Five years ago, The American Association of University Professors censured the College of St. Rose in Albany. As WAMC has learned, the organization sent a letter to the college last month reinforcing the designation.
For the last six years the College of Saint Rose administration has navigated choppy waters: labor problems with adjunct professors, staff cutbacks, cuts to benefit packages, communications breakdowns between faculty and administration, funding shortfalls and a drop-off in admissions. Students wondering about the future of the college. The resignation of the vice-president for academic affairs.
In 2016, censure was imposed by the American Association of University Professors, after an investigative committee issued a 17-page report finding program closures and faculty layoffs violated AAUP's recommendations and standards on academic freedom and tenure.
The report traced the private colleges' difficulties to October 2014, when it was revealed St. Rose had a $9 million budget deficit.
In February 2016 faculty overwhelmingly voted no confidence in then-president Dr. Carolyn Stefanco.
By 2020, the school cut $8 million in administrative and staff expense reductions via layoffs, salary reductions, and freezing the staff pension plan. Near the end of the year the college moved to discontinue academic programs and executed a plan to reduce expenses by nearly $6 million, eliminating 16 bachelor degrees, six master’s degrees and three certificate programs. The move terminated 33 of the college’s 151 full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty positions as of December 2021. Several are now suing.
Last month, Greg Scholtz, AAUP's Director of the Department of Academic Tenure, Freedom and Governance, wrote to college president Marcia White after receiving complaints that the school was once again acting "in a manner again at odds with our supported principles and standards."
“Typically, we try to get institutions off the censure list, and we've written the president of the college, at least yearly since then, asking, if there's something we could do to help get that to happen," said Scholtz. "So I was somewhat surprised to learn last year that a similar action was being taken. And we were eventually contacted by four faculty members at the college, who told us that their appointments, their tenured appointments, have been terminated on the basis of anticipated low enrollment, apparently. And we wrote this letter to express our disappointment, that in a time we, when we hoped we would be removing the college from censure, we were now opening another case, and to express our new concerns about what appeared to be a similar action.”
Scholtz tells WAMC 57 institutions are currently on the censure list.
Saint Rose declined to comment on mic and issued the following statement:
"The College of Saint Rose faculty are not represented by AAUP. We took difficult but necessary steps in 2020, in the midst of a pandemic, to move the College into a position of financial sustainability. After reducing the administrative budget, and implementing other cost reductions, the College made certain academic program reductions which resulted in faculty layoffs. The process used involved collaboration with faculty representatives. The loss of treasured academic programs and valued faculty members is profoundly painful and an acknowledged loss to the College and community."
Scholtz' reaction: "It's not the response that I've seen before, but it's not really relevant. The response was that the College of Saint Rose faculty are not represented by the AAUP. The AAUP does have a number of chapters that engage in collective bargaining, including a number of those such chapters in state of New York, but AAUP, when it writes in administration about an issue like this, it doesn't make any difference whether or not the faculty at that institution are in an AAUP chapter, whether the chapter is collective bargaining chapter or non-collective bargaining chapter. AAUP's mission is to advance principles and standards of academic freedom tenure and governance, at all institutions of higher education in this country, for the common good, for the sake of quality education, and quality research," Scholtz said.
Scholtz says by placing Saint Rose on its censure list, AAUP has done all it can to register its condemnation.
"We have essentially fired our last gun here," said Scholtz. " And as I also say in the letter, if and when there's an administration at the College of Saint Rose that's interested in being removed from censure, one of the things they're going to have to deal with now is this subsequent case, because in order for censure to be removed, the institution has to address the policies that led to our investigation, and in addition, the cases of the affected faculty members. And these cases would be added to the ones that we investigated in 2016."
You can find AAUP's letter below.
LINKS
2014: College Of Saint Rose Adjuncts To Vote On Unionizing
2015: College Of St. Rose: Growing Pains
https://www.wamc.org/capital-region-news/2015-09-21/college-of-st-rose-growing-pains
2015: St. Rose Professor Disputes Administration’s Strategy
2016: College Fires Back After Critical AAUP Report
https://www.wamc.org/capital-region-news/2016-05-05/college-fires-back-after-critical-aaup-report
2020: College Of St. Rose Faces Further Cuts
https://www.wamc.org/new-york-news/2020-07-31/college-of-st-rose-faces-further-cuts
2020: Citing Financial Struggles, College Of St. Rose Ending Academic Programs
2021: Terminated Music Professors Sue College Of St. Rose
https://www.wamc.org/news/2021-09-17/terminated-music-professors-sue-college-of-st-rose
