This CHE article suggests as much:
Experts on [the AAUP's] standards-setting Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure revised the definition of financial exigency in 2013.
Under the previous definition, a university’s financial condition had to be so dire that it "threatens the survival of the institution as a whole."
"We decided, frankly, that that was too stringent," says Henry F. Reichman, chair of Committee A.
The newer and broader definition staked out in 2013 allowed that "an institution need not be on the brink of complete collapse" in order to declare exigency. But it did need to prove that its financial troubles were legitimate and serious. Exigency, the report says, "is not a plausible complaint from a campus that has shifted resources from its primary missions of teaching and research toward employing increasing numbers of administrators or toward unnecessary capital expenditures."
And if an institution is to declare exigency, it must take deliberate steps to tell its faculty so. AAUP’s recommended institutional regulations stipulate that a faculty-governance body "participate in reaching the determination that a condition of financial exigency exists or is about to exist and that all feasible alternatives to terminating appointments have been exhausted."
Colleges are also supposed to try to find alternative positions elsewhere in the institution and not fill the empty position for three years, unless it means reinstating the original faculty member.
Not all of those rules, Reichman acknowledges, are universally applicable. "Each institution is different. But if they don’t follow at least the spirit and basic approach that we outlined," he says, "what ends up happening is this becomes an excuse for a transformation, not of the mission of the institution, but the character of the faculty."
That "spirit and basic approach" is grounded in trust and transparency, a faculty member’s faith that their institution will abide by shared-governance standards if it’s considering dramatic changes, and that the commonly-held conception of tenure as a lifetime appointment will generally remain intact.
Increasingly, it seems, institutions want to have it both ways: dismiss tenured faculty — but do so without consulting and communicating transparently with faculty. You might call these new efforts near exigency.
The CHE also lists schools that have terminated tenured faculty based on "near exigency," including University of Southern Maine, College of Saint Rose, Hiram College, and (in progress) St. Cloud State University. Clark Atlanta University in Georgia tried to fire 54 faculty (including many tenured faculty), but a court sided with the faculty challenging the firings.
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