AcademicFreedom and Tenure:

THE STATE UNIVERSITY OFNEW YORK1

I. BackgroundIn 1948, the Governor and the legislature of the State ofNew York acted to create the State University of NewYork (SUNY), which brought together a number ofstate-supported institutions, some of them tracing theirorigins to normal schools founded more than a centuryago. The University was established under a Board ofTrustees, of whose members fifteen are appointed bythe Governor for ten-year terms, and the sixteenth, thechairman of the University Student Senate, serveswithout a vote. The Chancellor, the chief executiveofficer of the University, is appointed by the Board ofTrustees, and the administration of individual cam-puses is entrusted to presidents appointed by the Boardof Trustees on the recommendation of the Chancellorand of each college's council. University policies aredetermined by the Board of Trustees with the advice ofthe Chancellor, who in turn seeks the advice of campusadministrators through monthly meetings (except inJuly and August) of a University Council of Presidents.The Chancellor at the time of the events described inthis report, Dr. Ernest L. Boyer, had served in that posi-tion since 1970. He has since resigned to accept ap-pointment in Washington, D.C., as Commissioner ofEducation in the Department of Health, Education,and Welfare.

Although developed largely out of about a dozen

1 The text of this report was written in the first instance by themembers of the investigating committee. In accordance withAssociation practice, the text was sent to the Association'sCommittee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, to theteachers at whose request the investigation was conducted, toadministrative officers and chapter presidents in the StateUniversity of New York, and to other persons directly con-cerned in the report. In light of the responses received, theAssociation's staff has revised the report for publication.

teacher colleges and half a dozen two-year agriculturaland technical colleges, SUNY has come, through aseries of changes and additions, to include four univer-sity centers (two of which have medical centers), twoseparate medical centers, three specialized colleges(such as the College of Environmental Service andForestry), and five statutory colleges attached to privateuniversities (such as the College of Ceramics at AlfredUniversity). One of the former teacher colleges hasbecome a university center (Albany), and the rest havebecome multi-purpose Colleges of Arts and Science,although teacher education continues to be a primaryfunction. The total number of campuses is now thirty-four.2 In addition, SUNY provides partial support for

2 The institutions in the State University are:UNIVERSITY CENTERSState University at AlbanyState University at BinghamtonState University at BuffaloState University at Stony Brook

MEDICAL CENTERSDownstate Medical Center at BrooklynUpstate Medical Center at Syracuse

COLLEGES OF ARTS AND SCIENCECollege at BrockportCollege at BuffaloCollege at CortlandEmpire State CollegeCollege at FredoniaCollege at GeneseoCollege at New PaltzCollege at Old WestburyCollege at OneontaCollege at OswegoCollege at PlattsburghCollege at PotsdamCollege at PurchaseCollege at Utica/Rome

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thirty community colleges, the policies of which aredetermined by local boards of trustees. This report isnot concerned with the community colleges or thestatutory colleges.

Among them, the SUNY institutions offer a widevariety of programs leading to associate, bachelor's,master's, and doctor's degrees. In the fall of 1974, about190,000 full- and part-time students were enrolled atthe state-operated institutions, and there were approxi-mately 7,750 full-time faculty members in the fourranks from instructor to professor. In 1975, there wereabout 200,000 full- and part-time students and 7,800full-time faculty members, and in 1976, about 197,000full- and part-time students and 7,850 faculty mem-bers.3 For the period 1964-74, SUNY, with 3,373,ranked twenty-first among the nation's universities fortotal number of doctorates granted.4

Faculty government varies from campus to campus,with most campuses having faculty senates or councilswhich make recommendations to their administratorson such matters as curriculum and degree require-ments. Campuses also elect representatives to the state-wide University Faculty Senate, which meets at leasttwice a year to consider matters related to the academicprogram of the university as a whole.

SPECIALIZED COLLEGESCollege of Environmental

Science and Forestryat Syracuse

Maritime College at FortSchuyler (Bronx)

College of Optometry atNew York City

AGRICULTURAL it TECHNICALCOLLEGES (TWO-YEAR)

Alfred DelhiCanton FarmingdaleCobleskill Morrisville

STATUTORY COLLEGESCollege of Ceramics at

Alfred UniversityCollege of Agriculture &

Life Sciences at CornellUniversity

College of Human Ecology atCornell University

School of Industrial & LaborRelations at Cornell University

Veterinary College atCornell University

3 The SUNY enrollments are derived from the SecondDraft of The Regents Tentative Statewide Plan for the Devel-opment of Post-secondary Education, the New York StateEducation Department, October, 1976. The number of full-time faculty is derived from the Committee Z reports in theAAUP Bulletin, August, 1975, 1976, and 1977.

4 Elfrida L. Burnett, Doctor's Degrees Conferred by AllU.S. Institutions: by State, Academic Field, Sex, and Institu-tion—1964 through 1973-1974, Department of Health, Edu-cation, and Welfare, November, 1976.

Since 1971, the SUNY faculties have been repre-sented by a collective bargaining agent, which nego-tiates with the State of New York on salaries, fringebenefits, and terms and conditions of employment inaccordance with the provisions of New York's publicemployee bargaining law, the "Taylor Law" In thefirst election of 1970, no candidate for bargaining agentreceived a majority. The leading contenders were theSenate Professional Association (SPA), a local organiza-tion established by the University Faculty Senate forthe purpose of bargaining, and the State UniversityFederation of Teachers, an affiliate of the AmericanFederation of Teachers (AFT). The other candidates onthe ballot were the SUNY Council of the AmericanAssociation of University Professors, the Civil ServiceEmployees Association, and "no agent. " The SenateProfessional Association defeated the AFT local in therun-off election. Shortly thereafter the Senate Profes-sional Association affiliated with the New York StateTeachers Association (NYSTA), an affiliate of the Na-tional Education Association (NEA), and negotiated itsfirst contract effective as of July, 1971.

By the time the second contract was negotiated in1974, a merger had been effected between the AFT andthe SPA. The merged organization, United UniversityProfessions, Inc. (UUP), was affiliated with the NEA,the AFT, and their merged statewide affiliate, the NewYork State United Teachers (NYSUT).

The contract in force at the time of the events de-scribed in this report was to have expired on June 30,1976, but it remained in effect until a new contract wasagreed to in March, 1977. In 1976, the UUP mem-bership, consistent with the general failure of the NEA-AFT merger in New York State, voted to withdrawfrom the NEA; as a result, the UUP is now affiliatedsolely with the American Federation of Teachers.

As they were for many other institutions, the 1960swere years of enormous growth for SUNY. Budgets,enrollments, and numbers of faculty and support staffincreased rapidly. The University of Buffalo becamepart of SUNY in 1962; the College of Arts and Scienceat Old Westbury was established in 1968, and EmpireState College in 1971. Early in the 1970s, however,SUNY, like other institutions, began to feel the effectsof a straitened economy and a declining rate of studentpopulation growth. In spite of a University request for a1971-72 appropriation of $567,000,000, the total ac-tually reached only $485,000,000. By the time of hisinauguration in January, 1975, Governor Hugh Careyconsidered the State of New York to be confronting afiscal crisis which, though not as severe as that of NewYork City, would require extraordinary corrective mea-sures. For the fiscal year 1974-75 (extending from April1, 1974, to March 31, 1975), the state legislature hadappropriated approximately $542,000,000 of the totalSUNY budget of $918,000,000, and for fiscal 1975-76, ithad appropriated $567,000,000 of a total SUNY budgetof $967,000,000. For 1976-77, the legislature decreasedits appropriation to $528,000,000 of a total SUNY bud-get of $943,000,000, although the state-appropriated

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amount represented a slightly higher proportion of theentire state budget than in the previous year (6.1 per-cent as compared to 6 percent).

In June, 1975, Governor Carey directed, through thestate's Office of the Budget, that SUNY's base budgetbe reduced by $10,000,000, a decrease which requiredthe deletion of some budget lines and would be carriedover into ensuing budgets. In December, 1975, he or-dered all state agencies to reduce expenses by 3 per centbefore the end of February by terminating the servicesof persons who were on the state payroll as of Decem-ber 8, 1975. A reduction by $55,000,000 of the SUNYappropriation for 1976-77 was submitted to the leg-islature in January, 1976, and approved in April;but, through a supplemental appropriation and in-creases in tuition and fees for the academic year1976-77, the University was able to limit its dollar im-pact to $30,000,000. The legislature also restored somecuts in the Governor's proposed budget for the Uni-versity.

In a resolution adopted on May 28, 1975, the Univer-sity's Board of Trustees stated as its premise that it was"necessary and important" for the University to under-take a study of priorities in order that it might "respondcreatively to fiscal restraints" and serve all segments ofthe University and society most effectively in the yearsjust ahead. Accordingly, the Board authorized theChancellor to implement a "campus-by-campus reviewto determine those programs which should be strength-ened and those which should be consolidated for thefuture " in time for "the 1976 master planning cycle,with the results of Phase I of the studies to be availablein time to be incorporated in the planning for the 1976-77 University-wide budget recommendations."

On June 1, 1975, Chancellor Ernest Boyer issued aneight-point statement, the first point of which estab-lished the general guidelines for individual campus re-views :

1. Every State University president, with appropriate con-sultation, will be asked to examine all authorized degreeprograms, identifying those which should be continued andstrengthened as well as those which should be reduced orphased out. Class size, enrollment patterns, faculty andstaff recruitment and promotion procedures will be ana-lyzed.

As part of his statement, Chancellor Boyer announcedthat within thirty days he would appoint a UniversityCommission on Purposes and Priorities, the initial re-port of which would be submitted to the Board ofTrustees by September 30, 1976. The Commission wasappointed on July 11 and submitted its first interimreport in September, a second interim report in Decem-ber, and a final report in June, 1976.

On June 9, 1975, about a month before the appoint-ment of the Commission, Vice Chancellor for Financeand Business Harry K. Spindler circulated a memo-randum to the SUNY presidents containing guidelinesmore specific than those in Chancellor Boyer's state-ment of June 1. "This review," he wrote,

shall be directed to a strengthening of demonstrated worth-while existing activities and a shaping of new ways ofserving the people of this State, while eliminating or cur-tailing those programs for which interest has been minimalor where reasonable standards of effectiveness cannot beaffirmed or must be treated as lower priority in the face ofresource limitation and a commitment to qualitative per-formance of our highest priority programs.

In January, 1976, in introducing the proposed budgetfor 1976-77, the University administration noted someof the effects in 1975 of the reduced budget base andthe review of academic programs. The reduction of$10,000,000 in the budget base had required "the abo-lition of 528 positions throughout the system," andacademic programs abolished including a nursing pro-gram at the Upstate Medical Center, the Allen Colle-giate Center at Albany,6 and a baccalaureate degreeprogram in German at the College at Plattsburgh. Mostchanges in 1975, however, appear to have been effectedwithout widespread disruption of academic programs orthe removal of individuals from faculty positions. Theabolition of a position, in fact, did not necessarily meanthat someone was removed from the position, sincesome positions (or budget lines, as they are commonlycalled) had not been filled or, having fallen vacantthrough resignations, deaths, retirements, or transfers,were simply eliminated.

In any event, no significant number of individualfaculty complaints was lodged with the American Asso-ciation of University Professors until 1976, followingthe Governor's imposition of a 3 per cent reduction inthe expenses of all state agencies and the reduction ofthe annual legislative appropriation from $567,000,000for the fiscal year 1975-76 to $528,000,000 for fiscal1976-77. On April 21, 1976, the Association's ActingGeneral Secretary wrote to Chancellor Boyer to informhim that a "large and increasing number of facultymembers" at SUNY had been registering complaintswith the Association after being informed by their in-stitutional administrative officers that their appoint-ments would be terminated, and to call to ChancellorBoyer's attention that many of the termination actionsseemed to have been directed "both against facultymembers on continuous appointment or tenure andagainst faculty members on multi-year term appoint-ments with termination sought prior to the appoint-ment's expiration." He mentioned that these actionsraised "a series of basic concerns" for the Associationunder its longstanding commitment to the principles ofacademic freedom and tenure and particularly under itsstandards for "Termination of Faculty Appointmentsbecause of Financial Exigency, Discontinuance of aProgram or Department, or Medical Reasons."6 He took

5 The academic program of the Allen Collegiate Center isdescribed below in the section dealing with specific retrench-ment actions in Albany.

6 AAUP Bulletin, 61(December, 1975), pp. 329-331.

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the occasion of his letter, copies of which were sent tothe presidents of all SUNY colleges and universities,primarily to urge that notice of one year be given to allpersons affected instead of notices of "only a fewmonths, or a few weeks, or even less," as the Associa-tion had been informed was happening. On April 29,the Acting General Secretary again wrote to ChancellorBoyer, this time to call attention to the assurance givenby the administration of the University Center at Buf-falo on April 23 that all faculty members who were tolose positions as a result of reductions or retrenchmentwould receive a year's notice. He urged that this policybe adopted at all the SUNY institutions.

On June 2, Chancellor Boyer met with Associationstaff members during the course of a visit to Washing-ton, and on June 9, the Acting General Secretary, byletter, provided Chancellor Boyer with a list of tenuredfaculty members at SUNY who had been given noticein the early months of 1976 and had brought their casesto the Association's attention. The list (supplementedby an additional name sent to Chancellor Boyer on June16) included the names of two faculty members at theUniversity Center at Binghamton, three at the Collegeof Brockport, two at the College at Oneonta, and one atthe Agricultural and Technical College at Alfred. Cop-ies of the Acting General Secretary's letters were sent tothe presidents of these institutions.

On July 1, Chancellor Boyer replied as follows:

Thanks for your good note and the attached letter. I wouldbe pleased to meet with you again. Let's see if somethingcan be arranged. Warm regards.

