AU Perspective: An 'immoral' Land-Grant School

Some understand the hegemonic foundation of Morrill Land Grant Institutions designed to capture ag and mechanical arts intelligentsia. A land grant is a covenant with the people of a State... not with donors who flaccidly purchase building names on those lands. Auburn's covenant runs to every Alabamian inside the State's borders, including the roughly 28,000 souls in our Alabama Department of Corrections. Long-time Gazette readers are familiar with this story [most notably May 2019 https://www.alabamagazette.com/story/2019/05/01/opinion/sen-ward-kudos-and-apaep-in-our-prison-crisis-debate/1643.html and again in March 2021 https://www.alabamagazette.com/story/2021/03/01/opinion/that-smell-more-gas-tax-goat-hill-methane-to-build-prisons/2104.html] affirming Auburn's Alabama Prison Arts and Education Project (APAEP) as an integral part of any sincere solution to our State's incarceration crisis and a proven recidivism-reduction alternative to the billion-dollar mega-prisons Goat Hill championed. I write this column because the program I have been defending in print since my 2019 retirement has been quietly closed - i.e., the closure has never really been announced.

APAEP Quietly Closed

Open Campus reporter Charlotte West broke the story on April 4, 2025 as the only original news piece published [https://www.opencampus.org/2025/04/04/auburn-universitys-prison-education-program-indefinitely-suspended/] on the matter I could find. January 2024 a Tutwiler student wrote and submitted an article to the Prison Journalism Project. Auburn terminated the APAEP instructor who had printed and delivered the article to the inmate-author. In March 2024 ADOC reported Tutwiler students accessing unauthorized websites on Auburn-issued devices. In August 2024 ADOC barred three APAEP staff from any State prison and the same day Associate Provost Norman Godwin emailed faculty and staff Fall classes were canceled. AU subsequently terminated all three barred staff then late September 2024 ADOC notified Auburn the program would remain "indefinitely suspended until personnel changes are made."

Over a year later, there's been no public restart, no statement from President Christopher B. Roberts and no statement from Provost Vini Nathan. Provost Nathan, as Dean of the College of Architecture, Design and Construction, brought APAEP under CADC during her deanship and folded the program into her own college. Now as the installed Provost she has presided over its quiet shearing. The same hand that shepherded APAEP into CADC has, from the next politburo desk up, watched the program go dark - dare I type fleeced? The APAEP website [apaep.auburn.edu] reads as if classes are ongoing. No Alabama news outlet has produced original follow-up to Charlotte West's piece... AL.com, Alabama Reflector and Auburn Plainsman archives all silent after a year of closure/inactivity.

What Was At Stake

APAEP was the only path to a baccalaureate inside an Alabama prison, the B.S. in Interdisciplinary Studies launched in 2017 under the Second Chance Pell pilot. The first graduating class walked at Staton Correctional Facility on December 16, 2023, eleven men, with President Roberts visiting that same semester for the photographs. Some instructors requested to attend were barred from witnessing their students' remarkable accomplishments. The Vera Institute of Justice gave the program high marks in a July 2024 evaluation and Ruth Delaney of Vera's Unlocking Potential initiative told Open Campus the following Spring that without Auburn in the mix, there is no path to a bachelor's degree in Alabama prisons.

The funding APAEP had earned by 2024 was philanthropic, not appropriated, including a $900,000 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant in 2018 and a second Mellon grant of $1.3 million scheduled to run through March 2025. Internal mid-2024 budget documents reviewed by Open Campus showed hundreds of thousands of unspent grant dollars sitting idle on the books while the program was dark. Philanthropic capital pulled into Alabama, restricted to the only baccalaureate program inside the State's prisons, and AU let it sit.

Alabama Bureau of Pardons and Paroles Director Cam Ward spent more than a decade in the State Senate advancing prison reform making the arithmetic plain in public. Education inside prison cuts recidivism on release. Every inmate who does not return to ADOC custody is a man the State's General Fund does not pay to house, feed, guard and litigate another time. The RAND Corporation's 2013 correctional-education meta-analysis put the recidivism reduction for program participants at roughly 43 percent. APAEP carried Alabama's only baccalaureate pipeline inside our prisons and Auburn administrators closed it.

They Take It Away From You

Former APAEP academic coordinator Rob Sember gave Open Campus the following quotes describing the speed of collapse w.r.t. students he'd taught inside Tutwiler and Staton.

"The idea that it would suddenly, within a matter of a few months, just collapse, I found quite startling."

"They're devastated, they feel abandoned. The sense is, 'This is Alabama. This is how things work in Alabama, something good happens, and then they take it away from you.'"

And an anonymous former APAEP student, also to Open Campus.

"They've definitely been left hanging, but they can only hang on for so long."

Some of those students have since been released from ADOC custody. Auburn quietly implemented a "secondary review" process requiring formerly incarcerated applicants to submit criminal-history disclosures to enroll on the main campus, contradicting the Auburn student handbook's prior promise APAEP students could continue at any Auburn campus on release. At least two formerly incarcerated APAEP students have since been blocked from continuing at AU. That is Roberts/Nathan policy not ADOC policy.

