A national faculty advocacy group is again complaining about possible infringements on faculty rights by the University administration.
In an Oct. 29 letter addressed to Chancellor Michael Martin, the American Association of University Professors asked for the reinstatement of the 14 foreign language professors who will lose their jobs at the end of this semester.
“We urge you to rescind the notices of termination issued to the fourteen language instructors,” Associate Secretary B. Robert Kreiser wrote in the letter. “If, however, the notices are allowed to stand, we urge that their effective date be extended to the end of the current academic year.”
More than 200 instructors received notices of non-renewal in January. The “foreign language 14,” the subjects of the letter, are the only known instructors who did not receive extensions to those letters.
The AAUP letter argues that the instructors, most of whom have been at the University for more than seven years, should have received more advanced notice that their contracts would not be renewed.
The letter is the third such complaint this year. The AAUP blasted the administration in February for not renewing Ivor van Heerden, the marine sciences professor who made national headlines for his post-Katrina criticisms of the Army Corps of Engineers’ maintenance of the New Orleans levees.
The group claimed the administration had Ivor van Heerden fired because those criticisms could have endangered federal funding funneled to the University through the Corps.
The AAUP’s argument in the new complaint echoes the argument in the van Heerden case — by the association’s reading of LSU policy, both van Heerden and the foreign language 14 were tenured, protecting them from abrupt firings.
The University stringently denied that van Heerden had tenure when he was let go. A federal judge denied van Heerden a preliminary injunction in March that would have saved his job, arguing the University could legally fire him.
The AAUP is also investigating a case involving biology professor Dominique Homberger. In April, University administrators suddenly removed Homberger from teaching an introductory biology class after her students had unusually low class grades.
Homberger sponsored a Faculty Senate resolution passed Tuesday echoing the AAUP’s call for the professors to be reinstated and claiming administrators violated the instructors’ due process rights.
“A budget crisis should not be an opportunity for the administration to make major structural changes to the university,” the resolution said.
Faculty Senate President Kevin Cope says it’s unusual for “an academic institution of this stature to face this many complaints in so short a time.”
Though the AAUP doesn’t have any legal power, Cope said it has moral and political authority.
“The administration has made all sorts of promises and led people to believe their jobs are more secure than they really are,” Cope said.
 
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Contact Matthew Albright at [email protected]