Chapter Statements

Statement on Phil Mitchell
Statement on Adrienne Anderson
Statement on Ward Churchill
Statement on Proposal to Change the Editorial Authority of the Silver and Gold Record

The Phil Mitchell Case

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Phil Mitchell, a senior instructor in the Sewall Residence Academic Program (RAP) at the University of Colorado, Boulder, was terminated by non-renewal of his contract in spring 2007. Mitchell, arguably the most honored teacher in the history of the University, had previously been terminated in 2005, he claims, because of hostility by the History Department toward his conservative religious and political convictions. Mitchell publicly spoke out against his 2005 firing, an endeavor that he believes temporarily saved his job. Mitchell considers his 2007 firing an act of retaliation against his speaking out in 2005.

The American Association of University Professors, CU Chapter, finds substantial evidence that:

• A history of antipathy toward Dr. Mitchell’s political and religious convictions existed within the CU History Department.

• CU backed off Dr. Mitchell’s 2005 termination because, when challenged by media inquiries, the administration and tenured faculty could not document cause for his firing. Their stories changed several times, as each story proved untrue.

• The CU History Department and the Sewall RAP undertook extraordinary measures to ensure that documentation was available to justify Dr. Mitchell’s 2007 firing.

• The 2007 documentation against Dr. Mitchell was orchestrated and fabricated to justify his firing.

• The letter by the director of the Sewall RAP to the Dean of Arts and Sciences, recommending Dr. Mitchell’s termination, stands as an egregious act of unprofessional conduct.

• An improper culture exists at the University of Colorado, wherein most of the faculty can be fired at any time for any reason, or for no reason, thus encouraging the administration and tenured faculty to suppress the academic freedom of the majority.

• Dr. Mitchell’s termination violates numerous Laws of the Regents protections of due process, shared governance, and academic freedom, as well as his First Amendment right to free speech.

We request that Dr. Mitchell be reinstated as a senior instructor at the University of Colorado. We also request that he be granted tenure both in recognition of his decades as a teacher of the highest quality and to send the message to administrators and tenured faculty that the University of Colorado respects the rights and academic freedom of all its faculty and will no longer participate in their mistreatment. We further request that Ann Carlos be removed from the directorship of Sewall RAP and that the Sewall RAP faculty be given the primary role in selecting the new director, in accordance with the Laws of the Regents.

Download the AAUP's entire Statement on the Termination of Phil Mitchell >>

The Adrienne Anderson Case

This statement by the CU Chapter of the American Association of University Professors is a formal request that the national AAUP investigate the termination of Adrienne Anderson, an eleven-year non-tenured Instructor at the University of Colorado at Boulder .  We believe that Ms. Anderson should be reinstated to her former post, and promoted to Senior Instructor, as she was being reviewed for at the time of the abrupt and improper cancellation of all of her course, and be granted tenure, which is allowable for instructors who bring unusual skills and demonstrate excellence in teaching, as Ms. Anderson has.  Further, are requesting the AAUP to investigate whether academic freedom, due process, and the free exchange of ideas at the University are being implemented within a framework of shared governance and mutual accountability.  We believe that they are not,, as is amply demonstrated in the Anderson case.

Several factors make Adrienne Anderson's case unique and important:

• At the time Ms. Anderson's courses and teaching position were terminated, she had been a highly successful instructor for both the Environmental Studies Program and Ethnic Studies Department for eleven years receiving consistent A+ ratings from her students for courses which she developed, and for her as an instructor, and the highest possible rankings of "Far Exceeds Expectations" in her annual faculty evaluations within her program from faculty colleagues.

• As part of her University-related community service, representing a significant percentage of her University contract, Adrienne Anderson assisted environmental organizations,  community-based groups and labor organizations in evaluating environmental and occupational health threat at area facilities and hazardous and nuclear waste sites in the Rocky Mountain region, largely in the Denver/Boulder metropolitan area.  In a number of cases, her research, aided or augmented by student researchers she was mentoring, led to discovery of significant  public health and safety issues, lack of enforcement of existing state and federal laws despite evidence of risk, and actions by governmental and corporate interests to blunt the impact of her research disclosures in the public interest.

