“The NIH [National Institutes of Health] backed UConn’s allegations and in letters to UConn officials agreed with its decisions regarding Wang,” the article says. “Documents obtained by Hearst Connecticut show that the NIH in 2018 first questioned whether Wang had disclosed financial affiliations with the Chinese institutions when applying for grant funding, a violation of NIH policy.”
But, the article says, arbitrator Peter Adomeit wrote in his decision that Dr. Wang “did not falsify any record or provide false information,” and that “The only offenses committed by Dr. Wang relate to citations to grants that suggest to the reader that she was the [principal investigator]. Dr. Wang erroneously cited herself on the Yale Liver and on [research paper] #443.”
Inside Higher Ed was unable to reach Dr. Wang Monday.
A University of Southern California professor has recalled his new book after the Los Angeles Times found at least “95 instances of plagiarism,” the newspaper reported.
Dr. David Agus—a professor of medicine and biomedical engineering who directs USC’s Lawrence J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine and its Center for Applied Molecular Medicine—didn’t provide comment to Inside Higher Ed Monday.
In an email, USC’s Keck School of Medicine said, “The university takes any allegations of plagiarism very seriously. We will review this matter consistently with the university’s processes. We are unable to comment further at this time given the confidential nature of personnel matters.”
Larry Hughes with Simon & Schuster, publisher of The Book of Animal Secrets: Nature’s Lessons for a Long and Happy Life, responded to an email sent to Dr. Agus, referring Inside Higher Ed to statements on the publisher’s website.
“I was recently made aware that in writing ‘The Book of Animal Secrets’ we relied upon passages from various sources without attribution, and that we used other authors’ words,” Dr. Agus’s statement said. “I want to sincerely apologize to the scientists and writers whose work or words were used or not fully attributed. Because I take any claims of plagiarism seriously, I am taking two immediate steps. First, I have asked the publisher to halt the publication of the book in all formats. Second, I will rewrite the passages in question with new language, will provide proper and full attribution and when ready will announce a new publication date.”
“We take these matters seriously, as does the author, and regret that these errors were included in the initial editions of the book,” Simon & Schuster said in its statement. “Dr. Agus has decided, with our full support, to recall the book, at his own expense, until a fully revised and corrected edition can be released … Simon & Schuster has ceased distribution of all formats of the book and advised our retail and distribution partners to return copies of the book.”
The L.A. Times reported that the book was scheduled to publish today.
The American Association of University Professors has now censured Indiana University Northwest (IUN) for firing a tenured Black professor after IUN alleged he said “words to the effect that ‘the only way to end racism is to kill all the white people.’”
An AAUP report released in January called “implausible” the allegation that Mark McPhail “actually threatened to hurt white people,” noting one person it interviewed called his manner “mild and soothing.”
“The [AAUP] committee cannot help drawing the sad conclusion that, if Professor McPhail had not questioned the racism on campus and at IU, he might have been spared, at least temporarily, from becoming a target of it,” the report said.
“The racial climate at IUN appears to be unwelcoming to faculty members of color,” the report says. “In Professor McPhail’s case, it appeared to have been downright hostile, as evidenced by the presence of racist tropes of incompetent, angry and physically violent Black men in the language used to justify his dismissal.”
McPhail was once the chief academic officer of IUN. He was a communication professor at the time of his 2021 firing and is now interim vice president for academic affairs and provost at Oregon’s Linfield University.
In a news release Monday, the AAUP said its governing council voted unanimously Saturday to add IUN to its list of censured administrations.
“AAUP censure informs the academic community and the public at large that conditions for academic freedom and tenure at the institution are unsound,” the release said.
McPhail filed a lawsuit over the situation that is ongoing. He is seeking, among other things, back pay, punitive damages and reinstatement next academic year.
IUN didn’t respond to requests for comment Monday.
A former University of Connecticut professor won a $1.4 million settlement from UConn, Hearst Connecticut Media Group reported Monday at CT Insider.
The article says Dr. Li Wang resigned in September 2019, one day before she was to be fired, after allegedly not disclosing financial affiliations with Wenzhou Medical University and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
In November 2021, the American Arbitration Association ordered UConn to reinstate Dr. Wang and provide back pay, Hearst Connecticut Media Group revealed, citing documents. But UConn told Inside Higher Ed Monday that Wang isn’t an employee and hasn’t been one since September 2019.
“The NIH [National Institutes of Health] backed UConn’s allegations and in letters to UConn officials agreed with its decisions regarding Wang,” the article says. “Documents obtained by Hearst Connecticut show that the NIH in 2018 first questioned whether Wang had disclosed financial affiliations with the Chinese institutions when applying for grant funding, a violation of NIH policy.”
But, the article says, arbitrator Peter Adomeit wrote in his decision that Dr. Wang “did not falsify any record or provide false information,” and that “The only offenses committed by Dr. Wang relate to citations to grants that suggest to the reader that she was the [principal investigator]. Dr. Wang erroneously cited herself on the Yale Liver and on [research paper] #443.”
Inside Higher Ed was unable to reach Dr. Wang Monday.
The American Association of University Professors has now censured Indiana University Northwest (IUN) for firing a tenured Black professor after IUN alleged he said “words to the effect that ‘the only way to end racism is to kill all the white people.’”
An AAUP report released in January called “implausible” the allegation that Mark McPhail “actually threatened to hurt white people,” noting one person it interviewed called his manner “mild and soothing.”
“The [AAUP] committee cannot help drawing the sad conclusion that, if Professor McPhail had not questioned the racism on campus and at IU, he might have been spared, at least temporarily, from becoming a target of it,” the report said.
“The racial climate at IUN appears to be unwelcoming to faculty members of color,” the report says. “In Professor McPhail’s case, it appeared to have been downright hostile, as evidenced by the presence of racist tropes of incompetent, angry and physically violent Black men in the language used to justify his dismissal.”
McPhail was once the chief academic officer of IUN. He was a communication professor at the time of his 2021 firing and is now interim vice president for academic affairs and provost at Oregon’s Linfield University.
In a news release Monday, the AAUP said its governing council voted unanimously Saturday to add IUN to its list of censured administrations.
“AAUP censure informs the academic community and the public at large that conditions for academic freedom and tenure at the institution are unsound,” the release said.
McPhail filed a lawsuit over the situation that is ongoing. He is seeking, among other things, back pay, punitive damages and reinstatement next academic year.
IUN didn’t respond to requests for comment Monday.
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