Information provided by Todd Penner, President, Austin College chapter of the AAUP.
Twenty-five Austin College faculty formed an AAUP chapter this past fall in response to some disturbing national and regional trends in higher education, joining many other liberal arts colleges across the country that are doing the same. Austin College is a private, residential liberal arts college in Sherman, Texas (sixty miles north of Dallas-Fort Worth), with 1,350 students and about ninety full-time faculty members. One challenge that our chapter faces is the assumption that the concerns of the AAUP are relevant only to large, state institutions and that there is little the AAUP has to offer a smaller, private college like ours. While we in some sense stand at a distance from the systematic defunding of public institutions by state legislatures, we have experienced the effects of the 2008 financial crisis on our own campus. And while we feel relatively far removed from the public attacks on tenure and academic freedom, we realize that it is only a matter of time until we also feel the impact of some of the larger cultural and political trends that threaten the professoriate and student learning in general.
Being committed to the best practices and highest standards of the professoriate, we determined to form an AAUP chapter in order to join a larger movement that is working to make the long-term effects of the recession and threats to tenure and academic freedom less drastic throughout higher education. On our own campus, we are using AAUP data to conduct a peer institution salary survey as a means to stimulate informed discussion about the best ways to address an ongoing salary freeze and retirement contribution reduction at our institution. We are planning to host a symposium on the issue of academic freedom and what it means in the context of liberal arts education and in light of the responsibilities of the profession more generally. We also hope to examine the faculty shared governance structures at our own institution, beginning with a thorough study of the faculty handbook.
Since the AAUP chapter does not claim or aim to speak for the faculty as a whole like our elected faculty representatives do, we are hoping to set up meetings with the Faculty Executive Committee as well as senior administrators to discuss ways in which an AAUP presence can promote healthy dialogue on the best practices for shared governance and faculty governance at our institution. We hope that the introduction of the AAUP chapter will provide a context and structure for encouraging our faculty to cultivate identities as professionals beyond Austin College, as all in the professoriate, even those of us at smaller, private institutions, face a daunting and uncertain future.