• Major corporate polluters in the Denver area and their rightwing supporters in the former Governor Bill Owens administration worked to prevent the disclosure of environmental hazards that Ms. Anderson's research had revealed.  This was evidenced by documents obtained by CU students using the Colorado Open Records Act, finding voluminous evidence of polluters and Owens political appointees  exerting their political muscle through implied threats of loss of funding should CU officials not cater to their desires to curb Ms. Anderson's rights on the CU faculty.  Despite a barrage of communications revealing evidence of heavy external pressure, Ms. Anderson was kept in the dark about these external political maneuvers with and between  CU's top administrator, for well over a year, in apparent violation of her rights to academic freedom.      

• Large local corporations through rightwing political allies in the Owens administration pressured CU administrators to sanction Ms. Anderson and suppress evidence she had uncovered of corporate wrongdoing and the Owens administration's failure to enforce environmental laws protecting public health and safety.

• The University Administration failed to enforce the Laws of the Regents of the University of Colorado intended to protect a member of faculty from deleterious actions at the behest of powerful rightwing and corporate actors outside the University.

• The Environmental Studies Department and the University administration violated Ms. Anderson's academic freedom, denied her due process and violated proper procedures of shared administrative and faculty governance as specified by the Laws of the Regents.

• Conflicts of interest exist among University administrators involved in the adjudication of Ms. Anderson's subsequent grievance appealing the elimination of her courses and position, as several were themselves involved in the violations of her rights alleged, records show.

• The CU legal counsel, Privilege and Tenure Committee attorney and chair of what would have been a belatedly convened Level 2 hearing process, in violation of the CU Regents-approved procedures designed to assure a timely resolution of her grievances, in apparent deference to the University administration, refused to allow Ms. Anderson to present evidence of external political meddling and CU officials' violations of her academic freedom and due process rights in the improper process to eliminate all of her highly popular and successful courses, and her faculty position, thereby undermining her case, and protecting the administrators involved in the violations from further exposure of their wrongful acts.

• An official liaison between Ms. Anderson and the University administration, the current chairman of the CU Privilege & Tenure Committee, apparently failed to communicate a settlement offer made by Ms. Anderson, while advising Ms. Anderson that she was not to contact CU administrators directly and that any communications should go through him.  CU legal counsel denied that any such settlement offers had been communicated to the CU administration through the P & T chairman.

The Director of the Environmental Studies Program and University administration failed to discipline a faculty member, whose position is funded by the E.W. Scripps Company who violated Ms. Anderson's right to confidentiality and spread false and defamatory claims about Ms. Anderson using McCarthy-era type tactics to parties outside of the program unit that was to have confidentially considered her personnel matter and promotion, and circulating other defamatory Scripps material within the program as students sought the faculty's reconsideration of their vote and Ms. Anderson's appeal was in process.

• University administrators blocked other employment opportunities offered to Ms. Anderson within the University of Colorado system, causing severe personal and financial stress.

• Ms. Anderson's termination is the most egregious example of a pattern of behavior among University officials and their allies, often in deference to powerful external actors and contradictory to the Laws of the Regents, which constitutes a clear violation of academic freedom, denial of due process, negation of shared administrative and faculty governance, diminishment of educational quality, inhibition of a free exchange of ideas, threats to tenure and suppression of information important to public health and safety.

• Ms. Anderson's termination occurred within an increasingly hostile national environment for higher education, wherein powerful corporate and rightwing organizations exert pressure upon the nation's universities to curtail shared governance, reduce the protections of tenure and curb the free exchange of ideas, which offend vested corporate interests or violate rightwing preconceptions of higher education's 'proper' role in modern society.