On July 17, the Acting General Secretary wrote toexpress interest in a further meeting and to offer totravel to Albany for that purpose with the Director ofthe Association's Northeast Regional Office. On July 21,a call to Chancellor Boyer's office elicited the informa-tion that the Chancellor would not return from vacationuntil August 2. Although a meeting was scheduled forAugust 9, it was cancelled by Chancellor Boyer; and onAugust 6, the Director of the Northeast Regional Officesent Chancellor Boyer a one-and-one-half-page memo-randum originally prepared for the August 9 meetingand outlining a number of Association concerns re-specting the notices to faculty members at SUNY. Hereported that the Acting General Secretary was con-sidering appointing an ad hoc committee to "examineconditions of academic freedom and tenure and dueprocess within SUNY, with particular reference to sev-eral of the cases cited in our previous communicationsto you and the campus presidents. '

The August 6 memorandum and its covering letterbrought no reply, and, in the absence of any assurancethat cases brought to the Chancellor's attention wouldbe suitably resolved, the Acting General Secretarywrote to Chancellor Boyer on September 17 to an-nounce that the Association would conduct a formalinvestigation.

The undersigned ad hoc investigating committee,which has operated independent of any other AAUP in-

terests relating to SUNY, visited SUNY campuses dur-ing the week of December 6, 1976. Chancellor Boyerwas then on an extended leave of absence abroad; buton December 6, the committee met with Acting Chan-cellor James F. Kelly, members of his staff, and thepresidents of those SUNY institutions from which theAssociation had by then received formal faculty com-plaints. On December 6 and 7 the committee conductedinterviews at the University Center at Albany, fromwhich some half a dozen complaints had recently cometo the Association. The committee then divided, withone member (assisted by a member who has since re-signed) visiting the University Center at Binghamtonon December 8 and the other two visiting the Collegeat Oneonta on December 8 and, on December 9, theCollege at New Paltz, where four faculty members hadfiled complaints with the Association. The chairman ofthe committee visited the College at Brockport on De-cember 10. A scheduled January visit by two membersof the committee to the University Center at StonyBrook was cancelled when President John S. Toll re-fused to meet with the committee members because, ashe viewed it, an amicus brief which the Association hadfiled with the Supreme Court of the State of New Yorkhad compromised the investigation. The investigatingcommittee regrets that it was thus denied the opportu-nity to consult with the administrative officers concern-ing the actions at Stony Brook during the retrenchmentperiod, and it sees little validity in the reason given byPresident Toll for the denial. The Association's briefwas submitted as a friend of the court, and its functionwas to outline relevant Association policies in the StonyBrook case. It has in no way influenced the investigatingcommittee's view of the Stony Brook actions.

Committee members were courteously received bythe Acting Chancellor and his staff and by the presi-dents of individual institutions, and they were providedwith all available public documents that they re-quested. No visits were made to the Alfred and Cort-land campuses, each of which involved only one case.At the meeting in the Acting Chancellor's office, fourrepresentatives of the United University Professionswho were present stated that they thought it in-appropriate for the administration to be holding dis-cussions with a committee of the American Associationof University Professors; and at each subquent meetingwith an institutional president at least one UUP repre-sentative was also present. At all meetings with admin-istrative officers, negotiations were avoided as a matterof course, and once or twice discussion was interruptedwhen an institutional president expressed the view thathis response to a specific question might tend to takehim into areas which were reserved to the UUP asexclusive agent for the faculty under the Taylor Law, orwhich bore upon litigation then under way. In spite ofthese constraints, discussions with administrative offi-cers were conducted with a high degree of opennessand candor, as were the much more numerous dis-cussions with faculty members and, at one institution,with a small group of students.

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II. The Retrenchment-SUNY Central

The 1975 "Policies of the Board of Trustees" providefor a tenure system under which "continuing appoint-ment" is achieved by professors and associate professorsno later than after three consecutive years at a SUNYcampus and by assistant professors after three years inrank and seven years at the University. Notice of non-reappointment, under the "Policies," is to be given toprobationary faculty members by March 1 in the firstyear of service and by December 15 in the second, withtwelve months' notice after two or more years' service.Dismissal of faculty members on continuing appoint-ments can be effected for cause, defined in the "Poli-cies" as "inadequate performance of duties, mis-conduct or violation of these Policies," with the facultymember entitled to have charges heard by the Univer-sity's Standing Committee on Terminations. A similarsystem of "permanent appointments" is provided forthe University's professional employees, known at theUniversity as "Non-teaching Professionals."

With respect to retrenchment, Article XIV, Title E,of the "Policies" reads as follows:

The services of any members of the academic staff may beterminated in the event of financial or program retrench-ment. If the Chancellor anticipates that such retrenchmentmay be necessary, he shall seek the advice of the FacultySenate concerning the policy to be followed in the reduc-tion of staff.

The collective bargaining Agreement between theState of New York and United University Professions,Inc., which was in effect between July, 1974, andMarch, 1977, contained no separate provision for atenure system, but did duplicate the Board's policy onnotice. Of particular relevance to the investigatingcommittee's inquiry, however, is Article 35, which dealswith retrenchment and defines it as follows:

the termination of the employment of any academic orprofessional employee during any appointment, other thana temporary appointment which may be terminated at anytime, as a result of financial exigency, reallocation of re-sources, reorganization of degree or curricular offerings orrequirements, reorganization of academic or administrativestructures, programs or functions University-wide or atsuch level of organization of the University as a campus,department,,unit, program or such other level of organiza-tion of the University as the Chancellor or his designeedeems appropriate.

Under the Agreement, the Chancellor or his designee("Consistent with the mission of the level of organiza-tion of the University at which retrenchment occurs"and "after such consultation as may, in his judgment,be appropriate") shall apply retrenchment "among em-ployees holding the same or similar positions" in "in-verse order of appointment within each affected groupof employees." Specifically, part-time employees wereto be released before full-time, full-time "academicemployees" (i.e., faculty) on term appointments before

those holding continuing appointments, and full-timeprofessional employees holding term appointments be-fore those holding permanent appointments. As for no-tice, persons affected by retrenchment were to be noti-fied "as soon as practicable recognizing that, wherecircumstances permit, it is desirable" to provide at leastfour months' notice to those on term appointments andat least a semester's notice to those on continuing orpermanent appointments.

In further clauses on retrenchment, the Agreementprovided that the released employee would be givenspecial consideration for placement within the Univer-sity if "a suitable position" was available for which theindividual was "otherwise qualified"; and that for aperiod of two years the released employee would beoffered re-employment in the same or similar position ifan opening should occur at the affected campus.

When he reported to the University Faculty Senateat its January 31-February 1 meeting in 1975, Chancel-lor Boyer commented on the state's financial difficultiesand expressed the view that "the state has faced a fiscalcrisis comparable to the one that was faced in '70-71. 'He called attention to an expected gap between reve-nues and projected state expenditures of half a billion toa billion dollars and to proposed new taxes to assist inbridging the gap. He noted that the overall new execu-tive budget for the fiscal year 1975-76, although in-creased for SUNY by some $37,000,000, contained onlyabout half the increase "we had preferred."

"Nothing in this budget," he added, however,"would even hint, if it holds, at a retrenchment orpersonnel dismissal, although in my first reading itsuggests that at most, of the arts and science colleges,there would probably be a net reduction of one or twoor three faculty positions. These would be unfilled."

In subsequent discussion, the University FacultySenate adopted a position paper entitled "Retrench-ment Benefits and Accommodations," which amongother things called for discussion by the chief adminis-trative officer with involved departments and campusgovernment committees when retrenchment on indi-vidual campuses was being considered, suggestedguidelines for the reassigning of retrenched per-sons, and expressed the view that retrenched personsshould be given a year's salary after notice of retrench-ment in order that they might have adequate time torelocate. By vote of the Senate, the paper was sent tothe Chancellor for his consideration as the Senate's"partial response to Art. XIV, Title E. of the Policies ofthe Board of Trustees," which required the Chancellorto consult with the Senate when a retrenchment isanticipated. The Senate also endorsed "selective cut-ting rather than across-the-board cutting if further re-duction is necessary."

Section 35 of the collective bargaining Agreementbecame, of course, the principal referral point when adecision to retrench was reached in mid-1975 and an-nounced to the presidents of SUNY institutions. TheBoard of Trustees, as we have seen, directed the Chan-cellor on May 28, 1975, to implement a campus-by-

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campus review immediately "to determine those pro-grams which should be continued and strengthenedand those which should be consolidated or phased out."Three days later, on June 1, Chancellor Boyer in-structed the presidents to examine, "with appropriateconsultation," all degree programs and identify "thosewhich should be continued and strengthened as well asthose which should be reduced or phased out." On June9, Vice Chancellor for Finance and Business Harry K.Spindler issued a five-page memorandum of "Prelimi-nary Guidelines" to the presidents, and on June 23,Vice Chancellor for Faculty and Staff Relations JeromeB. Komisar issued a further five-page memorandum on"Retrenchment Procedures."

In emphasizing the "twofold purpose" of redirectingsome resources "to more effective enterprises" and "ul-timate divestiture of some allocations towards a newlyformed base level of operations," the Spindler memo-randum specifically ruled out the possibility of meetingthe budget constraints with a general belt-tightening:

It is intended that selective program excision will occur andthat any across the board application of budget cuts wouldlead to a mediocrity which is contrary to the goals andintentions of this University.

The memorandum announced further that the re-view process would begin immediately and that result-ing actions could be initiated as early as July, 1975,"with the preponderance of changes scheduled to takeplace in the academic year commencing with the sum-mer of 1976." Reductions, however, were to be realizedin the fiscal year 1976-77 (April 1 to March 31) "to theamounts prescribed for each individual campus."

The University Faculty Senate endorsed this generalapproach at its meeting of January, 1976, as did theUniversity Commission on Purposes and Priorities,which submitted its second interim report in Decem-ber, 1975. When asked by the Association's ad hoccommittee why the administration, in accordance withthe "Policies of the Board of Trustees," did not consultwith the University Faculty Senate before it announcedits plans for retrenchment, Acting Chancellor Kellyguessed that it was assumed that the retrenchmentprovisions of the collective bargaining Agreement hadsuperseded the Board's policy on this point.

After the general retrenchment policy had been an-nounced in Vice Chancellor Spindler's memorandum ofJune 9, 1975, the role of the central administrationseems to have been largely to clarify questions of pol-icy, to report actions of the Office of the Budget or thelegislature, to circulate information from campus tocampus so that local decisions on retrenchment mightbe made with some knowledge of their likely impactupon the program of the University as a whole, and toset deadlines and see that they were met. Vice Chancel-lor Komisar's June 23 memorandum contained analysesof three hypothetical situations aimed at assisting presi-dents in resolving difficult questions as to what consti-tuted a unit of retrenchment and what faculty members

might be included in it. In a June 26 memorandum,Chancellor Boyer made it clear that, for the purposes ofretrenchment under Article 35 of the Agreement, theinstitutional presidents were his "designees. ' On Janu-ary 23, 1976, Vice Chancellor Spindler reviewed recentretrenchment actions and provided the presidents withguidelines and a timetable for implementing the 1976-77 budget. The memorandum called for two lists fromeach of the presidents: the first, due by February 15,was to include the names of employees who would beoccupying, after February 29, 1976, positions to beabolished as a result of the $10,000,000 base budgetreduction or who were to be removed under the 1976-77 executive budget; the second, due by March 15, wasto include the names of additional persons, not pre-viously identified, whose removal was made necessaryby the reduction in the 1976-77 budget. Individuals inboth groups were to be removed from their positionsbefore August 31, 1976, and all program changes wereto be decided upon by April 1.

Within the guidelines set down in the Agreement,and consistent with the constraints of the budget, theoverall University program, and the institution's mis-sion, individual presidents seem to have been givenbroad discretion to act as they saw fit. Required underthe collective bargaining Agreement to consult only asthey thought appropriate, the presidents employedvarying procedures before deciding upon those pro-grams to reduce or eliminate, and their consultationwith faculty groups varied widely in extent and form.The procedures followed on campuses from which fac-ulty members lodged complaints with the Association,along with some of the specific retrenchment actions,are described in the following sections.

III. The University Center at AlbanyIn early January, 1975, six months before he was to

relinquish the presidency of the University Center atAlbany, President Louis T. Benezet appointed a SelectCommittee on Academic Programs and Priorities. Thecommittee was instructed to review the full range of theUniversity Center's offerings and "to recommendpriorities 'in the light of increasing constraints posedby the State's budget for higher education." The com-mittee was to proceed on the assumption of "steadystate resources or, at the most, limited additional re-sources for those programs in the best position to makeuse of them."

The Select Committee, reporting in mid-May, in-cluded recommendations to discontinue some pro-grams—e.g., the Allen Collegiate Center, and graduateprograms in astronomy and business eduction. But itstressed that none of its recommendations was "so radi-cal or immediate that it would jeopardize the programsof any student or abrogate the existing contract of anyfaculty member or other university employee." Morespecifically, it noted, "nothing in this Committees re-port contemplates or endorses the dismissal of tenuredfaculty as a result of its recommendation." The com-mittee further expressed its view that any decisions

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regarding changes of university personnel, but espe-cially instructional positions at Albany, would require areview of the University Center's entire budget andfiscal management: that is, a decision to declare re-trenchment would have to be justified by a much morecomprehensive review than the committee itself hadconducted. It would have to be justified, moreover, onfinancial grounds.

The Select Committee's report, four months in themaking, was issued on May 19, two days after classeshad ended and thirteen days before Commencement.Departments and schools were given a week to respondto the report, and, according to President Benezet,there was "remarkably consistent support" for theCommittee's recommendations except from "thoseschools and departments negatively affected."

