The Chronicle for Higher Education
October 5, 2015
Louisiana State University’s Faculty Senate voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to censure three top administrators there over their dismissal of a tenured professor accused of creating a hostile environment in the classroom with obscene language and sexually explicit jokes.
The Faculty Senate voted, 39 to 5, to censure F. King Alexander, the university’s president; Stuart R. Bell, its provost; and Damon Andrew, the dean of its College of Human Sciences and Education, for the June dismissal of Teresa K. Buchanan, a tenured associate professor of curriculum and instruction. The censure resolution accuses the administrators of violating academic principles related to tenure, faculty governance, and due process for firing Ms. Buchanan for misconduct after a faculty panel concluded that her removal was unwarranted and her case had been mishandled.
The administrators applied “a standard that is chilling in its breadth and ambiguity” to Ms. Buchanan in concluding, in the absence of any named student’s complaint, that her statements in the classroom created a hostile environment and amounted to sexual harassment, the resolution says. The administrators’ subsequent allegations that Ms. Buchanan had created a hostile environment by being abusive of students similarly applied standards contrary to academic freedom, because they failed “to define what constitutes a consistently hostile environment” and appeared to regard the administration “as the sole guardian of student welfare,” the resolution says.