Open Letter to Gallaudet Community
Contact: Gallaudet University Chapter of the AAUP – gallaudet.aaup@gmail.com

2023-2024 Year-End Summary

This annual letter summarizes our accomplishments over the past year and serves as a historical record.

Membership and Recruitment

Our dues-paying membership grew from 52 faculty members in April 2023 to 72 by November 2023. Membership held steady throughout the Spring 2024 semester at between 69-71 members and ended with 71 members in May 2024. We currently represent 45% of Gallaudet’s 158 voting faculty. 

Results from a faculty climate survey administered October 2023, which we have not yet released, show that three-quarters of faculty respondents support our AAUP chapter and the Executive Committee’s actions. Concerningly, the results also showed that many faculty respondents are scared to express their opinions on campus. This fear may be contributing to the leveling off in recruitment. 

We continue to have the recruitment goals of reaching a majority of 51% of the voting faculty becoming members, followed by a supermajority of 65%.

Elections

In 2024, we had our second election for a full slate of AAUP officers. This was our first election as a mature chapter. Our AAUP members first approved an election official, who then administered our election electronically via a free Qualtrics account.

Results of the election: 

Derek Braun as President (2nd term), unopposed
Dani Hunt as Vice President, unopposed
Secretary, no nominations
Regina Nuzzo as Treasurer, unopposed
Jennifer Nelson as At-Large, unopposed
Tonya Stremlau as At-Large, unopposed

Audit and Webinar

Our keystone accomplishment of the 2023-2024 academic year was funding an external forensic audit of Gallaudet’s finances by Howard Bunsis, JD, MBA, PhD, a former AAUP National officer and expert in university finances. (In the previous AY, we raised $5,000 in just eight days to fund Dr. Bunsis’ audit).

Dr. Bunsis’ webinar, where he shared the audit results, aired on August 17, 2023, and is available on YouTube. Dr. Bunsis’ audit report was downloaded from our Gallaudet AAUP website 1,400 times over the following month.

The audit affirmed the AAUP’s previous analyses by showing that Gallaudet is not struggling financially. Rather, the administration is not prioritizing funding for academics, particularly faculty salaries.

Following the audit webinar, Gallaudet began its #WeAreGallaudet conversation series to answer questions from the community about its finances and operations. This series continued throughout the 2023-2024 academic year.

Open Letters

We released five Open Letters regarding the faculty salary campaign and emergent issues such as the sudden staff layoffs and the unannounced loss of the food discount benefit last February. We also updated the Faculty Salary Dashboard, which gives an at-a-glance summary of the ongoing salary campaign.

  1. Gallaudet AAUP’s Executive Committee Supports FoCC’s Concerns about Faculty Summer Work Groups (May 12, 2023).
  2. Forensic Audit Results Summary by GU-AAUP Executive Committee (August 31, 2023)
  3. The administration’s sudden staff layoffs show continued disregard for transparency and indifference toward employees (February 12, 2024)
  4. Changes to the food and drink employee discount show the administration’s continued lack of transparency and accountability (February 14, 2024)
  5. The loss of regular COLAs to counter inflation has caused a steep decline in faculty and staff real wages (April 9, 2024)

AAUP Store

We opened a GU-AAUP store where anyone can now purchase Gallaudet AAUP merchandise directly. Scott Carollo developed several of the designs.

Outreach

Our website, gallaudet-aaup.org, went live in January 2023, replacing our previous practice of using Google Docs links. Our website has collected 13,369 views and 6,949 unique visitors since launch, averaging 30 views per day.

We hosted weekly AAUP Luncheons during Common Time throughout the Spring 2024 semester. Some of these events drew faculty, but ultimately, the ongoing #WeAreGallaudet series presentations, as well as continued program and school meetings, competed with these luncheons. Therefore, we do not plan host regular luncheons again next year. Instead, we will invite faculty eat with us informally.

We hosted five AAUP Happy Hour Socials at restaurants/bars in the Union Market District. The AAUP Socials were successful and we plan to continue these in the upcoming academic year.

We were invited by Student Congress to present on the faculty salary campaign on November 29, 2023, alongside Provost Rashid and Dean of Students Travis Immel.

Media Exposure

Our chapter received media attention concerning our push for transparent communication and shared governance related to faculty salaries.

