By Peter Schmidt

The American Association of University Professors issued a report today accusing Clark Atlanta University of numerous violations of faculty rights in connection with its dismissal of about a fourth of its faculty members last year.

The report, by an AAUP investigative committee, concludes that the university's administration declared a nonexistent "enrollment emergency" last February as a pretext for firing about 55 full-time faculty members without due process.

The investigative committee says the historically black college's administration showed a disregard for shared governance by deciding on the layoffs without faculty input. The administration's selection of which faculty members to fire appears to have been based largely on a desire to shed those faculty members it regarded as unwanted, and both the university's president, Carlton E. Brown, and its associate vice president for academic affairs, Jeffrey J. Phillips, "seemed to view tenure as having no particular significance when it came to making decisions about whom to lay off," the committee's report says.

The report also accuses the administration of giving far too little notice of dismissal to the faculty members—who were told by letter on February 6 that their jobs had been eliminated, "effective today"—and of offering faculty members far too little severance pay. All of those laid off were offered severance packages equal to an additional four weeks' pay. Those who agreed to sign severance agreements releasing the university from any potential legal claims were given additional severance payments ranging from two to eight weeks' salary.

A spokeswoman for Clark Atlanta, Jennifer Jiles, declined today to comment on the report, saying that it was still being reviewed by officials there. In a letter to the AAUP responding to a prepublication draft of the report, President Brown argued that, considering the economic climate and the university's recent enrollment declines, "it should be clear to any objective person" that the actions taken by the university were "absolutely essential."

"Please know that we understand and have always understood the position that the AAUP would take on this matter," Mr. Brown's letter said. "Our number one priority, however, has been and will always be the preservation of this fine institution for the students it serves now and will serve in the future."

A chief point of contention between the AAUP and Clark Atlanta is the university's unorthodox decision to base its layoffs on a declaration of "enrollment emergency," defined in its handbook as "a sudden or unplanned progressive decline in student enrollment the detrimental financial effects of which are too great or too rapid to be offset by normal procedures in the handbook." Although the AAUP's guidelines for colleges allow them to terminate faculty appointments based on declarations of "financial exigency," the association does not recognize an "enrollment emergency" as a legitimate basis for terminating faculty members before the end of their specified terms of employment.

The report also disputes President Brown's assertion that the university faced an actual enrollment emergency. It argues that Mr. Brown's prediction that enrollment would drop from 4,100 in the fall-2008 semester to 3,400 in the spring-2009 semester was based partly on his own efforts to curtail enrollment, which ended up being nearly 4,000 anyway.

"The investigating committee has found no evidence to support the administration's claimed enrollment crisis," the report says, and in fact "finds credible that in all likelihood the administration, and President Brown in particular, attempted to manipulate enrollment numbers in order to establish plausible grounds to dismiss faculty members summarily."