On May 28, President Benezet informed an Ad HocConsultation Committee on Academic Priorities, whichhad been appointed by the University Senate, that therevised state budget left no alternative to retrenchmentand asked it to endorse the principle of selective—asopposed to across-the-board—cutting. The committeevoted to endorse that principle. In late June, PresidentBenezet announced that the "continuing series of fi-nancial negatives from state budgeting has left theadministration with no option but to ask the Chancellorto designate authority to the President of the Albanycampus to declare retrenchment by program. . . . " Henoted that hard choices would have to be made be-tween programs to be cut back or phased out and thatretrenchments would include a few faculty members oncontinuing appointments—something that neither "anoutgoing nor an incoming president can view . . . asanything but the most repugnant of prospective univer-sity actions." He added that the "agreed way by whichsuch hard decisions have been approached was by ex-tensive peer review, response and consultation."

Approximately forty faculty members, twenty ofwhom were tenured, were given notice by June, 1975,that their positions would be terminated at the close of thenext academic year, and President Benezet's decisionswith regard to retrenchment were announced to thefaculty in a report entitled "Academic Priorities at theState University at Albany, July 1, 1975." The reporthad been signed by President Benezet on June 23. OnJuly 1, Dr. Emmett B. Fields, who had been a VicePresident at the University of Houston, assumed theAlbany presidency. He had been kept fully informed ofdevelopments throughout the preceding months, andhe fully concurred in the actions of his predecessor.

In January, 1976, faced with the prospect of furtherrestrictive budgets, President Fields appointed a TaskForce on Priorities and Resources to "(1) assess allacademic and support programs of the University, (2)recommend priority rankings for program claims onresources, and (3) consult and advise me on the devel-opment of the University's operating budget in the nextyear." The Task Force was to be guided by three strate-gic principles: the preservation and nurturing of pro-grams essential and central to a university; the preser-

vation of quality where it exists; and the preservationand nurturing of programs that "uniquely address" theUniversity Center's immediate environment, The StateCapital District of New York. In addition, the TaskForce was instructed to "locate at least thirty-threefaculty lines which would be terminated by the state in1976-77 (six in the previously announced 1976-77 Exec-utive Budget)."

Relying heavily on the work already done by theSelect Committee, the Task Force reviewed the Univer-sity's offerings and prepared recommendations regard-ing the University Center's future, and it submitted itsreport by its deadline, moved up from March 1 toFebruary 23. On February 24, the full report wasprinted in the Albany Student Press, and PresidentFields forwarded copies to various University officerswith a request that they respond to the recommenda-tions in their areas of responsibility by March 2 so that"the views of units directly affected by the Task Forcerecommendations may be reflected in the consultativeprocess." President Fields also forwarded copies of thereport to the Council on Educational Policy of theAlbany Faculty Senate, with a request that it advisehim by March 4 concerning the soundness of the TaskForce's procedures and conclusions, and to the Execu-tive Committee of the Senate, which was asked both toadvise on the report and to make recommendations forresolving any differences between the Task Force reportand the Council's review. After considering the variousresponses, the Task Force reaffirmed its original con-clusions on March 11, and President Fields publiclyannounced his acceptance of them on March 16, 1976.On April 26, President Fields' report was in turn ac-cepted by Chancellor Boyer.

In summary, President Fields called for a reductionof programs in the School of Education; a terminationof doctoral programs in classics, French, and Romancelanguages; a termination of master's programs in arthistory, comparative and world literature, Italian,Latin-American studies, and speech pathology and au-diology; and a termination of bachelor's programs in arthistory, astronomy, comparative and world literature,environmental studies, inter-American studies, Italian,nursing, and speech pathology and audiology. Somepositions or programs were to be terminated by August31, 1977, and faculty members whose appointmentswere thus being terminated were sent formal notices inmid-May. Other programs, like those in nursing and inspeech pathology and audiology, were to be phasedout over a period of three or more years.

As a result of these decisions, a group of facultymembers established a Committee of Concerned Fac-ulty and a substantial number of complaints were filedwith the American Association of University Professors,which had already been consulted by faculty membersfollowing the retrenchment actions of 1975. Many fac-ulty members, in fact, have sought redress through onemeans or another. Accurate figures have been difficultto obtain, but at least twenty grievances have been filedunder the collective bargaining Agreement, and a num-

AUGUST 1977 243

ber of suits are pending against the University or spe-cific University officers. As for tenured faculty membersaffected by the notices issued in 1975 and 1976, theinvestigating committee has been able to identify somethirty, as contrasted with the twelve listed in the com-pilation prepared for the investigating committee bythe SUNY-Central staff. (See Table 1.)

Some Specific Retrenchment Actions

The Allen Center. The James E. Allen Jr., CollegiateCenter was organized in 1970-71 as an experimentalfour-year degree-granting program for special students.In March, 1975, President Benezet announed his in-tention to declare the Allen Center a retrenchmentunit, and in June, 1975, having been supported in thatintention by the Select Committee report of May, 1975,

Table 1Termination of Faculty Appointments

on Grounds of Retrenchment9/74-9/76°

Campus

AlbanyBinghamtonBuffalo (Univ)Stony BrookDownstate Med.Upstate Med.BrockportBuffalo (Col)CortlandFredoniaGeneseoOld WestburyNew PaltzOneontaOswegoPlattsburghPotsdamPurchaseUtica/RomeEmpireAlfredCantonCobleskillDelhiFarmingdaleMorrisvilleForestryMaritimeOptometryCentral Admins.

TOTALS:

Number of Number ofFaculty Appointments Faculty

Terminated

TermFaculty

187

161425

1022000110287004202000000

103

TenuredFaculty

1221

1230711200735020001002001000

62

Re-employed

Term TenuredFaculty Faculty

516801612000000020001100000000

34

210800311000704010000001000000

29

* Prepared by SUNY Central Administration—12/22/76

he notified the faculty members of the Allen Centerthat their positions would be terminated on August 31,1976. Several of the faculty members were tenured.

One of the tenured faculty members had joined theSUNY-Albany faculty in 1966 as a lecturer in anthro-pology, and in 1971, following his completion of thedoctorate, his position was changed to an assistant pro-fessorship. He participated in the planning of the AllenCenter and, when the opportunity arose, transferredfrom the Anthropology Department to the Center. Hewas granted tenure while serving at the Allen Center,where he continued to teach both graduate and under-graduate courses on a regular basis.

In the months following his receipt of the June, 1975,termination notice, the faculty member twice appliedfor openings in the Anthropology Department, one ofwhich he felt especially qualified to fill, and on eachoccasion his application was rejected by vote of thefaculty and students in the department. In a grievanceaction against the University, he argued that he hadtenure at Albany and not just at the Allen Center, andthat the administration had not made the essentialgood-faith efforts to place him in a suitable positionelsewhere. He was offered a two-year visiting appoint-ment in anthropology in settlement of his grievanceagainst the University, which he says he was compelledby his financial situation to accept on the terms onwhich it was offered. He accepted it under protest.

Art History. Art history and studio art, traditionallythe two components of a single SUNY-Albany Art De-partment, were made separate departments in 1974-75.In that year, outside evaluators of the art history mas-ter's program raised questions about the adequacy ofthe program and the resources supporting it. The SelectCommittee cited these questions in recommending, inits May, 1975, report, that the master's program in arthistory be suspended. In February, 1976, the TaskForce recommended that both the master's and thebachelor's programs in art history be discontinued.

The art history faculty at Albany had challenged thereport on their master's program by the outside eval-uators, and they challenged the Select Committee'sreliance on that evaluation in recommending the pro-gram's elimination. They also challenged the TaskForce's recommendation to eliminate the bachelor'sprogram on the ground that the recommendationrested on judgments that had been inaccurate in thefirst place, were altogether out of date two years later,and were irrelevant because they dealt with the gradu-ate and not with the undergraduate program in arthistory.

The administration accepted the recommendation ofthe Task Force to eliminate both the bachelor's andmaster's programs in art history, and in May, 1976, twotenured and three nontenured faculty members weregiven notice of termination. One tenured art historianwas retained in the Studio Art Department.

Astronomy and Space Science. The astronomy andspace science program was reviewed in November,1974, by the State Education Department's Doctoral

244 AAUP BULLETIN

Project, and a preliminary report on that review appar-ently influenced the Select Committee's recommenda-tion of May, 1975, that the graduate programs in as-tronomy and space science be discontinued before theacademic year 1976-77. President Benezet, in makingthat recommendation his own, added that "the ques-tion of retaining an undergraduate major should be leftto my successor on the basis of faculty resources . . .available after September, 1976." As a result of thedecision to discontinue the graduate program, four ten-ured members and one nontenured member of the six-person department were notified in June, 1975, thattheir positions would be terminated on August 31,1976. Having concluded that offering the Bachelor ofScience degree in astronomy was not feasible with onlythe single faculty member remaining, the Task Forcerecommended that the undergraduate program be dis-continued as well.

Comparative and World Literature. Acting upon arecommendation in the Task Force Report of February,1976, that the Department of Comparative and WorldLiterature be discontinued, the administration gave no-tice to two tenured professors and one part-time lecturerin May, 1976, that their positions would be terminatedas of August 31, 1977. In 1974-75, the department'sM.A. program had been reviewed by a committee ofoutside evaluators, and by the Graduate Council ofSUNY-Albany, and the department as a whole by theSelect Committee; and though all three groups seemto have found satisfactory conditions, the Task Forceconcluded in the following year that "the Universitycould not sustain this department without major atten-tion to reorganization and leadership, a sharp resur-gence of student interest and increased expenditures ofresources"—developments which the Task Force con-sidered "neither feasible nor likely."

The chairman of the department until 1975, a widely-published senior tenured professor, had joined theAlbany faculty in 1970. A frequent and outspoken criticof successive Albany administrations, he had not hesi-tated to express his views about them in letters whichhe circulated to New York legislators. In the fall of1975, he was not reappointed to the chairmanship—a position, he states, that he had earlier asked to havefilled by another senior scholar—and on May 18, 1976,he was notified that his appointment would expire onAugust 31, 1977. In response he initiated grievanceprocedures and brought suit against the University.He asserts in particular a right to a position in the De-partment of German, where he regularly taught somegraduate courses and where, in 1973, the department'sgraduate faculty voted him an "Associate Member."He charges that the decision to abolish the Departmentof Comparative and World Literature and the termina-tion of his appointment constitute a reprisal against himfor his outspokenness, and that his academic freedomand his constitutional rights have thus been abridged.

The other tenured member of the department, whobecame chairman in 1975, also initiated grievance pro-cedures.

History and Systematics of Science. In 1968, an ex-perienced "person in industrial research was brought tothe campus as a professor with tenure in the newly es-tablished Department of History and Systematics ofScience. The department was abolished in 1971, andthe professor was attached to the Dean's office, throughwhich he taught courses in various fields of science.

In June, 1975, he was informed that the Departmentof History and Systematics of Science was being dis-continued and that his position would be terminated asof August 31, 1976. He filed a grievance on the groundthat the department had already been eliminated andwas upheld at Step 1 of the grievance. A new notice oftermination was then sent to the professor and a newgrievance has been denied at all steps, including arbi-tration. The professor's position apparently was notconsidered by the Select Committee, and the termina-tion was thus a unilateral action of the administration.

The Milne School. The Milne School, the CampusSecondary School at SUNY-Albany, was under theSchool of Education until 1974, when it became a sepa-rate administrative unit. The recommendation to dis-continue the school appears to have been reached inApril, 1975, by a University-wide committee formed atthe initiative of Chancellor Boyer to review the place ofcampus schools in the training of teachers. As a result ofthe elimination of the school, fifteen tenured andeleven nontenured faculty members were given noticein June, 1975, that their positions would be terminated.

The School of Nursing. The School of Nursing, estab-lished in 1967, had from the beginning offered only theBachelor of Science degree, but it had requested per-mission to add a master's program. The Select Com-mittee appointed by President Benezet was clearly im-pressed with the school. At the same time it felt that the"obvious lack of medical programs and facilities atSUNY-Albany raises questions as to whether the Schoolof Nursing is appropriately placed at this Center." Itrecommended therefore that an independent com-mittee be appointed to decide whether or not the schoolmeets "a compelling need" in the area, with a view toinstituting a master's program if the committee foundaffirmatively and to phasing the school out if it did not.Such a committee was constituted and met in the fall of1975. It did not recommend conclusively either way,however, and the Task Force in its February, 1976,report—regretting "that this high quality programcould not be maintained because of the reduced re-sources allocated to the University"—recommended"reluctantly" that the school with its twenty-one facultymembers be phased out over a four-year period endingin 1979-80.

Speech Pathology and Audiology. In May, 1975, theSelect Committee recommended that Speech Pathol-ogy and Audiology, a department in the School ofEducation, be "conditionally" continued for threeyears and that it be reassessed at the end of that period.A few months later the program was reviewed by agroup of outside evaluators, who recommended a num-ber of improvements. In February, 1976, the Task

AUGUST 1977 245

Force recommended that the program be phased outover the next three or four years, on the ground that theneeded improvements would take more money thanwas likely to be available. The administration has sentnotices of termination to the department's five tenuredand six nontenured faculty members.

IV. The Agricultural and Technical Collegeat Alfred

An Associate Professor of English and Humanitiesappointed at the Agricultural and Technical College atAlfred in September, 1970, was placed on continuingappointment (tenure) effective September 1, 1973. OnFebruary 11, 1976, he was notified orally that his ap-pointment would be terminated on August 31, 1976,and the oral notice was confirmed by letter on February20, 1976.

The associate professor taught Spanish and French,which were required "within the emphasis of Human-ities/Social Science of the Liberal Arts Transfer Pro-gram." Confronted with the need for retrenchment inDecember, 1975, President David H. Huntington con-sulted with the Dean of the School of Liberal Arts, whoin turn consulted with the Chairman of the Departmentof English and Humanities and the Coordinator of theHumanities/Social Science Emphasis of the LiberalArts Transfer Program. In February, 1976, PresidentHuntington states, he concluded that Spanish andFrench should no longer be required within the Hu-manities/Social Science Emphasis, his "cabinet" con-curred with him in that decision, and the associateprofessor, as the only person teaching foreign lan-guages, was notified of the termination of his appoint-ment.

