From the General Secretary: Partnerships
By Mary Burgan
In an age of fragmentation, when faculty are threatened by a managerial notion that they ought to be "unbundled" so that their functions can be parceled out more cheaply, and more imperiously, it is important for all academic professionals to seek better ways to work together. With this principle in mind, the Association has been eager to extend its assistance to many of the faculty groups that now represent higher education. That's why we are happy to announce the initiation of several new relationships this spring. We have signed on to an organizational partnership with the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges (ASCCC) that will enable the AAUP to contribute in a systematic fashion to the ASCCC's ongoing mission of strengthening faculty governance in California community colleges. In this new relationship, we will offer workshops on governance in California and welcome members of the ASCCC to participate in relevant meetings of our Association.
We have just concluded an agreement for a relationship with the United University Professions (UUP) of the State University of New York. Under that agreement, one thousand UUP members will enroll in the AAUP. And the AAUP will back up our union colleagues in New York as they strive to safeguard academic freedom and tenure as well as the status and autonomy of those academic professionals who are so essential to research and teaching.
We have also formed a coalition with the Berkeley Faculty Association (BFA) at the University of California, Berkeley. In this partnership, we will join forces with a group that has long lobbied for faculty interests, both on the Berkeley campus and at the state level. Now our colleagues at Berkeley, many of whom have belonged to both the AAUP and the BFA, will join their more local aims with national AAUP advocacy on issues like intellectual property, the privatization of the university, and the diminishment of faculty governance.
To complement our associations with faculty groups, we have also agreed to join with the American Council of Academic Deans to cosponsor a nationwide conference on college and university governance to be held here in Washington next October. At that event, faculty members and their administrative colleagues will work together to devise and refine practices that can help them to share in making the decisions that drive academic programs in their institutions.
And, finally, our work with adjunct and part-time faculty continues with our support of the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor in Boston. Banded together on a "regional" rather than institutional basis, part-time members of the AAUP in Massachusetts hope to be able to make a difference in the conditions of contingent faculty, who tend to be separate, and very unequal, in large metropolitan areas.
These new partnerships reach out to our colleagues in a wide spectrum of academic life and practice. From the East Coast to the West. From the community college to the research university. From the unionized to the nonunion system. From the ranks of teaching faculty and research associates to the ranks of administrators to the ranks of part-time colleagues. Our response to fragmentation is to enact an inclusive form of academic community.
And though we encompass new versions of the professoriate, our motives are the ones that have driven us since our founding. We are ready to join with all colleagues in higher education who are committed to principles of academic freedom, tenure, shared governance, and the protection of professional standards in the academy. Indeed, each of our new arrangements has introduced us to new allies in our commitments. We know that the academy will change in the future. When we criticize the excessive promises and exploitations of distance education, for example, we do so with the full acknowledgment that technology is a wonderful and essential tool for our teaching and research. But we are unwilling to surrender our principles to a brave new world in which truth serves someone else's bottom line. Or in which our commitment to the effective and passionate communication of knowledge is subject to the popularity contest of the market. As skeptics and idealists at once, we understand that there are many versions of the bottom line and that markets are easily subject to manipulation.
Looking ahead, then, we see a future enabled by new partnerships, built upon old loyalties.
|