|
|
 |
 |
Inside Higher Education
Fired Because He
Wouldn't Dumb Down a Course?
AAUP report concludes that a professor at Community College of Aurora
was likely fired for refusing to compromise on rigor in his courses as
part of a "student success" initiative.
By Colleen Flaherty
March 29, 2017
Students may complain about courses that are too hard, but could
fighting to maintain high standards actually get a professor fired? A
new report from the American Association of University Professors
alleges that Colorado’s Community College of Aurora terminated an
adjunct because he refused to lower his expectations for his
introductory philosophy class. The report sets the stage for the AAUP
to vote on censuring Aurora for alleged violations of academic freedom
later this spring, but the college denies such charges. It blames
Nathanial Bork’s termination on his own teaching “difficulties.”
“While it is impossible to say with absolute certainty that Bork’s
dismissal was an act of retaliation by the [college] administration,”
reads the AAUP report, “we can say with certainty that the timeline of
events is suggestive, the circumstances of the dismissal are
extraordinary and the administration’s stated rationale is
unconvincing. Moreover, even if the administration were not engaging in
retaliation against Bork, its actions have convinced many faculty
members that it was.”
Bork began teaching at Aurora in 2010. Splitting his time between
Arapahoe Community College and Aurora, Bork taught a variety of courses
over the next six years, from philosophy to comparative religion. He
also served as an outspoken proponent for adjuncts, who make up the
overwhelming majority of instructors at Aurora.
Then in September, Bork received a call from his department chair and
dean at Aurora, who told him that he was done teaching there --
effective immediately. The college eventually blamed the decision on
what it called Bork’s “lack of effectiveness in implementing the
philosophy curriculum redesign.” But he says he was fired for planning
to blow the whistle on a dumbing down of introductory liberal arts
“gatekeeper” courses. The college was trying to boost passage rates to
demonstrate progress in encouraging student success.
Just days before Bork was terminated, he says, he drafted an email to
the state’s Higher Learning Commission, complaining about Aurora’s new
Gateway to Success initiative. The goal of the program was to increase
pass rates in these gatekeeper courses but, Bork said, in reality, he’d
been asked to cut 20 percent of his introductory philosophy course
content; require fewer writing assignments, with a new maximum of eight
pages per semester; offer small-group activities every other class
session; and make works by women and minority thinkers about 30 percent
of the course.
Bork said he was told to keep teaching this way until 80 percent of all
student demographic groups were passing the course, which in his view
violated the spirit of Colorado law on guaranteed transfer courses to a
four-year institution.
“Simply put,” he wrote in the draft email, “this class is now much,
much easier to get an A in or pass than it was previously. … If the
people we’re giving [A-pluses] to in the [guaranteed transfer] courses
are only doing the equivalent of high school work at other colleges, I
believe that sets up our students for harm later on. Our student
success rates will spike through the roof, but we’ll be graduating
people who think they’ve received a college education, but in reality
have only done high school-level work.”
He asked the commission to investigate some of the college’s inclusive
excellence policies and, according to AAUP, attached a letter from a
fellow professor at Aurora who said he’d resigned over the changes
(that professor could not immediately by reached for comment).
Bork didn’t forward the letter to the commission, he says, but did
share it with administrators. Days later, he was observed while
teaching with no notice by his department chair and a college
“achievement coach.” He eventually learned that both raters -- Bobby
Pace, the chair for social sciences, and H. Ray Keith, the coach --
gave him low marks. That was after six years of consistently positive
reviews, he says.
“There was no content being presented during the observation period,”
reads Pace’s evaluation, and “the students did not appear to be
properly instructed in the specific step[s] of the process.”
Bork maintains that the students were frustrated with the new
curriculum, not with him. He reached out to the AAUP after his
termination, and the national office contacted the college to say that
it recommends faculty members be able to defend themselves against
specific charges before a faculty committee.
An AAUP investigating committee visited the campus in December to
conduct interviews with administrators, faculty members and a student.
The committee found that while Bork, an adjunct, was not entitled to
any due process under institutional policies, full-time faculty members
at Aurora may only be fired for incompetence "after notice and
opportunity to improve.” After six years of strong service, the
committee said, it seem that Bork deserved such an opportunity.
Investigators also questioned how Bork's observed exercise on how to
draft a thesis statement could be so bad that he'd been fired virtually
on the spot.
“It bears emphasizing that adjunct instructors constitute, by the
administration’s reckoning, at least 80 percent of the [college]
faculty,” the committee wrote in the report. “Bork’s case highlights
the very clear threat that a lack of due process poses for the exercise
of academic freedom and underscores the general unacceptability of such
policies, at [the college] and elsewhere. Under these conditions, the
academic freedom of adjunct faculty members is not universally
guaranteed as a matter of institutional policy but selectively bestowed
as a function of administrative benevolence. That is to say, it does
not exist.”