The associate professor filed a grievance under thecollective bargaining Agreement on the ground thatthere had been inadequate consultation with the fac-ulty before such a decision was reached and on thefurther ground that he was more than minimally qual-ified to teach other subjects in the Department of Eng-lish and Humanities and thus should be retained inpreference to members of the department who werejunior to him. He also alleged that the termination ofhis appointment resulted from a decision to provide ateaching position to a retiring administrative officer.His grievance was rejected at both Step 1 (the CollegePresident or his designee) and Step 2 (the Chancelloror his designee). A Step 3 hearing (the Director of Em-ployee Relations or his designee) was held in March,1977. Despite the time limits in the collective bargain-ing Agreement, the decision, rejecting the grievance,was not issued until June 15. As of early July, the UUPhad not stated whether it would take the matter toarbitration.

V. The University Center at BinghamtonIn June, 1975, the University Center at Binghamton,

like other units of the State University, received thefirst notification of a budget cutback. In a discussionwith members of the Association's ad hoc committee,President Clifford D. Clark stated on December 8, 1976,

that the June cutbacks, and those subsequently im-posed, fell disproportionately hard on Binghamton be-cause its budget base was comparatively small and be-cause, with the campus not expanding in the last sixyears, a larger than usual proportion of the faculty wastenured. President Clark felt, he said, that he had nochoice but to cut deeply into the core of the UniversityCenter at Binghamton.

President Clark's initial response to the budget re-duction called for in June was to establish a Task Forceon Academic Programs. The faculty members whom heappointed to the Task Force were endorsed by theFaculty Summer Committee, and the Task Force waschaired by the Vice President for Academic Affairs.Consistent with the June directive, the Task Force ex-plored ways of meeting the budget reduction; it alsorecommended "selective program excision" (a phrasein Vice Chancellor Spindler's memorandum of June 9)to a greater extent than necessary in order to strengthenwhat it considered other important but underfundedprograms. The report of the Task Force, however, wasrejected by the Faculty Senate in September, 1975, onthe ground that the Task Force had exceeded its au-thority by going beyond determining how specificsavings could be made to recommend sweeping pro-grammatic changes.

The earliest notification of retrenchment was given toan associate professor in the Department of Classicaland Near Eastern Studies, who was informed in aletter from President Clark dated September 29, 1975,that his position would be terminated as of September1, 1976. The definition of the faculty member's "unit ofretrenchment" seems to have been arrived at unilat-erally by the administration.

The faculty member given notice, a classicist, hadbeen appointed to the faculty in 1967 and had attainedtenure in 1971. There were two untenured facultymembers in the Department of Classical and Near East-ern Studies, and one to whom tenure was grantedlater than 1971. Thus, if the department had been theretrenchment unit, the associate professor given noticewould have been the fourth in line for retrenchment.When President Clark designated "classical studies," asubsection of the department, as the retrenchment unit,the associate professor became the least senior member.He was the only tenured faculty member to be givennotice at this time. The faculty member filed a griev-ance and a faculty committee advisory to PresidentClark noted that the faculty member

. . . may have been the victim of unfair practices to theextent of having been singled out for retrenchment as anindividual rather than having been the unfortunate victimof a defensible academic retrenchment. The specter ofselective individual retrenchment is so threatening to thefaculty, and so potentially demoralizing, that every reason-able effort must be made to demonstrate the legitimacy ofeach retrenchment action.

Despite this concern, President Clark reaffirmed thetermination.

246 AAUP BULLETIN

In a "Statement of Principles" issued on December8, 1975, President Clark indicated that he was stillthinking not only of meeting the required cuts but alsoof reallocating the University Center's reduced re-sources to reshape its academic emphases. His "State-ment" called for a communal effort to maintain a stan-dard of excellence in the face of declining resources anda willingness to accept sacrifices. By this time, PresidentClark was actively seeking the advice of the ExecutiveComittee of the Faculty Senate, an ad hoc student-staffcommittee, and a special Faculty Senate Committee onAcademic Program Priorities, and in one way or an-other all three of these committees recommended tohim that retrenchments necessary for reallocation bekept to an absolute minimum. In addition, the Execu-tive Committee of the Faculty Senate proposed a pro-cedure by which the University Center would be ableto respond quickly to a budget crisis.

The crisis came on January 8, 1976, when the centraladministration ordered an additional reduction in theBinghamton budget of about $1,000,000 to take effectby February 29. On January 20, President Clark sent alist of proposed reductions to the three committees fortheir responses. Time was very short, but he receivedtheir replies, held hearings with departments affectedand with student groups, and announced his final deci-sion on February 5. There was at this time no realloca-tion of resources; there were only reductions in ex-penditures designed to meet the budget cut. PresidentClark did announce, however, his intention to elimi-nate the entire four-person Russian Department.

The question of eliminating the Russian Departmenthad been under discussion since about the middle of1975, and President Clark's decision appears to havebeen reached with faculty and student advice. Formalnotice of retrenchment, however—in spite of the Presi-dent's February 5, 1976, announcement—was not sentto the Chairman of the Russian Department, who wasalso its senior professor, until March 26, when PresidentClark informed him that his continuing appointment asProfessor of Russian would be terminated "at the closeof business on August 18, 1976." Since the Chairmanwas also a Professor of Comparative Literature, he wasinformed that he was being assigned to a half-timeposition in the Department of Comparative Literature.A distinguished scholar and an outspoken critic of theadministration, the Chairman had been appointed tothe Binghamton faculty in 1971, with tenure.

Another tenured faculty member in Russian, withsixteen years of service at Binghamton, was also notifiedat this time that her appointment would terminate onAugust 15. Subsequently, when the demands foicourses in Russian by students part way through theprogram, and by a large number of Slavic-Americans inthe community, forced the administration to offer Rus-sian tutoring in 1976-77, this faculty member was of-fered the tutorial position; but the salary was so dispro-portionately low that the faculty member found itimpossible to accept. In addition, the appointments oftwo assistant professors of Russian on term contractswere terminated before the expiration of their con-

tracts, as were those of one person in philosophy andanother in physics. The faculty member in physics wasplaced elsewhere at Binghamton, and the other threepersons found positions at other institutions.

The faculty member in philosophy, an assistant pro-fessor with one year remaining on his contract, was thejunior member of the department, which was to haveone line retrenched. There was, however, a half lineattached to the department on which part-time lectur-ers in the history and philosophy of the social andbehavioral sciences, a program leading to the Ph.D. inphilosophy, were appointed. The administration desig-nated the Department of Philosophy, excluding the linefor part-time lecturer, as the retrenchment unit, withthe result that the appointment of the assistant profes-sor was terminated rather than those of the part-timeoccasional lecturers, whose combined salaries were ap-proximately the same as his. Subsequently, the admin-istration technically removed the visiting line from thecontrol of the Department of Philosophy. It has contin-ued to fund essentially the same program from theDean's office.

VI. The College of Arts and Science at Brockport

At the College of Arts and Science at Brockport, theactions of primary interest to the Association's in-vestigating committee began with a mailgram fromVice Chancellor James F. Kelly which was received byPresident Albert W. Brown at Brockport on January 7,1976. Among other things, Vice Chancellor Kelly con-veyed the information that by February 29 the Brock-port administration would have to terminate the ap-pointments of eight persons who had been on theCollege payroll on December 8 and that additionalreductions would have to be made before September 1.On January 26, the first day of the spring semester, afull professor in the Department of Educational Re-search was called from his classroom by his dean anddepartment chairman and informed that his appoint-ment would be terminated on February 29. On the nextday an associate professor in the Department of Educa-tional Research was given the same notice. The full pro-fessor had been appointed to the faculty in 1970 andbecame tenured in 1973; the associate professor hadbeen appointed in 1965 and became tenured in 1967. Bothfaculty members filed suit in the New York SupremeCourt on February 25 and were granted temporaryinjunctions which extended their appointments at theCollege until the end of the semester. Their requests forpermanent injunctions, however, were denied by theCourt, and their cases have been appealed to the Appel-late Division of the New York Supreme Court.

On April 19, 1976, President Brown announced thatthe appointments of fifteen additional faculty membersin eight departments would be terminated by August31, and an official newsletter containing the announce-ment listed five criteria considered in the retrenchmentdecisions, including "programmatic needs" in relationto the College's mission and faculty/student ratio. Aspart of the retrenchment, the Department of Educa-

AUGUST 1977 247

tional Research was abolished, with one of its remain-ing two members being assigned to other duties and theother—a tenured member of the faculty appointed in1949—being sent a written notice dated April 29 butpostmarked May 5 that his appointment would be ter-minated on August 31. According to the administra-tion's Brockport Newsletter of June 23, 1976, thirteenof the fifteen faculty members given termination no-tices in April were offered the same or similar positionsat the College for the next academic year, and as ofJune 18 nine had accepted the offers. "Most of theoffers," the newsletter stated, "were made possible byattrition that has taken place since the retrenchmentwas announced." Figures supplied to the Association'sad hoc committee by the central administration in Al-bany indicate that in 1976 the College at Brockportterminated the positions of six faculty members on con-tinuing appointments and ten on term appointmentsand that it reinstated three on continuing appointmentsand six on term appointments. (See Table 1.) No offer ofreinstatement was made to the senior member of theDepartment of Educational Research, who, earlier thanhe had planned, went on retirement status on Septem-ber 1.

Initial consideration of individual retrenchments be-gan after the receipt of the Kelly mailgram on January7, and decisions appear to have been reached by Presi-dent Brown on the week-end of January 17, when heconferred with the College's vice presidents. In a letterto President Brown dated February 16, 1976, and en-dorsed by the Faculty Senate, the President of theSenate expressed his continuing concern that PresidentBrown had failed, as he saw it, to consult the FacultySenate "in any meaningful way" before giving noticeto the two faculty members in the Department ofEducational Research. He noted that in December hehad attended two meetings with the President and thevice presidents as a group "to deal with budget prior-ties," and he expressed his understanding that thisgroup was to become involved "if an emergencyarose." According to the letter, the President of theFaculty Senate learned of the "planned action" at anemergency Administrative Council meeting called byPresident Brown on January 20; the next morning theSenate President and the Chairman of the Appoint-ments, Promotion, and Tenure Committee were invitedto a further meeting, and the chairman of the com-mittee, who attended the meeting, informed the SenatePresident that President Brown "read the criteria to beused and the names of the people to be retrenched."

The Senate President's letter of February 16 waswritten to President Brown in part to explain an earlierletter of January 27, in which the Senate Presidentinformed President Brown that the Executive Com-mittee of the Senate had determined that the LongRange Planning Committee was the appropriate com-mittee to engage in budgetary discussions, which theSenate hoped "would be on a continuous rather than anemergency basis." The January 27 letter had also con-veyed the information that the Senate did not wish to

"designate a committee or other group to consultwith . . . [the President] on the matter of retrench-ment." The Executive Committee, wrote the SenatePresident, "views retrenchment as a contractual mat-ter."

President Brown replied to the January 27 letter onFebruary 2, when he expressed regret at the action ofthe Senate Executive Committee, declared his strongfeeling that "the faculty voice is important in govern-ance of the institution at all levels," and drew a dis-tinction between governance and "contractual relation-ships" in respect to negotiated terms and conditions ofemployment. Retrenchment, he noted, "has enormousprogrammatic implications which are properly the con-cern of the governance unit," and he added that thematter was serious enough for him to question whether"a faculty voice should not be sought quite apart fromthe Senate." In his February 16 reply, the Senate Presi-dent, after protesting the notices to the two tenuredfaculty members and reviewing the events cited above,stated that the concern of the Senate's Executive Com-mittee about being involved in retrenchment is "in partcaused by the way in which you have handled thisaction." There was "no room for input," he wrote,"into a decision that had already been made."

President Brown stated to the chairman of the in-vestigating committee that he recalled receiving a letterfrom the Senate President in 1975 saying that the Exec-utive Committee did not wish to designate a group toconsult with him on retrenchment. He did not makesuch a letter available, however, and the Senate Presi-dent insisted that no letter to that effect was writtenuntil January 27, 1976, when the retrenchment actionshad already been taken. In any event, no consultationwith a faculty group preceded the decision to give theJanuary 26 notices. And in a meeting which the chair-man of the investigating committee had with PresidentBrown—a meeting attended by four vice presidents, anassociate vice president, an assistant vice president, twoassistants to the president, one provost, two deans, theDirector of Personnel, the past president, and president-elect of the Faculty Senate, and the president of theBrockport Chapter of the United University Profes-sions—President Brown stated that, since the gover-nor's office, legislature, and chancellor have to takeresponsibility for those things for which they are re-sponsible, he had not tried to place either the union orthe senate in the position of seeming to have responsi-bility for what basically are administrative decisions.

Nor was there any consultation with the two facultymembers who, on January 26 and 27, were notified thattheir positions would be discontinued on February 29,or with their colleague of twenty-seven years' servicewho was given notice at the end of April to becomeeffective on August 31. The decision to eliminate theDepartment of Educational Research seems to havebeen based upon its productivity, specifically the lownumber of full-time student equivalents it was teachingin relationship to the cost of the department and thenumber of faculty members in it. A study completed by

248 AAUP BULLETIN

the College's Office of Institutional and Sponsored Re-search on February 19, 1976, had placed the Depart-ment of Educational Research the highest (by a consid-erable margin) among thirty-two departments in eachof several categories under "cost per student credithour" as of the fall of 1975. Ry its nature, however, theDepartment of Educational Research was not expectedto rank high in full-time student equivalents. Onemember of the department given notice in January wasdeveloping and trying out experimental courses inwhich the enrollment was purposely kept low, andwhen the courses gave promise of being valuable addi-tions to the curriculum they were transferred to otherdepartments, where they might attract substantial stu-dent interest. The other member given notice in Janu-ary was actually carrying a sizeable student load. Andthe member given notice in April was not working inthe department at all; he had been on loan to theStudent Development Center for about two years towork with problems of student testing. He informed thechairman of the investigating committee that he re-quested at least one additional year because, being atan age when he was close to statutory retirement, theextra time would greatly increase his retirement an-nuity and assist him with the education costs of hiscollege-age children; but his request was unable toovercome the fact that his budget line was in the De-partment of Educational Research, which was beingeliminated.