The University of Colorado at Boulder Chapter of the AAUP feels the Anderson case is a particularly egregious instance of an emerging pattern of autocratic and opportunistic behavior by the University of Colorado administration, its political allies, and corporate donors. It involves startling efforts to intervene in University hiring and promotion policies by high-level state government officials;  evidence indicates that these efforts were intended to silence her and prevent her research from being disseminated. Several factors stand out to make Ms. Anderson's termination extraordinary; all have disturbing implications for the academic freedom of tenured and non-tenured faculty; educational quality at the University of Colorado and similar institutions; the free exchange of ideas; shared governance between faculty and the University administration; assurance of due process in personnel and curricular matters. Further, the University's action in removing Anderson from the faculty and suppressing her research on highly toxic environmental pollution endangers the public. Actions by the administration and its allies can be viewed within a larger context of attempts by powerful organizations such as the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) and other economic and political interests to impose a rightwing corporatist agenda upon the nation's universities.  Indeed, the University of Colorado is at the epicenter of attempts to reshape academia in a manner antithetical to principles of academic practice long represented and defended by the AAUP.

It is our belief that Adrienne Anderson's case is important not only to the University of Colorado, but to higher education generally.  As is clear from statements and the literature of influential groups like ACTA and various corporate and rightwing critics of higher education, Colorado institutions of higher education, particularly the flagship University of Colorado, are viewed as a test case for the rightwing corporatist model.  ACTA and its allies hope to weaken faculty governance, eliminate the protections offered by tenure, constrain academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas, and severely reduce access to due process for faculty. The significance of Ms. Anderson's case has been obscured by other recent high-profile occurrences at the University of Colorado, so we feel it particularly important to highlight this case at the national level.

It is also important to note considerable incentive exists for large local corporations implicated by Ms. Anderson's research to silence her.  Moreover, these corporations are in a strong position to influence decisions at the University of Colorado.   They are significant investors in the University who exert influence over curricular and other decisions.  One of them, Scripps-Howard, controls all major Front Range print media, including the Rocky Mountain News, Denver Post, Boulder Daily Camera and CU's Colorado Daily, plus a large and growing portion of smaller suburban and military publications in Colorado. Ms. Anderson's research on toxic waste revealed that Scripps-Howard is an EPA-designated potentially liable party for its own toxic industrial wastes dumped at a Superfund site Ms. Anderson extensively researched as a component of her CU contract-related research position and community service ó and whose role in a defamation campaign against Ms. Anderson was acknowledged in a decision in Ms. Anderson's favor by a federal whistleblower judge in 2001, and favorably finding that Ms. Anderson's research was "credible" and "well-founded," while comparing her to some of the nation's top whistleblowers, including Erin Brockovich and Karen Silkwood.  Consequently, Ms. Anderson's case has received minimal coverage in the Denver metropolitan area, given the media monopoly of the Scripps corporation in this region.  What coverage there has been by the Scripps-associated newspapers has been designed to malign Ms. Anderson's research and even calling it fraudulent while refusing to publish the documents revealing the facts of her research, and publishing Op-ed pieces intended to  impugn her professionally and personally, in overt attempts to undermine her public support and divert attention from the pollution facts which reveal the newspapers' corporate owners' own environmental liabilities.

Due to the broad significance of this case and the many obstacles facing Ms. Anderson, it is important that it be given a fair and full airing, external to the processes at CU which are demonstrably not being followed or abused in still further violation of Ms. Anderson's rights.  An organization of national stature can investigate the facts, publicize the results, and take appropriate action in full public view.  The AAUP is the nation's top advocate on behalf of American higher education.   AAUP is most appropriate agency to evaluate Anderson's case, bring it to public attention and press policy makers to make changes.  At this point, the American citadel of ideas is under assault, especially at the University of Colorado.  Therefore, we are asking your help to defend those principles of academic freedom and shared governance upon which American higher education and the AAUP are founded.