The committee said that several current and former college faculty
members anonymously indicated that administrators also had told them
“if they were unwilling to implement the new Gateway to Success
curriculum, they should seek employment elsewhere.” The committee took
these requests for anonymity as evidence of a “climate of fear” on
campus -- one inimical to academic freedom.
Pace reportedly told the AAUP investigators that a student in Bork's
class conveyed her concerns about the course to him. But the student in
question reportedly told the investigating committee that she
approached the department to complain about the Gateway to Success
curriculum itself, not Bork’s teaching. She reportedly said she enjoyed
Bork's class, with the exception of the new curriculum.
In sum, the committee wrote, the Aurora administration’s stated
rationale for Bork’s summary dismissal “strains credulity.”
Speaking to greater concerns about part-time faculty members and abuses
of academic freedom across academe, the committee said that as the
proportion of the faculty members employed in adjunct and other
contingent positions grows, “the overall academic freedom of America’s
faculty shrinks. The private business model of academic employment, in
which managers exercise complete control over the working conditions
and appointment status of those they oversee, is already a reality for
the majority of those who teach at U.S. colleges and universities.”
If higher education wishes to maintain academic freedom for the
ever-shrinking proportion of the faculty who enjoy tenure-track and
tenured appointments, it said, “we must extend the guarantee of
academic freedom -- through changes in institutional policies,
professional norms and, ultimately, personal attitudes -- to those who
do not.”
In response to questions about the degree of faculty involvement in
developing the Gateway to Success curriculum, Pace reportedly told the
investigating committee that meetings were held in February and May
2016 to solicit faculty input. But the AAUP committee concluded that it
doesn't appear faculty members could have refused to go forward
"without jeopardizing their future employment at the institution.”
That's based in part on faculty interviewees reportedly saying that the
curriculum meetings were really “presentations,” at which Pace and
Keith, the achievement coach, shared retention-related data and
reportedly declared, “There aren’t enough people passing; we need to
get more people passing.”
Betsy Oudenhoven, college president, said in a statement that Aurora
disagrees with the AAUP’s conclusions. The college launched the Gateway
to Success initiative in collaboration with faculty disciplinary
experts to determine how professors’ teaching strategies were either
promoting or hindering success in gateway general-education courses,
she said.
Gatekeeper courses were updated to better help students learn and
“still meet the target learning goals set by the State Faculty
Curriculum Committee,” she added, noting that the Colorado Department
of Higher Education confirmed that the redesign met state standards for
guaranteed transfer to four-year institutions.
In Bork’s case, Oudenhoven said, the department chair and achievement
coach who observed him “discovered general instructional problems as
well as difficulties in the implementation of the new curriculum they
characterized as severe.” Moreover, she said, she didn’t receive any
letter of complaint from Bork about the curriculum.
Bork, who is still teaching at Arapahoe Community College, said he did
indeed inform administrators of his concerns, including in an email
dated July 17. He could not share the Sept. 7 email that allegedly
prompted his termination, he said, because he's lost access to his
faculty email account as a result of his termination. Beyond that, Bork
said he was a member of several committees that met regularly with the
president, making her claims of ignorance all the more implausible.
As to the college’s assertion that he was terminated due to poor
teaching, Bork pointed to the AAUP committee’s interview with the
student in question.
“Pace did not tell the truth about what happened in my classroom that
day and used that falsehood as justification to dismiss me,” he said.
No due process for adjuncts meant no opportunity to defend himself
against the charges, he added so, after seven years “of stellar service
to the college and its students, I was simply told I'd been fired over
the telephone while I was getting an oil change.”
Pace did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Greg Scholtz, director of tenure, academic freedom and governance at
AAUP, said he thought Bork's case was representative of others the
association deals with, in that part-time professors typically serve on
an at-will basis, making them "entirely disposable."
"If their administrative superiors are not satisfied with their
service, for any reason, they simply do not offer them any course
assignments for the next academic term, and there’s usually nothing the
part-timer can do about it," he said. Yet Bork's case is unusual in
that he was dismissed immediately.
Scholtz said he expects such cases to proliferate as colleges try to
appeal to students in an increasingly competitive environment, and that
even faculty members will feel the retention pinch.
"Bork claimed that he was fired because he criticized the college’s
efforts to dumb down courses in order to improve student success,"
Scholtz said with a tone of irony. "In this increasingly
consumer-oriented higher education environment, we also see a lot of
faculty members -- full-timers and well as part-timers -- get into hot
water because of student complaints."
|
|
|
|