The full professor in the department whose ap-pointment was terminated had had seven years' experi-ence in the New York State Education Departmentbefore joining the faculty. He stated that he had had nointention of protesting the retrenchment notice becausehe knew that in government employment such re-trenchments were sometimes necessary. He decided topursue his case, he said, when he learned the identity ofthose outside of his department who were not beingretained. These six persons included a faculty memberwho was on a disability leave of absence for a year andwas in a position to retire; two cleaning women ondisability; a groundskeeper who had not been on cam-pus for five months; an employee discharged for mis-conduct after an appointment of one month; and anassistant in the residence halls. When the chairman ofthe investigating committee read out this list to Presi-dent Rrown and asked if it was correct, President Brownreplied that he did not know. The chairman was assuredby faculty members that it was essentially correct.

The Senate President had this list in mind when hewrote to President Brown on February 16, 1976, to urgea reconsideration of the decision to terminate the ap-pointments of two tenured members of the faculty: "AsI understand it, you were able to cut six of the eightpostions through various forms of attrition including atleast one retirement." Writing to President Brownagain on April 19, following the announcement thatthere would be further retrenchments, the Senate Pres-ident once more urged that the budgetary problems bemet by attrition and by limiting expenditures for such

things as travel, supplies, and equipment. On April 26,he sent a memorandum to the faculty in advance of ascheduled May 3 faculty meeting and in it deplored, ashe had in his letter to the President, the "reduction infaculty lines at a time when the faculty/student ratioexceeds State standards." He also asserted his beliefthat "alternatives, other than retrenchment, exist toresolve the so-called budget crisis."

At the May 3 meeting, a Committee on Alternativesto Retrenchment, which had been appointed by theSenate President, was confirmed by the Faculty-at-Large. The committee met with President Brown onMay 5 and May 12 and consulted with deans, chairmen,and others. Because decisive steps toward additionalretrenchments had already been taken, the committeeconcluded that it should explore "alternatives to losingthe retrenchees and alternatives to retrenchment forfuture reference." On May 17, it submitted two resolu-tions to the faculty which were overwhelmingly ap-proved. One, aimed at facilitating "the rehiring of re-trenchees, resolved that the faculty should accept, on aone-year emergency basis, a delay of reassignment andreallocation of lines, along with a load-sharing withinand between departments." The other asserted facultyapproval of "the attrition model" to forestall futureemergencies and directed the Faculty Senate to study itfurther "and develop policies leading to its implemen-tation."

In its discussions with President Brown, the com-mittee reported, it was given to understand that theadministration intended to reinstate retrenched facultymembers when that seemed feasible. As already noted,nine persons were reinstated by June 18,1976. No offersof reinstatement, however, were made to the membersof the Department of Educational Research.

VII. The College of Arts and Science at CortlandAn Associate Professor ot Geology, appointed to the

faculty of the College of Arts and Science at Cortlandbeginning with the 1970-71 academic year, was placedon continuing appointment in 1973. On February 6,1976, he was informed by President Richard Jones thathis position would be terminated as of August 31, 1976,because of the "difficult financial situation." The asso-ciate professor was the only tenured faculty membergiven notice at Cortland, and the Geology Departmentappears to have been singled out because its enroll-ments were lower than those of a number of otherdepartments.

The associate professor was subsequently appointedto a part-time position at Cortland for the 1976-77academic year. The position was understood to be tem-porary.

VIII. The College of Arts and Science at New PaltzOn March 15, 1976, Dr. Stanley K. Coffman, Presi-

dent of the College of Arts and Science at New Paltz,notified eight members of the faculty that, because ofthe "difficult financial situation," their positions were

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being eliminated and their connections with the Col-lege would be terminated as of August 31 of that year.Of the eight faculty members notified, seven were ten-ured, and the nontenured member was subsequentlyreinstated when the resignation of a colleague created avacancy.

A formal consideration of cutbacks had begun atNew Paltz in the spring of 1975, when the College wasrequired to reallocate or reduce the number of unoccu-pied faculty lines. Following the discontinuance of theCollege Assembly in 1974, President Coffman hadasked the Assembly's standing committees to continueas presidential committees, and he established a newcommittee consisting of the chairmen of five com-mittees and two students to advise the administrationon the question of line reallocation. The committeebecame the nucleus of a larger committee when later inthe spring the College was notified by the Office of theBudget that its expenditure ceiling for 1975-76 was tobe reduced by $168,000 and that its share of the$10,000,000 reduction in the SUNY base budget for1976-77 was $400,000. The larger committee, chairedby President Coffman, included the line reallocationcommittee, the budget committee, and some adminis-trators, and in meetings during late May and early Juneof 1975, it prepared the preliminary budget request for1976-77. President Coffman stated to the investigatingcommittee, however, that in his view the committeehad proposed such extensive cuts in salary, wages, andpeople as to jeopardize the College's operations, and asa consequence he recalled the line reallocation com-mittee, added faculty, students, and administrators toit, and established it as the Program Review Committeeunder the chairmanship of Vice President for AcademicAffairs Peter N. Vukasin.

The Program Review Committee issued a report inDecember, 1975, in which it noted its acceptance of theprinciple of a retrenchment based not wholly uponattrition, its view being that because of the high propor-tion of tenured faculty at New Paltz (about 75 per cent)the burden of attrition would fall unduly upon thenontenured faculty. No faculty position was termi-nated at that time, however; nor was there any re-trenchment of faculty members under the 3 per centcut imposed by the Office of the Budget in January,1976. But when the new Executive Budget required theelimination of forty-two instructional and non-instructional lines, as compared to twenty-seven in thepreliminary budget proposal, the Program ReviewCommittee was compelled to resume intensive sessionsin which it reviewed all departments and invited repre-sentatives of departments considered to be vulnerableto appear before it. Early in March, it issued its report.

Recommended for retrenchment by the Program Re-view Committee were 10.5 teaching lines dividedamong seven departments, with the expectation (whichturned out to be well founded) that two or more of thelines would be eliminated through retirement or someother form of attrition. Among those which clearly

would require termination notices to faculty members,two were in Asian studies, 2.5 in history, one in French,and one in art studio.

The administration concurred in the total number ofteaching positions to be eliminated, but did not concurin the proposed distribution. It decided to reduce, byhalf a line each, two departments that the committeehad recommended for reduction by a full line. It madeno reduction in history. And it reduced Asian studies bytwo additional lines, for a total of four, and requiredalso that two positions be eliminated in African studies.Asked by the investigating committee if his discussionswith the Program Review Committee had changed hisviews as to what positions should be retrenched, Presi-dent Coffman replied that they had not.

In Asian studies, the entire department of eight per-sons was tenured, as was the entire department of fourin African studies. In African studies, the two facultymembers most recently tenured (1970 and 1973) weregiven termination notices in accordance with Section35.2 of the collective bargaining Agreement, whichrequires notification "in inverse order of appointment. 'In Asian studies, the three faculty members most re-cently tenured (all since 1973) were given terminationnotices. The fourth person notified was second in sen-iority in the department, a professor of Chinese lan-guage who had been appointed to the faculty in 1962and granted tenure in 1964. By inverse order of ap-pointment in his group, he was seventh rather thanfourth.

The administration explains this apparent discrep-ancy by citing Article 35.1 of the Agreement, whichpermits retrenchment "at such level of organization ofthe University as a campus, department, unit, programor such other level of organization of the University asthe Chancellor or his designee deems appropriate.''Under this article, President Coffman, as the Chancel-lor's designee, declared Chinese language a retrench-ment unit, and since only one person was teachingChinese language he was subject to immediate re-trenchment, whatever his seniority in the departmentas a whole. Some faculty members expressed the viewto the investigating committee that the professor ofChinese language had incurred the administration'sdispleasure because of presumed excessive outside ac-tivity (specifically, an interest in a restaurant in anearby town) and that the administration had invokedthis article in the Agreement to get rid of him; Presi-dent Coffman, however, was unwilling to discuss thereasons for his actions with the investigating com-mittee. In this connection, the investigating committeenotes that President Coffman, in a March, 1976, reportto the University's central administration on the "Im-pact of Line Cuts in the Academic Area," called atten-tion to the retrenchment of only seven positions—threein Asian studies, two in African studies, one in French,and one in art studio—and omitted all reference to theretrenchment in Chinese language. Because of thethree-line reduction in Asian studies, he stated, in effect

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"we are left with a China studies program." Sub-sequent letters sent by the chairman of the in-vestigating committee to President Coffman and ViceChancellor Komisar failed to secure an explanation ofthis omission and of one or two related matters. Thechairman of the committee was informed that the cir-cumstances of the collective bargaining Agreementmade a reply inappropriate.7

The period of notice given to the faculty memberswas five-and-one-half months, and, because of theshortness of notice, efforts were initiated by some of theaffected faculty (and later pursued by the adminis-tration) to secure a supplemental appropriation fromthe legislature which would make a longer notice pos-sible. In addition, the faculty in May created an Emer-gency Committee to Study Alternatives to Retrench-ment, which gave first priority, according to itsSeptember 28 report to the faculty, "to saving the jobsof the eight retrenched faculty or at least achieving oneyear's notice for them if possible."

The legislature did in fact make a supplemental ap-propriation for the purpose (in part) of extending theappointments of the faculty members at the Collegewho had received termination notices, and in Novem-ber President Coffman offered to those affected facultywho requested them appointments as Research Asso-ciates for the period November 1, 1976, to March 31,1977. In addition, the Committee to Study Alternativesto Retrenchment adopted three resolutions asking thatthe affected faculty members be considered for va-cancies in other departments; it also sought to havelines held open for another year so that these facultymembers might occupy them. In their discussion withthe investigating committee, members of the Commit-tee noted that departments reacted negatively to thepossibility of reinstating the faculty members to theirvacant positions; and in its report the Committee statedthat Vice President Vukasin informed the Committeeon August 6 that 4.5 lines which had been open had bythen been filled. Fifteen new full-time faculty memberswere in fact appointed as additions or replacementsfor the academic year 1976-77.

The two faculty members in African Studies and thefour in Asian Studies filed grievances under the collec-tive bargaining Agreement, but none has yet been suc-cessful in securing redress.

IX. The College of Arts and Science at Oneonta

In the spring of 1975, Dr. Clifford J. Craven, Presi-dent of the College of Arts and Science at Oneonta,established a budget consultative group consisting ofthe College Senate's recently appointed ad hoc Com-mittee on Academic and Instructional Priorities, theSenate Steering Committee, and a number of adminis-trators whom President Craven looked upon as the

7 In a subsequent response to a prepublication draft of thisreport, President Coffman stated that he had omitted refer-ence to Chinese language through inadvertence.

executive group. Although retrenchment of specificprograms and departments was not then a primaryconsideration, it was clearly on the minds of administra-tors and faculty members. On May 26, 1975, for ex-ample, Vice President for Academic Affairs Carey Brushwrote to an associate professor in the Department ofInternational and Foreign Area Studies, who was thenon an unpaid leave of absence to pursue work as aResearch Associate at Columbia University's School ofInternational Affairs, to suggest that he take a positionelsewhere if one should become available to him, sinceif retrenchment became necessary at Oneonta "AreaStudies would be high on our list of retrenchment possi-bilities. "

The consultative group s spring, 1975, recommenda-tion was that 7.75 faculty positions be eliminated for asaving of $72,000. Then in June, 1975, after the Officeof the Budget imposed a requirement that the Collegereduce its expenditure ceiling by slightly over $200,000,the consultative group again held intensive sessions andrecommended the elimination of an additional ninefaculty positions by August 1, plus other savings. Noneof these cuts required the retrenchment of facultymembers already appointed. On August 29, the Collegewas informed that $260,000 was to be cut from its basebudget, which for 1975-76 was $15,246,000, but that itwould be given a credit of $100,000 on the base budgetas a result of the closing of the campus school.

On January 8, 1976, President Craven received amailgram from Vice Chancellor James F. Kelly inform-ing him that thirty-eight positions would have to beeliminated by September 1 and that nine persons (to beincluded in the thirty-eight) would have to be removedfrom the University payroll by February 29. Before thistime, however, an all-but-final decision seems to havebeen reached to abolish the Department of Interna-tional and Foreign Area Studies. Informal minutes of adepartment meeting of December 17,1975, record thatPresident Craven met with the department and an-nounced his intention to retrench the department "be-cause of budget exigency," and that he invited themembers of the department to appear before the con-sultative group the following evening at 7:45. Specifi-cally, as President Craven explained, the retrenchmentwould affect only two of the department's three mem-bers, since the third would be transferred to the Over-seas Program. The acting chairman of the departmentwas the Dean of Liberal Studies, whose position as deanwould not be affected.

The two faculty members met with the consultativegroup the following night in the presence of PresidentCraven, and both spoke at some length. Although thetime between President Craven's announcement at thedepartment meeting and their appearance before theconsultative group was short, they were assisted by thework that one of them had previously prepared. Therecommendation of the consultative group (which hadcontinued to meet throughout the summer and fall, andone of whose constituents, the ad hoc Committee on

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Academic and Instructional Priorities, had by then beenmade a permanent committee of the College Senate)was that the Department of International and ForeignArea Studies be eliminated, and the two faculty mem-bers were formally notified by President Craven onFebruary 18, 1976, that their appointments would beterminated as of the following August 31. No facultymembers were included among the nine persons to begiven notice effective February 29.8

Of the two faculty members given notice, one hadbeen appointed to the faculty in 1963 and grantedtenure in 1966; he had been a full professor since 1967.The other, an associate professor, had been appointedto the faculty in 1967 and granted tenure in 1972. Thethird faculty member in the department, who was sec-ond of the three in tenure seniority, was retained todirect the University's overseas program in Israel, andhe continues to teach courses at Oneonta under the title"International Studies and International Education."

