In March 1953 Alan Barth, editorial writer for the Washington Post, addressed the Thirty-ninth Annual Meeting of the American Association of University Professors. He claimed that both editorial writers and university faculty were "supposed to inhabit ivory towers," but he asserted that the need for such a position "removed from reality" was based on their common function: to "challenge complacency." Barth warned that both groups faced a "design to level our towers and to change our function from challenging popular prejudices to mere reflection of them."
Almost half a century later, leaders of the AAUP and the Newspaper Guild have come together to continue the important tasks of challenging complacency. Although Barth was talking specifically about the threats to higher education posed by congressional investigating committees in the early 1950s, his concerns about independence, academic freedom, and the vital nature of free inquiry resonate today as society faces the challenges posed by economic and technological changes.
At a time when "knowledge workers" are heralded as the harbingers of the new millennium, academics and journalists find themselves in the paradoxical position of seeming to lead a revolution that threatens the very essence of their professions. Professors and journalists are pressured by the management conviction that the generation of profit is the engine and goal of all enterprise, and that the model of manufacturing processes applies to the creation, development, and distribution of ideas and knowledge. When cost containment and profit maximization become the central motives for developing information and circulating basic knowledge about human affairs, the activities of journalists and professors are viewed as drains on resources.
In fact, the professions of journalism and higher education have long been viewed, and view themselves, as the critics and conscience of society. This role has been recognized in forums as wide ranging as the 1989 New Zealand Education Act and the 1997 UNESCO Recommendation Concerning the Status of Higher-Education Teaching Personnel.
The AAUP and the Newspaper Guild/Communications Workers of America (CWA) will work together to maintain the kinds of values that both organizations have articulated and promulgated since their beginnings. Since 1915, the AAUP has stood for the freedom to pursue research and to question the institutional conditions for teaching and research, as well as the conviction that the best mode of governance is that in which faculty share in making decisions. Since 1933, the Newspaper Guild has worked to raise the standards and ethics of journalism and to promote the integrity of the newspaper industry.
In the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, the AAUP and the Association of American Colleges wrote, "Institutions of higher education are conducted for the common good and not to further the interest of either the individual teacher or the institution as a whole. The common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition."
The Newspaper Guild mission statement includes among its fundamental purposes to "guarantee, as far as it is able, equal employment and advancement opportunity in the newspaper industry and constant honesty in news, editorials, advertising, and business practices" and to "raise the standards of journalism and ethics of the industry."
With a view toward furthering these long-standing and mutually inclusive common principles, the AAUP and the Newspaper Guild/CWA pledge themselves to the following propositions:
(a) a renewed commitment to the principles and objectives of the First Amendment to protect the rights of a free people to govern effectively; (b) a renewed commitment to the principles of academic freedom, and to mechanisms that protect and advance those principles: tenure, shared governance, peer review, due process, and collective bargaining; (c) a commitment to promote and secure legal and public recognition of journalistic freedom under the First Amendment; (d) a commitment to continue to promote and protect the intellectual property rights of creators and to secure their recognition in the new digital environment; (e) a renewed commitment to the development of workplace democracy and diversity in the new technological environments of the twenty-first century; (f) a commitment to insulate intellectual work from commercial concerns and to maintain the distinction between intellectual content and commercial content; and (g) a commitment to encourage and stimulate broader access to knowledge in all its forms and venues: libraries and classrooms, as well as print and electronic media.
These principles, goals, and commitments shall guide our actions in the coming years as we strive to protect the dignity, freedom, and independence of our professions. The vital nature of higher education and journalism in the development, understanding, and dissemination of ideas make it essential that our professions maintain the highest standards of accountability and accomplishment. As Alan Barth told the members of the AAUP in 1953, "We shall be fighting for much more than freedom for ourselves. We shall be fighting for the whole of human freedom."
The Newspaper Guild and the AAUP pledge themselves to make that fight together. They further pledge to seek coalitions with other membership groups to expand this fight throughout our society.