Advocacy and Labor Issues

Gallaudet AAUP representatives met with Provost Lewis and Dean of Faculty Rashid biweekly during the 2022-2023 academic year. Provost Lewis retired last summer and was succeeded by Dr. Rashid. We met with Provost Rashid only twice; first, on October 3, 2023, during which she was upset because she had assumed that we would release the audit report to the administration prior to the webinar. Second, on October 23, 2023, following the media exposure in Issues in Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed, the provost called an emergency meeting with Gallaudet AAUP leadership to discuss the article. In this two-hour meeting, the provost and University Faculty Chair Ennis were openly hostile with personal attacks. Following the meeting, the provost sent a letter to the campus community admonishing us. After the meeting, we consulted with the National AAUP office and obtained professional advice.

In April, following the second Daily Moth media exposure, the provost spoke to the Faculty Senate and admonished the Gallaudet AAUP chapter for providing incorrect information, even though the bulk of the Daily Moth interview were outtakes from the Bunsis webinar and the Bunsis analysis was performed entirely using data from federal filings by Gallaudet. Following this, on April 8, 2024, UF Chair Ennis and Vice Chair Greenwald sent an Open Letter to the University Faculty standing with the administration and again admonishing the AAUP leadership.

Of note, while the administration has repeatedly called our AAUP chapter’s reports “a pack of lies,” the administration has never stated which information that our AAUP chapter has published is incorrect. Our analyses are entirely based on data which Gallaudet filed with federal agencies, specifically the U.S. Department of Education’s IPEDS database and the Internal Revenue Service. Gallaudet has not directly provided us with any data.

Summer Institute Workshops and Training from AAUP National

Dani Hunt and Tonya Stremlau attended the 2023 AAUP Summer Institute at the University of Vermont where they learned more about recruiting and organizing, issues that various colleges and universities are facing that are similar to what we are seeing at Gallaudet, and had the opportunity to network with AAUP national leadership and chapter leaders from all over the United States. They brought back valuable insight, ideas, and tools to implement change and keep moving forward as an advocacy chapter.

During this academic year, we met several times with Kelly Benjamin, AAUP Media and Communications and David Kociemba, the AAUP East Coast Organizer, for training on working with the press as well as advice on emerging issues.

Faculty Representation

Over the past year, we’ve continued to advocate for faculty members on personnel issues relating to Handbook actions and salary review requests. We routinely answer questions from faculty members about Handbook and HR procedures. These names and cases are confidential. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) secures the right to have a labor representative at meetings with administrators. Faculty representation is an essential function of our AAUP chapter, and we provide this support to AAUP members and non-members alike. 

In one notable situation in February 2024, our AAUP chapter intervened when Dean Solomon called upon the Art Program faculty to vote on its own closure. Our AAUP chapter counseled Art faculty on the Handbook language and advised that program closure would make Art program members vulnerable to layoffs. Ultimately, the Art faculty voted against closing. Our Executive Committee updated our dues-paying members with a transcript of these proceedings.

Summary of Suggested Goals for AY 2024-2025

For the 2024-2025 Academic Year, the Executive Committee suggests that the Gallaudet AAUP focus on these priorities:

  1. Continue advocacy efforts regarding lagging faculty salaries.
  2. Continue advocacy efforts within Faculty Governance to prioritize student and faculty academic interests, demand transparency and accountability from the administration, encourage academic freedom, reduce authoritarianism, and rebuild trust in the Faculty Governance system.
  3. Further faculty recruitment into AAUP with 51% and 65% membership goals. Our AAUP Happy Hour Socials were successful this year, and we propose continuing with two socials per semester in the next AY; one to kick off each semester and one to wrap up each semester. The AAUP Luncheons were less successful due to repeated scheduling conflicts, and we do not recommend continuing formal weekly luncheons.
  4. Continue to build relationships with the Faculty of Color Coalition (FoCC), the Student Body Government (SBG), Graduate Student Association (GSA), and the Gallaudet Staff Council (GSC).
  5. Publish our informal faculty survey from Fall 2023, which shows that Gallaudet has a fearful climate; continue to work on establishing a validated annual faculty climate survey.
  6. Customize our bylaws, which are presently boilerplate. Revisions should detail election and voting procedures, stagger the terms of officers so that there is not complete turnover every three years, define and prohibit potential conflicts of interest (e.g., should AAUP officers be disallowed from also serving as UF Governance officers?), and establish formal procedures for referendum voting by dues-paying members.
  7. Invite external speakers from AAUP National and elsewhere who could speak to the campus community about academic freedom, shared governance, and economic security for faculty.
  8. Build a team of ASL-English interpreters to provide access during chapter meetings and special events so that faculty who are emerging signers feel welcome and fully engaged.
  9. Educate the Gallaudet community about the responsibilities of the President and the Board of Trustees as defined by the Education of the Deaf Act, the yardstick by which they should be measured and held accountable.