No votes were taken by the consultative group,which was chaired by the President of the CollegeSenate, but the administration believed there to be aconsensus on all the matters which went forward fromthe group, including the desirability, under existingfinancial circumstances, of eliminating the Departmentof International and Foreign Area Studies. Participat-ing faculty members who were interviewed by the in-vestigating committee concurred in that view. Aboli-tion of the department, however, seems to have been anadministration desire for some time. The investigatingcommittee was informed that the administration dis-cussed the department with the Curriculum Committeeas early as 1971-72 in the context of potential retrench-ment, and, as has been noted, the Vice President forAcademic Affairs informed one of the affected facult'members as early as May 26, 1975, that the departmentwas high on the list of retrenchment possibilities. None-theless, participating faculty members did not appearto have felt coerced in this recommendation. It wasalways understood that the Committee on Academicand Instructional Priorities had the right to meet sepa-rately, and information supplied to the investigatingcommittee indicates that it took advantage of this op-portunity on numerous occasions, including threemeetings between December 8 and February 8.

There was, however, a record of some conflict be-tween the President and the senior member of thedepartment, who had been Coordinator of Area Studiesuntil 1968, and the faculty member and a number of hisfaculty colleagues believed that the differences betweenhim and the President over the years accounted for thePresident's attitude toward the department. The Presi-dent stated that, under the constraints of the collectivebargaining Agreement, he was not prepared to discuss

8 One of the faculty members states that he was nevershown the recommendation ot the consultative group, andthat when he asked to see it he was informed that it was con-fidential. Nor was he informed of the criteria used by thegroup in making its recommendation.

the individual case with the investigating committee.With regard to the abolition of the department, theadministration stated publicly that the decision re-flected solely a view of "the importance of the AreaStudies Program to the total academic program of thecollege." It noted that the department did not offer amajor; no student had enrolled in the minor (a state-ment disputed by students who, in their meeting withthe investigating committee, asserted that minors werefrequently not registered); area studies are no longerrequired in all programs; and some dozen departmentsnow offer courses related to Africa and Asia, whereas afew years ago Area Studies was the only department tooffer them. Enrollments do not appear to have been aconsideration; the courses of both faculty membersseem to have been well subscribed.

When President Craven met with the Area StudiesDepartment on December 17, he was asked if it wouldbe possible to accommodate one of the faculty memberswhose appointment was about to be terminated in theDepartment of History and the other in Political Sci-ence, their two major fields. President Craven repliedthat he had not yet formally approached the two de-partments with this question. He subsequently com-municated with the department chairmen and urged"very careful consideration" of the qualifications ofthe affected faculty members, but assured the chair-men that, consistent with the wishes of the consultativegroup, no department would be required to accept afaculty member against its will. He noted also that anadditional line could not be made available, so thatacceptance of one of the affected faculty memberswould mean not otherwise filling a line if one wasvacant or creating a vacancy by giving notice to anontenured member of the department. The two de-partments declined to accept the faculty members.

Both faculty members filed grievances under thegrievance procedures of the collective bargainingAgreement, and their grievances were rejected at Steps1, 2, and 3. The UUP has thus far not stated whetherit will take their cases to arbitration. Neither facultymember was able to find a position for the academicyear 1976-77.

X. The University Center at Stony Brook

In June, 1975, Dr. John S. Toll, President of theUniversity Center at Stony Brook, was informed by theUniversity's central administration of severe cuts to bemade in the Stony Brook budget: specifically, the ex-penditure ceiling for 1975-76 was reduced by $850,000and a further cut of $950,000 was mandated in thebudget to be submitted for 1976-77. Institutions withinthe University were also under instruction from Chan-cellor Ernest Boyer to select programs for retrenchmentrather than to impose cuts across the board.

Acting in response to Chancellor Boyer's directive,President Toll announced his decision on August 28,1975, to eliminate Stony Brook's Department of Educa-

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tion, and some forty faculty members in the depart-ment were informed that their positions would be ter-minated as of August 31, 1976. Of this number, twelvewere tenured, seven were on term contracts which ex-tended beyond the announced retrenchment date, andthe rest were on one-year contracts. For a number ofreasons, however—including a court injunction follow-ing the filing of a suit—the tenured faculty were re-tained at Stony Brook during the academic year 1976-77, although some were placed in other positions; andfaculty members on term contracts have been permit-ted to serve them out. As of spring, 1977, six tenuredfaculty members had not been given other positionsand thus faced the likelihood of retrenchment afterAugust 31, 1977.

At the time of the budget crisis in June, 1975, theelected Faculty Senate established a standing com-mittee, the Resource Allocation and Academic PlanningCommittee (RAAP), to study the effect upon the StonyBrook program of the various possible changes in re-source allocations. The committee was briefed by theadministration concerning the likelihood that facultymembers would have to be retrenched, but members ofthe committee felt rebuffed in their efforts to have theadministration consult the committee as to where spe-cific retrenchments should occur. Early in July, 1975,President Toll appointed a Commission on Budget Pri-orities, which had some overlap in membership withRAAP, and after a month of meetings the Chairman ofthe Commission complained in a letter to President Tollabout "the empty and helpless role of these groups(RAAP and the Commission) in attempting to conveypoints of view that differ from yours."

On December 19, 1975, the Faculty Senate, by avote of forty-nine to six with one abstention, approveda resolution of censure against and no confidence inthe administration for its "abrogation" of the "rightand responsibility of the Faculty . . . to participate inrecent actions" and for failing to provide "for properappeal and due process in the terminations of appoint-ments" related to the retrenchment.9

XI. Issues and Findings

The Initial Decision

The 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Free-dom and Tenure, prepared jointly by the Association ofAmerican Colleges and the American Association ofUniversity Professors and endorsed by scores of othereducational organizations, states simply that "termi-nation of a continuous appointment because of finan-cial exigency should be demonstrably bona fide." In

9 Responding to a prepublication draft of this report, Pres-ident Toll asserted that its treatment of events at Stony Brookis faulty in several respects. He declined, however, to pro-vide detailed comments, on the same grounds that he hadoffered in declining earlier to meet with the investigatingcommittee.

order to assist institutions in the application of thispolicy, Committee A on Academic Freedom and Ten-ure, in the fall of 1974, formulated a new Regulation 4in its Recommended Institutional Regulations on Aca-demic Freedom and Tenure, and in the December,1974, issue of the AAUP Bulletin Committee A and theCouncil of the Association published the new regu-lation under the title "Termination of Faculty Appoint-ments because of Financial Exigency, Discontinuanceof a Program or Department, or Medical Reasons."Committee A subsequently revised the regulationslightly and republished it in the February, 1976, AAUPBulletin.

Under this policy, a "demonstrably bona fide ex-igency"—an exigency, that is, which permits the "ter-mination of an appointment with continuous tenure, orof a probationary or special appointment before the endof the specified term"—is "an imminent financial crisiswhich threatens the survival of the institution as awhole and which cannot be alleviated by less drasticmeans." The policy prescribes that, as a first step,"there should be a faculty body which participates inthe decision that a condition of financial exigency existsor is imminent," and that "all feasible alternatives totermination of appointments [should] have been pur-sued."

It is clear that the financial situation confronting theState University of New York in 1975 and 1976 was aserious one. A sudden decrease in the budget base of$10,000,000 in 1975, and a 1976-77 legislative appro-priation which threatened to fall short of the previousyear's by $55,000,000 (about a 10 per cent drop), ob-viously placed the University in a difficult position,particularly during a period of inflation. To say that,however, is not to say that appropriate inquiry had ledto the conclusion that the survival of the University as awhole, or of any of its constituent institutions, wasthreatened and that the situation could not be alle-viated by less drastic means than the dismissal of ten-ured faculty members or of faculty members whosespecified terms had not been completed.

As noted earlier, Chancellor Ernest Boyer, while ack-nowledging to the University Faculty Senate early in1975 that the state faced a "fiscal crisis" comparable tothat of 1970-71, expressed some optimism about theUniversity's ability to avoid "retrenchment or per-sonnel dismissal," even though some reduction in fac-ulty positions might be compelled; and the Senateadopted and sent to the Chancellor a position paper on"Retrenchment Benefits and Recommendation" whichit pointedly labeled a "partial" response to that sectionof the Policies of the Board of Trustees requiring theChancellor to seek the advice of the Senate when heanticipates that retrenchment may be necessarv. Lessthan four months later, the Board directed the Chancel-lor to implement a campus-by-campus review to deter-mine which programs should be "continued andstrengthened" and which should be "consolidated orphased out."

Perhaps the Board intended drastic action, but its

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language called for a review leading specifically to con-solidation and phasing out, neither of which suggeststhe dismissal of faculty members on tenure or extendedcontracts which followed over the next twelve months.The Board's language underwent some changes, how-ever, as it moved from administrator to administrator.Chancellor Boyer's words, in the statement which heissued on June 1, 1975, were "reduced or phased out."Vice Chancellor Spindler's words on June 9 were "elim-inating and curtailing." The considerations for localcampus review were provided in Chancellor Boyer'sstatement and the criteria for elimination or curtail-ment in Vice Chancellor Spindler's.

Chancellor Boyer failed to consult the UniversityFaculty Senate before his and Vice Chancellor Spin-dler's statements defined the retrenchment policy andset the retrenchments in motion, a failure which seemsto the investigating committee to have been clearlycontrary both to the Policies of the Board of Trusteesand to the policies supported by the Association. It wasa failure also which, by itself, casts doubt upon theappropriateness of the "policy . . . followed in the re-duction of staff." This was the very area in which theBoard Policies had mandated the Chancellor's consulta-tion with the Senate and on which the Senate, com-prised of faculty members intimately concerned witheducational policy, was particularly well suited to ad-vise.

No one interviewed by the investigating committeeexpressed the opinion that the actual survival of theState University of New York or any of its constituentinstitutions was threatened by the budget cuts. This isnot surprising. However serious the ultimate drop of$39,000,000 in legislative appropriations, it seems lesscritical when viewed against the total appropriation of$567,000,000 for fiscal 1975-76. This was a cutback ofabout 7 per cent. In total funds available to the StateUniversity of New York there was a cutback from$967,000,000 in 1975-76 to $928,000,000 in 1976-77, orabout 4 percent. Such a reduction raises a questionabout the need to terminate the services of facultymembers on continuing or extended appointments un-der any circumstances. The investigating committeefinds the retrenchment, as general policy authorizedand set in motion unilaterally by the University admin-istration, to be contrary to accepted standards relatingto faculty participation in academic government andviolative of the provision on financial exigency in the1940 Statement of Principles.

The Specific Decisions

Just as there was no faculty consideration at theUniversity level of the basic question as to whether ornot a financial exigency existed, so there was none onany of the campuses which came to the investigatingcommittee's attention. Each campus received the vari-ous directives about retrenchment from SUNY-Centralbeginning in the late spring of 1975, and the adminis-trations set about implementing them as they thought

appropriate. On some there was compliance, or nearcompliance, with the prescription in the statement on"Termination of Faculty Appointments ' for "an appro-priate faculty body'' to exercise primary responsibilityin determining the criteria for identifying the individ-uals whose appointments are to be terminated. Com-mittees chaired by faculty members met frequently atAlbany and Oneonta; and at New Paltz a joint com-mittee of faculty, students, and administrators devel-oped recommendations to submit to the President.There was a questionable indulgence in presidentiallyappointed committees (Albany) or in placing key ad-ministrators in committee chairmanships (Binghamtonand New Paltz), but though the administrators obvi-ously exerted considerable influence on committeedeliberations, the investigating committee found noevidence of coercion or, with one exception, of otherirregularity. The exception was Binghamton, where thereport of the 1975 Task Force was rejected by theFaculty Senate because the Task Force had exceededits authority. At Albany, Binghamton, New Paltz, andOneonta, committees seem to have been provided withall the information they thought essential to their workand to have been given the opportunity to expressconsidered judgments. At Stony Brook, however, dis-satisfaction with the role permitted faculty committeesled to a motion of censure against the administrationwhich was approved overwhelmingly by the FacultySenate in December, 1975.

At Alfred, what consultation there was seems to havebeen informal and limited. At Brockport, there wasvirtually no consultation with the faculty, and as aconsequence the Faculty Senate found itself frequentlyin a position of confrontation with the administration.It sought to modify specific retrenchment actions and toestablish a policy for retrenchment that in its judgmentwould be reasonable and fair, as well as have the leastdrastic consequences for individuals, and through itspersistence it was able substantially to influence thelater stages of the retrenchment.

One serious problem was created at Albany, wherethe changes were most numerous and comprehensive,by the very short periods allowed for the preparationand consideration of committee reports. The 1975 Se-lect Committee had the longest period at its disposal—from January to mid-May; but in that time it wasrequired to review the full range of the offerings atAlbany and to recommend priorities. The 1976 TaskForce had only from January to February 23 for asimilar study. The faculty as a whole, through its de-partments and schools, had only a week to respond tothe far-reaching recommendations of the 1975 report,and that week came right in the middle of the springfinal examination period. As for the 1976 report, allresponses were expected to be in President Fields' of-fice less than two weeks after the report was published.However conscientious the work of the Select Com-mittee and the Task Force, the investigating committeedoes not believe that, under the circumstances, ade-quate time was allotted for the consideration of recom-

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mendations fundamental to the mission of the Univer-sity and to the professional welfare of numerousmembers of the faculty.10 In the absence of adequateprovision for official faculty discussion, it is not surpris-ing that a Committee of Concerned Faculty came intobeing and spoke out on procedural and substantiveissues raised by the restructuring of academic programsand the reordering of priorities at the State Universityof New York at Albany.

