The following piece is an opinion and does not reflect the views of The Eagle and its staff. All opinions are edited for grammar, style and argument structure and fact-checked, but the opinions are the writer’s own.
Dear AU students and Recognized Student Organizations:
We write as a group of faculty and staff concerned about the new policies and procedures governing advising of RSOs that the Center for Student Involvement recently issued. As some of you have likely learned, the Center for Student Involvement modified its RSO advisor manual and expectations over the summer.
A number of advisors, some who have served in their roles for years, have refused to sign the agreement issued by CSI due to the onerous obligations the manual sets forth for advisors, including being tasked with the role of policing our students’ actions and participating in repressive policies aimed at free expression.
CSI has been unresponsive to our requests, despite numerous requests to extend the deadline for signing and reasonable attempts to provide feedback on the manual.
Advisors were left with the unhappy choice of signing the CSI agreement or refusing to do so, and thereby leaving some RSOs without an advisor. We are among the faculty and staff who decided to uphold the principles of fairness and open communication, rather than the authoritarian measures outlined in CSI’s policy.
The undersigned faculty and staff did not “decide to step away from” our roles as advisors; we were dismissed by CSI for refusing to fall in line.
The agreement we were asked to sign requires advisors to attest to and comply with the 96-page RSO Manual, which governs every aspect of student organization recognition and oversight. It asks advisors to respond to and advise students against so-called “climate concerns,” which are left undefined.
CSI refused to define to us what might constitute a “climate concern,” despite numerous requests for clarification by multiple faculty and staff. We read these undefined climate concerns as attempts to chill student speech that make the AU Board of Trustees and wealthy donors uncomfortable.
Many advisors remain concerned about being held liable for student activities that, while they might be protected forms of free speech (such as protesting the ongoing genocide in Gaza), could be deemed “climate concerns” by CSI or other administrative units at the University.
Despite CSI’s claims that advisors would not be held liable, several legal experts who reviewed the manual advised us not to sign because the agreement is a contract masquerading as an “agreement.”
The consensus is that signing such a document puts the signer in a potentially vulnerable legal position. CSI has not responded to these concerns by clarifying the legal exposure advisors might incur.
Neither has CSI, despite numerous requests, explained why a signature would be required, asserting only that AU is “out of step” with institutions like Tulane University and Washington University, St. Louis — both of which have clearly stated that club advisors are not subject to liability for actions undertaken by student organizations.
More concerning, the agreement positions club advisors as agents in decisions that could potentially breach the University’s contractual obligations to students — including this promise that the University will not “ban student expression solely because it is controversial, takes extreme, ‘fringe’ or minority opinions, or is distasteful, unpopular or unpleasant.”
By introducing vague and subjective standards like “climate concerns,” the agreement creates a mechanism for restricting the very speech the University has pledged to protect and makes advisors complicit in that restriction.
The potential for such vague criteria to be applied unevenly or used to chill expression is not hypothetical. It reflects real patterns of institutional response in the recent past and shows why many faculty and staff refused to sign an agreement that would require them to reproduce those outcomes.
It is important for students to understand that CSI initially issued its new requirements and the manual without consulting RSO advisors. In 2024, the Working Group on Shared Governance issued a report that states, “In shared governance, all decision-makers are obliged to own their decisions, collaborate with other stakeholders, and be answerable to other stakeholders. This encompasses actively involving those involved and affected from the early stages of decision-making through implementation.”
In plain terms, the principles of shared governance that the Working Group articulates mean that CSI should have consulted stakeholders such as advisors and students. CSI did not engage in any process of consultation. It simply rolled out a new and onerous policy.
It was only after faculty and staff advisors objected to the terms of the manual that CSI began communicating with advisors, and then with a ridiculous and arbitrary 48-hour deadline.
It should be noted that the deadline came at a time of the semester when many of us were in the process of administering and grading midterms and other assignments. CSI, moreover, has suggested that they will revise the RSO manual in the spring semester, again raising the question about why a signature was so urgently needed before this revision.
CSI has since removed former advisors who refused to sign the new RSO agreement, despite the fact that many would like to remain in their roles as advisors. CSI recently reached out to a number of RSOs with misleading claims.
In their email, CSI states that, “our records indicate your advisor is either no longer working at AU, recently retired, or has decided to step away from the advising role.” Although some advisors may have decided to step away from their roles, the undersigned faculty and staff did not “decide to step away from” our roles as advisors. We were dismissed by CSI for refusing to fall in line with their authoritarian policies designed to chill student speech.
We remain committed to working with students to express themselves in accordance with American University policy and the rights conferred on them by the Constitution of the United States. We are willing to engage in an exchange with CSI to improve the manual and to guarantee rights for all stakeholders in RSOs.
What we will not do, however, is continue to stand by idly while CSI steamrolls our policies and our guaranteed principles of freedom and shared governance.
Sincerely,
Andrew Phelps, Film & Media Arts, SOC
Amanda Berry, Literature Department, CAS
Garrett Graddy-Lovelace, Environment Development & Health, SIS
Lauren Weis, Philosophy and Religion, CAS
Kirstie Dorr, Critical Race, Gender and Culture Studies (CAS)
Elke Stockreiter, History & CRGC, CAS
Toby Aho, Critical Race, Gender & Culture Studies, CAS
Christopher Tudge, Biology Department, CAS
Irene Calis, CRGC, CAS
David Vazquez, CRGC, CAS
Victoria Kiechel, Department of Environment, Development, and Health, SIS
Carl Menninger, Performing Arts, CAS
Nabina Liebow, Philosophy and Religion, CAS
Gustavo Abbott, Physics, CAS
Jean McGee, SOC
Anton Fedyashin, History, CAS
Larry Engel, Film and Media Arts, SOC
This article was edited by Quinn Volpe, Alana Parker, Neil Lazurus and Walker Whalen. Copy editing done by Sabine Kanter-Huchting, Emma Brown, Arin Burrell, Paige Caron and Andrew Kummeth. Fact-checking done by Aidan Crowe.
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