AAUP Plans to Investigate Clark Atlanta U. Over Faculty Layoffs

The American Association of University Professors informed Clark Atlanta University on Tuesday of plans to investigate the university over its dismissal of 70 full-time faculty members in February.

In a letter to Clark Atlanta’s president, Carlton E. Brown, the associate secretary of the AAUP, B. Robert Kreiser, wrote that the institution’s “massive dismissals of faculty” raised “key issues of academic freedom, tenure, and due process” that remain unresolved after two months of communications with the university. Accordingly, Mr. Kreiser said, the AAUP plans to establish an investigative panel to determine whether the association’s committee on academic freedom and tenure needs to take action against the university.

Mr. Carlton had characterized the layoffs, which also included 30 employees who were not full-time faculty members, as a necessary response to budgetary pressures resulting from falling enrollments in recent years. Since 2001, enrollment at the historically black institution has fallen from 5,000 to 3,900.

The college carried out a similar round of layoffs in 2003, and since then has sought to eliminate several academic programs to cut costs.