At all campuses, responsibility for designating indi-viduals whose appointment would be terminated wasassumed by the president, and where the faculty com-mittee functioned with reasonable effectiveness thisprocedure can be said to have had the faculty approvalcalled for in the Association's statement on "Termi-nation of Faculty Appointments." No such approvalcan be presumed at Binghamton, Brockport, and StonyBrook. It should be noted, however, that—consistentwith the collective bargaining Agreement—terminationactions were considered in terms of "retrenchmentunits," which under the Agreement were left to theChancellor or his designee to determine. The usualretrenchment unit was a department or a school, buttwo or three exceptions to that practice have raisedserious questions about the administrative motivationsin giving notice of termination to specific faculty mem-bers.

At Binghamton, as we have seen, President Clarkdesignated classical studies as a retrenchment unit, andthus under the Agreement he was able to terminate theappointment of a tenured associate professor whowould have been fourth in line for retrenchment if hisdepartment (classical and Near Eastern languages) hadbeen declared the retrenchment unit. At New Paltz,President Coffman declared the Asian Studies Depart-ment a retrenchment unit to the extent of three juniorfaculty members, all of whom were tenured. He alsodeclared Chinese language, which was taught in theAsian Studies Department, a retrenchment unit, andthus was able to terminate the appointment of thesecond senior member in the department of eight mem-bers. These two faculty members were believed by theircolleagues to be in disfavor with their administrators,and their being singled out in this way raises seriousquestions as to whether the administrators may in facthave been concerned more with removing the individ-uals than the programs. As noted earlier, the classicist atBinghamton was the only tenured member of the fac-ulty given notice of termination in September, 1975.

As for the New Paltz action, it is noteworthy that theProgram Review Committee had recommended a re-

10 In his response to a prepublication draft of this report,President Fields stated that the timetable was influenced byreporting requirements relating to the SUNY budget. He ob-served that the assignments of the Select Committee and theTask Force were made feasible by the products of numerousearlier evaluations. In all, he stated, the State University ofNew York at Albany has had its programs and administra-tion assessed by ninety-eight separate teams of externalconsultants.

trenchment in Asian studies to the extent of only twolines; thus it was at President Coffman's initiative thatthe two additional lines—including the line occupiedby the professor of Chinese language—were re-trenched. Noteworthy also is a statement in a reportsent by President Coffman to the central administra-tion, apparently in March, 1976. The Program ReviewCommittee had recommended a retrenchment of two-and-one-half lines in history, but President Coffmanhad taken no action to reduce that department. Thereport states that "our History Department, which oth-erwise could sustain some reduction in staff, was notretrenched because the first two individuals who wouldbe retrenched are key figures. . . ." The investigatingcommittee is at a loss to understand why PresidentCoffman did not apply a similar reasoning to the AsianStudies Department, where he found a way to termi-nate the appointment of the professor of Chinese lan-guage in the Asian Studies Department and retain threepeople junior to him. As President Coffman informedthe committee, the deliberations of the Program Re-view Committee did not change his views as to wherethe cuts should be made, and the available evidenceleads one to conclude that he had resolved very early toremove the professor of Chinese language from hisposition.

Conversely, other positions were immediately foundfor faculty members in the Department of Internationaland Foreign Area Studies at Oneonta and the Depart-ment of Educational Research at Brockport, whereas ineach of these departments a more senior person wasgiven a notice of termination which remained in effect.The investigating committee finds no fault with theadministration for placing affected faculty memberselsewhere; on the contrary, it wishes that the adminis-trations of these and other SUNY institutions had beenmore successful in that effort than they were. But itfeels that some further consideration was due the seniorpeople in each of these departments. At Brockport, thesenior person in Educational Research seems simply tohave fallen victim to the tyranny of faculty lines; he wasnot working in that department, but that was where hisline was held and it disappeared with the department.He was, moreover, within a very few years of man-datory retirement, and the loss of his final teachingyears, at a time when he was still putting childrenthrough college, imposed a considerable hardship onhim.

At Oneonta, the senior member of the Department ofInternational and Foreign Area Studies was tenured,had held his position for thirteen years, and seems tohave maintained a satisfactory enrollment in hiscourses. He was also strongly supported by students,who continued their efforts in his behalf well into thenext academic year. When the department was de-clared a retrenchment unit, he was given notice oftermination; but the member of the department secondin seniority was retained to supervise the University'sOverseas Program in Israel. Retained also, however,were the second senior member's courses from the De-

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partment of International and Foreign Area Studies:nine of them are listed in the College's UndergraduateCatalogue for 1976-78 under the heading "Inter-national Studies and International Education." The in-vestigating committee is unable to appreciate the ex-planation given for this arrangement. The department,to be sure, was eliminated as an administrative unit,and substantively it was reduced to a large degree. Butit was not totally abolished, and more considerationseems thus to have been due to the senior member ofthe department.

Hearings and Notice

The statement on "Termination of Faculty Appoint-ments" provides that a faculty member whose appoint-ment is to be terminated because of a financial exigencywill have the right to a hearing before a faculty com-mittee, and will also have the right to a year s noticeor severance pay if the faculty member has servedat the institution for two or more years." The collec-tive bargaining Agreement provided instead for agrievance procedure, and most of the retrenched fac-ulty members filed grievances under the terms of theAgreement. As for notice, this varied widely in spite ofthe fact that the University Faculty Senate, in its posi-tion paper of January 31-February 1, 1975, had urgedthe central administration to provide at least a year'snotice for retrenched faculty members. Some cam-puses—Albany and Stony Brook, for example—madeconsistent provision for a year's notice. Others—Alfred,Binghamton, Brockport, Oneonta—gave shorter no-tices. At New Paltz, the initial notices of only five-and-one-half months were extended to a year when thelegislature provided a supplemental appropriation forthat purpose. At Brockport, initial notices of a mere fiveweeks to two faculty members were extended to fivemonths when the faculty members obtained restrainingorders from the New York Supreme Court. The effectsof such limited notice were called to Chancellor Boyer'sattention by the Association's Acting General Secretary,when he urged on April 29, 1976, that SUNY in-stitutions be required to follow the example of theUniversity Center at Buffalo in giving a year's notice:

We ask you to appreciate that the need for an adequatestandard for notice was generally accepted by the academicworld in better times, when new positions could be moreeasily procured. To stint on due notice at a time when it issorely needed by the recipients not only inflicts injury uponthem; it serves to dampen the spirits of those who re-main. . . .

Chancellor Boyer did not reply.

Placing the Faculty Members

Concerted efforts to relocate faculty members else-where in the institution are mandated both by theAssociation's statement on Termination of FacultyAppointments and by the collective bargaining Agree-ment. The University-wide effort consisted of littlemore than a routine sending of SUNY vacancy liststo affected faculty members, with the faculty mem-

bers rarely if ever receiving any special considerationfor the positions. At New Paltz, one of the affectedfaculty members informed the investigating committeethat he heard of a vacancy in another New Paltz depart-ment for which he felt qualified, wrote a letter of appli-cation to the chairman, and never even received anacknowledgment. Administrations, as at Oneonta, ap-peared reluctant to suggest that departments mighthave some obligation to accept qualified faculty mem-bers from other departments in their own institutions.At Albany, the member of the Department of Com-parative and World Literature whose appointmentwas terminated, and who was designated in 1973 asan Associate Member by the German Department,was compelled to file a grievance in order to obtainformal consideration of his request for continuing mem-bership in the German Department. The request wasdenied. At Brockport, the President of the FacultySenate called President Brown's attention to fivequarter-time positions which he said could be used toaccommodate one of the tenured faculty members inEducational Research He received no reply to his sug-gestion. President Brown, however, did find otherplaces for some of the faculty members subsequentlygiven notices of termination.

A tabulation prepared by SUNY-Central in Decem-ber, 1976, indicates that of the 103 nontenured facultymembers who received notice of termination of ap-pointment between September, 1974, and September,1976, 34 were re-employed by the University, and thatof 62 tenured faculty members whose appointmentswere terminated 29 were re-employed. (See Table 1.)These figures must be read with considerable caution.The seven tenured faculty members retrenched at NewPaltz, for example, are listed as re-employed, whereasone was employed outside the University, another in aposition within the central administration, and theremaining five for one additional year at New Paltzas Research Assistants.

The Termination of Tenured Faculty Appointments

It is a cardinal principle of the statement on "Termi-nation of Faculty Appointments" that, in a financialexigency, the institution will not make new appoint-ments if it is terminating others and that it will notterminate the appointment of a faculty member withtenure in favor of retaining a faculty member withouttenure, unless, in either case, a serious distortion in theacademic program will result. At SUNY, the disregardof this principle was widespread. Indeed, from the be-ginning the central administration looked upon theUniversity's financial distress as an occasion for reor-ganization, and its memoranda to campus administra-tors called attention to the importance of strengtheningsome programs while others were being curtailed oreliminated. As previously noted, fifteen new facultymembers were appointed at New Paltz for the academicyear 1976-77. Albany advertised for senior persons inEnglish and history to shore up the doctoral programsin those departments

Perhaps some of these changes were justified on the

256 AAUP BULLETIN

ground that serious distortions in academic programswould otherwise have resulted. The investigating com-mittee, however, did not find a consistent resolve fromcampus to campus to terminate the appointments oftenured faculty members only when a distortion of pro-gram appeared to be the sole alternative. Programs orparts of programs were eliminated for a number of rea-sons—because enrollments were low, or leadership wasadjudged ineffectual, or the programs did not seem justi-fied by the central mission of the institution, or perhapsat times because the individuals responsible for themwere unpopular with the administration or with theirfaculty colleagues—and it does not always seem to havebeen a significant consideration whether the programswere staffed by few or no tenured faculty members orby many. At times this apparent disregard of tenurereflected a laudable concern for the untenured, but,except in extraordinary circumstances, the investigatingcommittee cannot take the view that the claims of thenontenured take precedence over the claims of thetenured. It was never made apparent that SUNY's ac-tion to terminate tenured faculty appointments had thejustification of extraordinary circumstances.

The Problem of Reorganization

Although the state's financial crisis precipitated theretrenchments of 1975 and 1976, the University, as hasbeen noted, clearly administered the retrenchmentswith a view to reorganization as well as to economy. Inall the early pronouncements—by the Board in May,1975, and by Chancellor Boyer and Vice ChancellorSpindler in June—the idea of strengthening some pro-grams was featured almost as prominently as the idea ofcutting back on others. Vice Chancellor Spindler madeclear that "selective program excision" was intendedbecause "any across the board application of budgetcuts would lead to a mediocrity which is contrary to thegoals and intentions of this University." The UniversityFaculty Senate on January 31-February 1, 1975, hadalso recommended "selective cutting rather thanacross-the-board cutting if further reduction is neces-sary," although it is not at all clear that it had the samething in mind as the administration.

Reduction of expenses by attrition, in any event, wasnot the administration's intention, as Vice ChancellorKomisar informed the investigating committee, sincethe administration felt assured that the winding downprocess would be of long duration and that attrition,which depended upon a series of random events, was byits nature unresponsive to the needs of the public ser-ved by the University. That conviction accounted forthe extensive review process ordered by ChancellorBoyer on June 1 and for the establishment of the Uni-versity-wide Commission on Purpose and Priorities.Nevertheless, as Acting Chancellor Kelly noted, somecampuses probably were successful in achieving theirgoals through attrition; and it also became evident thatsome faculty groups, as at Albany and Brockport, be-came dissatisfied when in their judgment the admin-istration did not adequately explore a resolution of theinstitution's budgetary problems through attrition.

Figures on the number of faculty members at theState University of New York in 1974, 1975, and 1976,bear out the supposition that the process was one ofreorganization rather than of retrenchment. The Uni-versity in fact did not lose full-time faculty members, inspite of the numbers of tenured and nontenured per-sons given termination notices. According to data sub-mitted by the central administration and received bythe Association, the University ended up with 104

Table 2Number of SUNY Faculty Members, 1974-76

ProfessorAssoc. Prof.Ass't. Prof.Instructor

TOTALS:

1974-75

2,2772,3342,593

544

7,748

1975-76

2,3462,3842,549

495

7,774

1976-77

2,3262,5262,544

482

7,878

Source: AAUP compensation surveys. The central administration,providing figures for "Full-time Academic Employees" as opposedto the four academic ranks in the Table, has referred to data sub-mitted to the National Center for Education Statistics (HEGIS Xand XI) that show 8,345 academic employees in fall, 1975, and 8,249in fall, 1976.

more faculty members in 1976-77 than it had in 1975-76 (only 52, if lecturers are counted).11 With a dropin average University faculty salaries from $19,180 in1975-76 to $18,750 in 1976-77, it is evident that, on thewhole, retrenched faculty members' lines were used toappoint faculty members with lower salaries.

It should be noted also that the University's affirma-tive action program suffered a serious setback as aresult of the retrenchment.

The statement on "Termination of Faculty Appoint-ments" excludes by implication the device of reorgani-zation in response to a financial exigency and insteadtreats it as a separate process ("Discontinuance of aProgram or Department Not Mandated by FinancialExigency"). The investigating committee, however,finds it appropriate to consider the administration'splan for reorganization on its merits. If the central admin-istration was correct in suggesting that straitened finan-cial circumstances were the likely norm for some timeto come and that the random nature of attrition wouldassure mediocrity, then doubtless a strong case for re-organization might be made. The investigating com-mittee does not concur in the view, however, that theadministration's approach was the best one under thecircumstances, even if an effort to reorganize could bejustified. Attrition is not generally so totally haphazardthat it precludes all possibility of planning. And toeffect in quick order such far-reaching changes as oc-curred on some campuses raises its own questions about

11 Figures in this paragraph, presented in Table 2 above,were submitted by the administration and used in the AAUPannual surveys of faculty compensation for 1974-75, 1975-76,and 1976-77. The administration approved the figures eachyear prior to their publication.

