Investigation Finds Kansas Board of Regents Members Unfit to Lead Emporia State University.
An investigation by the American Association of University Professors into Emporia State University's realignment plan, which included the firing of tenured professors, has found that university administrators and Kansas Board of Regents members are "unfit to lead." The report faults the university for "shifting and incoherent rationales" and concludes that the actions taken by ESU president Ken Hush with the blessing of KBOR amounts to an attack on academic freedom. The university fired 30 tenured and tenure-track professors in September 2022 under a temporary COVID-19 emergency policy that was put in place January 2021, before vaccines were widely available, and set to expire Dec. 31, 2022.