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

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