AUGUST 1977 257

over-hasty actions which may be regretted and evenhave to be undone at a later date. The elimination ofsome of the campus schools, to be sure, had been underconsideration for some time, and—with due attentionto rights of tenure, due process, and notice—it wouldbe hard to quarrel with a continuation of that process.But one can have little faith in the propriety of mo-mentous decisions which affected entire campus pro-grams and were placed in effect on the basis of com-mittee examinations lasting only a few months andsometimes a few weeks, with faculty reactions to com-mittee recommendations called for at times in less thana couple of weeks. A number of those whose appoint-ments were terminated complained bitterly to the in-vestigating committee that they themselves had eithervery limited opportunity or no opportunity at all topresent their cases to review committees or to admin-istrators before they were given retrenchment notices.The provision of such an opportunity seems an ele-mentary courtesy, to say the least. Even more impor-tant, the failure to provide it denied the review bodiesinformation and viewpoints which could have beensignificant in their deliberations.

The investigating committee has therefore to ques-tion the validity of the SUNY reorganization process,the procedures of which left much to be desired. It maybe argued, of course, that "the difficult financial situa-tion," as it was announced to affected faculty, left noalternative to haste. That may be so. But it did leavealternatives to a reorganization process that requiredmany more notices of termination than would havebeen necessary simply to meet the demands of thebudget cuts. It has been argued that the process ofattrition would have led to mediocrity. But the investi-gating committee was given no reason to conclude thatit would lead more surely to mediocrity than thedemoralization of faculty which was the inevitable re-sult of the administration's approach to retrenchment.

The Question of Responsibility

The retrenchment actions at SUNY in 1975 and 1976were taken in accordance with Article 35 of the Agree-ment between The State of New York and United Uni-versity Professions, Inc., which was signed on June 20,1974. Concerned solely with the subject of re-trenchment, Article 35 acknowledges the possibility of aretrenchment for such reasons as financial exigency,reallocation of resources, reorganization of degree orcurricular offerings or requirements or of academic oradministrative structure, or the curtailment of pro-grams or functions, with the Chancellor or his designeeauthorized to determine the level of organization atwhich the retrenchment will be applied—university-wide, campus, department, unit, program, "or suchother level of organization" as he considers appropriate.

These provisions, coupled with relaxed standards forconsultation and for notice to faculty whose appoint-ments were terminated, along with the failure to pro-vide for hearings for faculty members on tenure orextended appointments, acknowledged the administra-tion s power to take, virtually unchallenged, actions like

those described in this report. With a need only for suchconsultation as the Chancellor or his designee consid-ered appropriate (and that not necessarily with thefaculty), and with a need to give notice of one semesteronly "where circumstances permit," the retrenchmentof tenured faculty members determined unilaterally bythe administration, and announced to the faculty onseveral weeks' notice, was entirely consistent with theAgreement.

It was some protection to tenured and other seniorfaculty members, of course, that a reverse order ofseniority within a retrenchment unit was provided bythe Agreement. But the wide-open retrenchment lan-guage undercut even that protection by permittingpresidents to designate subjects like Chinese languageor classical studies for retrenchment and thus to givenotice to tenured faculty members while persons lesssenior in their departments retained their positions.Such actions clearly bypassed normal due process pro-cedures. For if, as was commonly believed, the adminis-tration felt that it had some reason to take actionagainst these tenured faculty members, its appropriatestep was to bring charges against them in a regulardismissal proceeding. The grievance procedures alsoprovided some ex post facto protection in a few cases.But with so much discretion granted to the administra-tion by the Agreement, few grounds were left for fac-ulty members to grieve upon, and it is not surprisingthat grievance after grievance was rejected.

Certainly administrations have had much power be-fore, but it is doubtful if, before the SUNY Agreement,any large university faculty group ever undertook toconfirm in writing such sweeping administrative powersand to consent to them formally by ballot. The act ofconsent, in this instance, rendered the faculty virtuallydefenseless when the central administration decided toinvoke its powers.

Thus the faculty must share some responsibility forthese actions. Ultimately, however, discretion and deci-sion lay with the central administration. It was the ad-ministration which, having failed to consult the Univer-sity Faculty Senate, unilaterally authorized the re-trenchment and defined its objectives. It was the ad-ministration which—despite the Senate's urging—failed to set adequate guidelines for notice and thuspermitted the limited notices which were issued onsome campuses. At no time did the administration callfor anything more precise than consultation "to theextent necessary," and at no time does it seem to haveraised its voice in protest against the removal of tenuredfaculty members from their positions. The administra-tion, in short, seems to have been prepared to exercisethe full powers permitted it under the terms of theAgreement, and the variations in practice resulted fromthe different situations, approaches, and attitudes ondifferent campuses, rather than from any determinationof the central administration to see that sound princi-ples of academic freedom and tenure were observed.

XII. Conclusion

The retrenchments at the State University of New

258 AAUP BULLETIN

York in 1975 and 1976 were initiated by the Universityadministration without appropriate consultation withthe faculty and without any showing of a financialexigency which actually threatened the continuance ofthe University. They were overseen by the administra-tion with disregard for the rights of tenure, for duenotice, and for the role of the faculty in institutionalgovernment.

The actions of the administration (both the centraladministration and that of campuses cited) in effectingthe successive budget cuts have produced a climate inwhich academic freedom is gravely endangered. Aprimary purpose of tenure is to protect the faculty'sright of dissent, including the right to oppose the ad-ministration on issues important to the faculty. Underthe circumstances that now prevail, no faculty membercan be certain of his position, for it is possible for theadministration—under the recently negotiated Agree-ment as well as under the old—to so define a "pro-gram" that a particular individual can be targeted forretrenchment. In situations where tenure has not beenhonored, where faculty participation has beenthwarted, and where administrative prerogatives havebeen graphically invoked, few will venture openly todisagree with administrative decisions, so that preciselythe atmosphere of fear that the 1940 Statement ofPrinciples on Academic Freedom and Tenure seeks todispel has settled on the campuses. In such an atmo-sphere, learning and the transmission of knowledgecannot be expected to flourish.12

Bertram H. Davis (English), Florida State University,Chairman

Victor Gourevitch (Philosophy), Wesleyan UniversityDaniel F. Howard (English), Rutgers University

Investigating Committee

Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure hasby vote authorized publication of this report in theAAUP Bulletin

Clark Byse (Law), Harvard University, Chairman.Members: Ralph S. Brown, Jr., (Law), Yale Univer-

sity; William J. Kilgore (Philosophy), Baylor Univer-sity; Jordan E. Kurland (History and Russian), Wash-ington Office, ex officio; Walter P. Metzger (History),

" President Jones of the College at Cortland, in his re-sponse to a prepublication draft of this report, emphasized alack of consistency between the text of the report and itsconclusions. President Craven of the College at Oneontastated in his response that "these concluding comments . . .present an imaginary picture of the actual campus atmo-sphere. Certainly morale has suffered. One would expect itto when positions are being eliminated and retrenched andprograms curtailed. However the statement that because ofwhat has happened few faculty members will venture openlyto disagree with administrative decisions does not at all de-scribe the situation at Oneonta.

The response of the chief administrative officer of the Uni-versity, Acting Chancellor Kelly, included comments on theconclusion of the report as well as on a number of the issuesdiscussed. A substantial portion of his comments appears as anAddendum to this report.

Columbia University; Terrance Sandalow (Law), Uni-versity of Michigan; Joseph E. Schwartz (Political Sci-ence), Washington Office; Winton U. Solberg (His-tory), University of Illinois; Peter O. Steiner(Economics), University of Michigan, ex officio; CarolSimpson Stern (Interpretation), Northwestern Univer-sity; Judith J. Thomson (Philosophy), MassachusettsInstitute of Technology; William W. Van Alstyne(Law), Duke University; Robert K. Webb (History),University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

ADDENDUMComments from Acting Chancellor James F. Kelly

At no time could we have reordered our resources amongthe campuses to prevent retrenchment. The budget of StateUniversity of New York is the sum of its component parts,with the State Legislature and the Governor determining theresources allocated to the individual campuses that comprisethe University. Although Central Administration has someability to move resources within the system, to imply thatwe could have moved personnel lines in such a way as toeliminate the need of some campuses to retrench, is a failureto understand our responsibility to abide by the intent of theLegislature. Legislative support for new or critical programscannot be translated into funding for other purposes. This istrue at all times, but it is of particular relevance during timesof financial distress when any increases in public fundingare clearly selective. Public policymakers may dictate an in-crease in resources for programs in the health sciences, whilereducing instructional lines in other areas; additional fundsmay be allocated to our newer, emerging campuses, whilereductions are being demanded at our more mature institu-tions.

Given the reduction in positions and funding that was,part of the Governor's express program to reduce the size ofthe State's labor force, there was no way the University couldavoid terminating employees. The only question facing eachcampus was where to cut back. To answer this, we sought andobtained the advice of our faculty, as your report clearly dem-onstrates. And the decisions that were ultimately reachedwere based largely on that advice.

I believe now, as I believed then, that to meet a severebudget challenge through the random process of attritionand by retrenching only the most junior employees, withoutthought of academic needs and the demands of the public tobe served, is to abdicate responsibility. Our aim was to main-tain the integrity of our academic programs and the qualityof our offerings. To achieve that end, we retrenched a fewprograms in whole, and reduced some programs in part. Thisallowed us to continue to support the vast majority of ouracademic offerings at the levels necessary to protect thequality of instruction and research.

There are other points in your draft report that deservecritical review, and I'm certain that a number of them willbe addressed by our presidents in their responses to the docu-ment. The apocalyptic conclusion reached by the ad hoc com-mittee, however, deserves some comment. I believe it is with-out foundation. Indeed, morale has been hurt. Sudden andsevere cuts in budgets have that effect, particularly on afaculty that has expended a great deal of time, energy, anddevotion to the building of this University. But to infer thatthe retrenchments have silenced our faculty belies the facts.If anything, our faculty has increased its involvement andefforts in the planning of this University.

AUGUST 1977 259

Faculty budget committees continue to fulfill their respon-sibility to help guide the allocation of resources, curriculumcommittees are actively ensuring the quality and diversity ofour academic offerings, and the research efforts of our faculty,as evidenced by outside support for their work, have neverbeen greater. There is no question that we have problems—very few institutions of higher education do not—but Ibelieve we are meeting them creatively and well.

As much as I believe the report's conclusion is wrong and,in fact, does not follow from the body of the report, it is notunexpected. Your letter to the editor of the Chronicle ofHigher Education, October 25, 1976, published just after theinvestigation committee was named and long before its workwas done, makes the same judgment.' The amicus briefsubmitted by AAUP in support of the plaintiff in Hedley vs.State University of New York (the Court upheld the StateUniversity), was filed the day before your investigating com-

mittee was scheduled to visit Stony Brook, the campus in-volved in this legal suit. These seem remarkable breaks withthe judicious procedures AAUP has followed in the past; somuch so, that the investigation and report seem more in linewith your organizational work than with your professionalactivities. AAUP has attempted and failed to become therecognized bargaining agent for our faculty. Our faculty andprofessional staff elected the United University Professions,Inc. as their exclusive representative. Under the terms of theAgreement negotiated by the State of New York and UUP,Inc., academic freedom is fully protected (Article 1) and dueprocess is provided through the grievance structure (Article7). The University is obligated to operate in accordance withthis agreement and to respect UUP's legal authority as theexclusive representative on matters relating to terms andconditions of employment.

* The text of that letter follows:

TO THE EDITOR: October 25, 1976

It was good to see the article by Mr. Semas in the October 11Chronicle on the dismissals in the State University of New Yorkduring the past several months. As he noted, these very severe actionsin S.U.N.Y. seem to have escaped the public attention one wouldexpect, perhaps because of the massive retrenchment in C.U.N.Y.that was emerging simultaneously.

1 should like to offer one correction for the record. The October 11article describes A.A.U.P.'s major concern as being lack of sufficientnotice in dismissing faculty members on tenure or on term appoint-ments prior to their expiration. We did receive numerous com-plaints from faculty members being dismissed with severely in-adequate notice, and without evidence of any real emergency thatmight warrant abrupt dismissal, and in these cases we urged as afirst order of business that the faculty members be retained pending aconsidered review. Our fundamental concern, however, is with thedismissal of faculty members under a "retrenchment" provisionrequiring no demonstration of cause, of financial exigency, or ofproper discontinuance of program. Presidents of S.U.N.Y. institu-tions, once they have defined an action as "retrenchment," canand have dismissed faculty members at will, without providing any

of the safeguards of due process that are basic to academic freedomand tenure.

I should like also to comment on an incredible statement thatthe October 11 article attributes to President Wakshull of the UnitedUniversity Professions, the current official bargaining agent forS.U.N.Y. faculty and staff that is a party to the above-mentionedprovision on retrenchment through its contractual agreement withthe S.U.N.Y. administration. Mr. Wakshull is reported as assertingthat the S.U.N.Y. retrenchment provision is stronger than A.A.UP.procedures because the latter permit nonrenewal of probationary ap-pointments while the former provides "retrenchment rights." Non-renewal of appointments, permitted under appropriate standards inall sound systems of probation and tenure, is not now at issue inS.U.N.Y.; the concern is over the termination of appointments priorto their expiration, and it is this concern with which the S.U.N.Y.retrenchment provision is supposed to deal. The "retrenchmentrights" in the provision do not extend in any meaningful way toaffected faculty members but are rights only of the administrationwhich, under its agreement with Mr. Wakshull's organization, ac-quired the authority to proclaim "retrenchment" and then proceedunilaterally to terminate appointments.

JORDAN E. KURLANDActing General SecretaryAmerican Association of

University Professors

260 AAUP BULLETIN