University of Colorado AAUP Chapter
April 2, 2007

Statement of the AAUP Chapter at the University of Colorado at Boulder Regarding the Investigation and Recommended Termindation of Professor Ward Churchill

The American Association of University Professors has been fighting to protect academic freedom, faculty governance, and due process in higher education since 1915. The newly constituted University of Colorado-Boulder chapter of the AAUP is deeply concerned over the University of Colorado administration's handling of the "Ward Churchill affair." We recognize that Professor Churchill's statements are often inflammatory and that serious questions have been raised about his scholarship. Nevertheless, we believe that academic freedom and due process must be accorded to all faculty members, regardless of their personalities or politics.

CU-B AAUP recognizes that the University's credibility depends on sound scholarship and our membership strongly supports the maintenance of rigorous research standards. However, faculty members whose research results in unpopular conclusions should not be held to a higher standard than scholars whose work is popular or uncontroversial. CU-B AAUP also believes that serious charges of misconduct leveled against faculty should be investigated. However, the credibility of those charges should be investigated as well, in order to protect faculty against politically motivated witch hunts. Finally, we believe that a central mission of the University should be

defending academic freedom by protecting faculty members from vindictive attacks and maintaining a presumption of innocence for faculty members who are accused of misconduct until investigations are concluded. This was not done in the Churchill case.

The membership of CU-B AAUP takes no position on whether or not any of the substantive charges of research misconduct leveled against Professor Churchill are justified. Our areas of expertise are different from Churchill's and we are not able to assess independently the conclusions of the two CU-B Committees that have investigated Churchill's work. However, several aspects of the investigation raise questions about the fairness of the ad hoc Investigating Committee's conclusions and the proportionality of the punishment recommended by the Administration. They also raise more general worries about the investigation's chilling effect on critical scholarship.

No one doubts that the original charges against Professor Churchill were politically motivated. In February, 2005, the Colorado House of Representatives unanimously adopted a resolution condemning Churchill and State Governor Bill Owens called publicly for him to resign for statements he made regarding the World Trade Tower disaster. These resolutions violated Professor Churchill's First Amendment right to free speech, as a University appointed committee rightly ruled. However, charges of academic misconduct immediately surfaced--from the same and similar sources--despite the fact that similar charges had been raised at least two years earlier, and were never followed up by the University. In this highly politicized context, many assert that no investigation of Professor's Churchill's work should ever have been undertaken, and others argue that, in such a context, a fair investigation was impossible. Notwithstanding, an inquiry was conducted, in circumstances marked by constant inflammatory, ad hominem, and even obscene attacks, on and off the CU campus, against Professor Churchill, his department, anyone who appeared to support him, and even against some members of the ad hoc Investigating Committee, two of whom resigned soon after the investigation began.

CU-B AAUP recognizes that the initial inquiry initiated by Interim Chancellor Distefano was an attempt to keep the investigation of Professor Churchill in the hands of the CU-B faculty and administrators, in the face of extraordinary pressures to cede control to Regents, legislators, or other outside bodies. We appreciate the service of our colleagues on the Standing Committee on Research Misconduct and especially on the sub-committee that investigated Churchill, who endured months of unrelenting pressure. While we do not question the integrity or acuity of these colleagues, nevertheless, we believe that the investigation now is widely perceived to be a pretext for firing Churchill when the real reason for dismissal is his politics. Our questions and concerns about the investigation include the following:

1. The lack of an uninvolved arbiter is troubling. It appears to be a violation of due process that the Interim Chancellor acted both as plaintiff, in bringing the charges against Churchill, and as judge, recommending dismissal. In making his recommendation, Professor Distefano acted on the most stringent recommendations of the two committees, even though half of the members recommended a lesser penalty.

