• • The Whitman College Chapter of the AAUP discussed and endorsed the statement “Zoom and Academic Freedom in the Time of Pandemic” by the Committee on Academic Freedom and Due Process.
  • We advocated successfully for greater and individual faculty choice in determining the extent of online vs. in-person instruction in the Spring of 2021 semester.

In the Fall of 2021, the chapter’s president, Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Culture Studies and Garrett Fellow, Lisa Uddin, was elected as one of the faculty’s representatives on the “Financial Sustainability Review” committees. Consequently, she transferred the chapter’s presidency to former Vice President Arielle Cooley, Associate Professor of Biology and Garrett Fellow.

In the Fall of 2020, in light of the rushed “Financial Sustainability Review” (FSR) initiated by the Board of Trustees, the Whitman College Chapter of the AAUP issued A Call to Action, asking the college’s president to:

• • Increase transparency about the college’s finances;
  • Inform and engage the faculty regarding ideas for major cuts before any decisions are made;
  • Commit publicly to following through with the recommendations of the FSR committees;
  • Provide a vigorous justification for a liberal arts education in today’s world.

(The college’s president did not respond affirmatively to this Call to Action and did not commit to following through with the FSR committees’ recommendations, nor did the Board of Trustees follow the recommendations with complete fidelity.)

On October 12, 2020, the Whitman College chapter of the AAUP issued this statement on the discontinuation of multi-year contracts for contingent faculty. From the statement: “We believe that the College’s decision to abandon established practice by eliminating multi-year contracts for qualified and essential contingent faculty, including athletic coaches is short-sighted at best.”

A September 10, 2020, article by Lena Friedman, a student reporter with the Whitman Wire, addressed the college’s response to pandemic-related budget challenges. It included interviews with leaders of Whitman’s AAUP chapter.

On September 5, 2020, Whitman College’s AAUP chapter issued a statement on the upcoming #ScholarStrike on September 8 and 9, expressing “vigorous support” for the event an all Whitman instructors who partake in it.
Black Lives Matter!

To inform the faculty’s reasoning about budget-related matters at the time of pandemic-related austerity, AAUP chapter members have put together two fact sheets. They are based on publicly available information about school budgets and the college’s endowment. The fact sheets are:

• A top-paid employee compensation comparison of Whitman with its peer institutions (relative to the schools’ operating budgets);
• Comments on the endowment in comparison to peer institutions.

On August 6, 2020, the AAUP chapter issued a compendium of community-generated concerns about the long-term costs from austerity measures.