The following statement is issued by officers of the 
Tulane University Chapter of the American Association 
of University Professors.

The recent action of the Board of Administrators in denying the appeal 
of the Department of Mechanical Engineering confirms a dismaying current 
pattern at Tulane: an utter refusal to give either financial or academic 
reasons for abolishing a particular program or department; a similarly 
pointblank refusal to respond to the detailed case that the Department 
put forward for its continuance and the FTFR Committee firmly supported; 
and a basic disregard for the University's obligations to its tenured 
faculty members. Moreover, new programs, e.g. Materials Science and 
Engineering and Engineering Physics, are being proposed in the School 
of Science and Engineering for the Physics Department without reference 
to the faculty in the Department of Mechanical Engineering whose professional 
expertise falls in this area and who had earlier underlined the presence 
of similar programs in their Department as well as in the Renewal Plan. 
Neither faculty tenure nor academic governance at Tulane University will 
be secure until the administration acknowledges the key role of professional 
expertise in programmatic decisions and the need to demonstrate why it 
believes such expertise should be overridden by other considerations in 
a specific case.

Linda Carroll
Chapter President
12/29/2006