2. The absence of peer investigators is also troubling. Professor Churchill is a specialist in Native American scholarship and has focused on historical issues regarding relationships between Native peoples and European-Americans. However, the final investigative committee included no scholars from Native American Studies or American Indian History. Thus, there was no expertise present in Professor Churchill's specific areas of study. We do not believe that a mathematician, physicist, physician or lawyer would have been investigated without disciplinary peers to evaluate the quality of his or her scholarship.

3. The hostile climate posed serious problems for the Churchill investigation and surely contributed to the absence on the sub-committee of scholarly peers in Professor Churchill's field. For example, one faculty member was pressured to resign from the Committee on Research Misconduct because he had signed the February, 2005, faculty petition supporting academic freedom in general at CU, and thus was viewed by some as supportive of Churchill himself. In addition, the two Native American historians originally asked to serve on the Investigatory Committee were so intimidated by the "toxic" atmosphere at CU and so pressured by outsiders that both resigned almost upon appointment.

4. Some scholars argue that the standards of research misconduct used in Professor Churchill's case were elastic and that they were applied to his work with special stringency. Others consider the recommended punishment disproportionate. From a record of more than twenty books and hundreds of articles, chapters, speeches, and electronic communications, the committee investigating Churchill's work isolated only a few minor examples of "plagiarism"--missing footnotes, in some cases--and one example of fabrication. If these instances indeed constitute research fraud and misconduct, they do show that Professor Churchill sometimes failed to adhere to the most rigorous standards of scholarship. However, they seem relatively small in light of Churchill's vast opus. All scholars have points of view and even distinguished scholars make occasional mistakes; however, it is highly unusual for the discovery of such errors to end in dismissal. We believe that the ultimate penalty--loss of tenure and of his position at the University--was imposed on Professor Churchill primarily for political reasons, and in a context of powerful pressures from the outside to fire him.

5. The investigation into Professor Churchill's work has been undertaken in the context of extensive well-organized and well-funded activity to discredit scholarship by faculty members perceived as liberal or left-leaning and to undermine the autonomy of institutions of higher education across the country. The University of Colorado has been a special target of such efforts and scholars around the country are watching carefully to see what happens here. Particularly insofar as the investigation inappropriately casts aspersions on Professor Churchill's controversial conclusions regarding relationships between Native Americans and the United States, it also will weaken academic freedom across the United States. The freedom of faculty to interpret their own data, regardless of these interpretations' conformity to conventional wisdom, lies at the heart of the scholarly enterprise. Further, the obligation of the Universities to stand behind their faculty is crucial to the survival of academic freedom overall.

In these circumstances, it is vital for the University of Colorado to defend not only the integrity of scholarly research but also the interlinked principles of academic freedom for its faculty and autonomy for itself. Failure to do this will be extremely damaging to the University of Colorado. It will injure faculty morale; set a precedent for further political meddling in university affairs; diminish the University's ability to recruit qualified faculty, especially in disciplines where controversies over interpretation are commonplace; impugn the University's scholarly reputation, and diminish the University's ability to represent the best of scholarly work in research, the classroom and the community at large.

1. For these reasons, CU-B chapter of AAUP calls on the University of Colorado's administration to reverse the decision to dismiss Professor Churchill. The problems that beset the Churchill inquiry, especially its highly politicized origin and context, bring into question both the objectivity of the inquiry and the proportionality of the recommended penalty. We recognize, however, the possibility that lesser sanctions may be justified for some specific acts described in the report.

2. More generally, we call on the University to renew its commitment to academic freedom. This requires that the administration and the faculty exist in a reciprocal relationship, whereby faculty engage in resolute and rigorous scholarship in accordance with the canons of their discipline and the administration protects this scholarship and instruction against external political pressures. The recent "Report of the First Global Colloquium of University Presidents," held at Columbia University in January 2005, and attended by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Anan stated clearly: "The autonomy of the universities is the guarantor of academic freedom in the performance of scholars' professional duties."