What Auburn Built Instead

While APAEP went dark, Goat Hill kept bonding the buildings. The Ivey Correctional Facility in Elmore County was sold to the legislature in 2021 at $623 million and now stands at a $1.23 billion guaranteed maximum price, financed in part by $725 million in Series 2022A revenue bonds underwritten by Stephens Inc. and Frazer Lanier. The general contract went to Caddell Construction of Montgomery after the legislature exempted the project from competitive bidding with Caddell's CEO and two other senior leaders holding Auburn degrees. The second 4,000-bed prison in Escambia County is now in the bond pipeline behind Elmore.

While the cellphones rolled inside Easterling, Donaldson, St. Clair, and Elmore, Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman stitched six years of smuggled footage into The Alabama Solution, an Oscar-nominated documentary feature which opened on HBO October 2025 and reportedly does not include APAEP; little surprise since Fall 2024 the program has been collapsing.

The February Resolution

The mechanism AU invoked to close its only baccalaureate prison program for over a year without a faculty insurrection was installed [2-13-26] when Chairperson Quentin Riggins, the former Alabama Power Government Relations Vice President, presented agenda item D.4 buried on page 80 of a 164-page Board packet; a resolution waiving "any and all applicable notice and timing requirements" and revoking previous delegations over faculty personnel procedures. Straight from the Lee County Corruption playbook, bury the explosive material and hope nobody reads past page 79. The Provost's office now decides which programs survive and which are quietly closed. Faculty who witness/can tell the people of Alabama what has happened to APAEP face vitriolic dismissal.

The Senator Who Said It Out Loud

Along duopoly party lines HB 580 passed the Alabama Senate 27-7 [4-9-26] after the leadership invoked cloture, truncated debate and slotted the bill first on the special order calendar. In opposition on the Senate floor, Senator Bobby Singleton put the following into the chamber record.

"Auburn University wants to see this get done. The flagship universities want to see it get done.... When Auburn University came to talk to me in my office, and they said, well, there could be some things in this bill that we like, even though we're constitutional, that we need to get control of on our campus."

AU General Counsel Jaime Hammer and Vice President for Government Relations Jared White met with the Auburn AAUP leadership [Friday, 4-10-26] and called Singleton's account "a mischaracterization of the conversation." Twenty-four hours later [Saturday, 4-11-26] the Auburn AAUP leadership received a forwarded screenshot of Senator Singleton's email to President Roberts, walking it back word for word.

"I made comments that characterized Auburn University as supportive of this legislation. That statement, among others, was not reflective of my conversation with Jared. At no point did Jared indicate that he personally or Auburn University supported the legislation."

Forty-eight hours separate the recorded floor speech from the written recantation routed to the AU president's inbox, which is not how Senators ordinarily revise the record on their own legislative speech. The apparatus AU used to close APAEP without an announcement is the same politburo machine which rewrote a sitting State Senator's testimony inside one weekend. The silence from those I've asked on Goat Hill about those 48 hours conjure memories of the same fear of 'Skeletor' and hired gun columnists used by universities in keeping with Matrix dark arts muscling some associates with public servants like Riggins/Alabama Power Government Relations thugs.

In Closing

Auburn is a land grant in name and a kleptocracy in operating instructions returning to their hegemonic origins. The State has bonded upwards of two billion dollars into two warehouses for human beings while Auburn quietly closed the only program teaching the people inside them, with hundreds of thousands of dollars of restricted grant funds sitting idle in APAEP cost centers and a $1.3 million Mellon commitment running out unspent.

42 U.S.C. § 1983 reaches public officials who act in concert under color of law to deprive citizens of constitutional rights, including First Amendment retaliation against APAEP staff who reported a security breach and were terminated for the trouble, and 18 U.S.C. § 242 supplies the criminal counterpart. Indemnification by the institution does not insulate individual trustees from personal exposure when the conspiracy is among public officials acting under color of law, an economic reality boards usually learn after they have squandered the money.

The Auburn Creed says study, work, and obedience to law. The Auburn Greed says concrete contracts, bond fees, secondary reviews of formerly incarcerated applicants and a website that pretends a closed program is still teaching. Eleven men walked at Staton in December 2023 and the State's path to the next eleven was closed in fall 2024 without an announcement. I pray APAEP returns. I pray its faculty are restored. I pray the eleven who walked at Staton are joined by the next cohort the land-grant agreed to teach... Deo volente.

Postscript

Kudos to Charlotte West at Open Campus, the only journalist who has done the documentary work on APAEP's quiet closure and to Kyes Stevens who founded APAEP in 2002 and built it into the only baccalaureate program inside the Alabama Department of Corrections. Kudos also to the incarcerated men of Easterling and elsewhere who got their reality on tape at risk of guard retaliation. As an APAEP instructor treated poorly by AU administrators slated to teach my last class before retiring in 2019, I can't help recall a former President somewhat surprised I didn't litigate the harms I endured... I didn't bother reminding him of my ongoing, biggest fight against the soviet making folks (mostly poor, black, rural) homeless. The former president said, without hesitation, his advice to any young person was to get a law degree and 'hang their shingle' directly across from Samford Hall.

John Sophocleus is a retired Ford Motor Company Warranty and Policy Administrator and a retired Auburn University Instructor of Economics. A former Libertarian candidate for Alabama House and Governor, U.S. House District 3 and U.S. Senate candidate, he has been a monthly Alabama Gazette columnist since 2009.

Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Alabama Gazette staff or publishers.