January 25, 2007

Statement on Proposal to Change the Editorial Authority of the Silver and Gold Record

Executive CommitteeThe CU-Boulder chapter of the American Association of University Professors wishes to protest, in the strongest form possible, proposed changes to the structure and editorial authority of the Silver & Gold Record (S&G), the newspaper for faculty and staff at the University of Colorado. We believe that the proposed changes will compromise the quality and mission of the S&G in ways harmful to the health of the university. By extension such changes also will undercut CU’s capacity to engage in and invigorate the free exchange of ideas that is central to the survival of democracy. The reliable information that the Silver and Gold Record provides is essential to the vitality of our university: The S&G's current independence effectively makes it the only resource where CU faculty and staff can get a balanced understanding of most issues they face.

The S&G's commitment to the code of ethics of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, expressed in the S&G's mission to "enable faculty and staff members to make more informed judgments on issues relevant to their role . . ." is critical to academic freedom and faculty participation in shared governance of the University—a central tenet of the AAUP. Essential to maintaining the S&G's ethical commitments is that it remain "independent of special interest groups and individuals," by taking "every step to assure that news content is accurate, free from bias, and in context.”

The proposed changes call for changing the Silver and Gold’s editor from a classified staff member to an at-will exempt employee, to be appointed by the university president. Substituting this form of governance for the current independent editorial board representing the diverse interests of our university community will violate the S&G’s code of ethics, summarized above. Further, any faculty newspaper that claims independence, but whose editor is an at-will employee serving at the pleasure of the University president and subject to termination at any time for any, or no, reason at all, is automatically suspect. History has repeatedly demonstrated that such perceptions of conflict of interest, while perhaps unfair to both the administration and the editorial staff, are crippling to the credibility of the university. Under such conditions, faculty and staff never know if the information presented is accurate and free from bias, or an expression of editorial accommodation to the political realities of the editor’s employment status.

According to the AAUP:

Employment-at-will contracts are by definition inimical to academic freedom and academic due process, because their contractual provisions permit infringements on what academic freedom is designed to protect. Since faculty members under at-will contracts serve at the administration's pleasure, their services can be terminated at any point because an administrator objects to any aspect of their academic performance, communications as a citizen, or positions on academic governance—or simply to their personalities. Should this happen, these faculty members have no recourse, since the conditions of their appointment leave them without the procedural safeguards of academic due process. Moreover, the mere presence of at-will conditions has a chilling effect on the exercise of academic freedom. Faculty members placed at constant risk of losing their position by incurring the displeasure of the administration must always be on guard against doing so. (AAUP, "Academic Freedom and Tenure: University of the Cumberlands (Kentucky)")

We find it self-evident that the constraints regarding dissemination of information upon faculty members serving at-will are identical to constraints imposed on any members of the university community serving at will. The efficacy of such employees is compromised to the extent that they can be constrained from reporting events, research, and other news according to their own judgments of accuracy and quality. Any compromising of the editorial independence of the Silver & Gold, whether a matter of fact or perception, will comprise a backward step toward mediocrity. The CU chapter of the AAUP strongly believes that transforming the editorship to an at-will position would be such a compromise.

The dangers that at-will status poses to the quality of expression at the University has been highlighted recently at CU. Last week, in a referendum to endorse the AAUP's "Institutional Regulations on Academic Freedom and Tenure," the contingent teaching faculty at CU-Boulder voted 279-29 in favor of freeing themselves from at-will employment and its inevitable constraints on academic freedom and shared governance. Many did so despite implicit threats from tenured colleagues and administrators that such actions might result in wholesale firings. These threats are emblematic of the dangers which the Silver and Gold editor would face in becoming an at-will employee.

We urge that the new Administrative Policy Statement regarding the Silver & Gold guarantee the independence and integrity necessary, in both policy and practice, to maintain the continued excellence of the S&G—one of our university's essential resources. We believe that it should do so by retaining the Silver and Gold editor’s current employment status, and the newspaper’s independent editorial board. To do otherwise would be a cynical movement away from the transparency and openness that President Hank Brown has so often espoused.

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