2001 Annual Meeting

AAUP Explores Student-Faculty Relationship

Keynote speakers Virginia Valian and Douglas Foard further explored the meeting’s theme in luncheon addresses. One issue for which faculty must prepare students is the influence of gender on professional life, said Valian, professor of psychology at Hunter College and author of Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women. She discussed how people’s unarticulated beliefs about women and men make it harder for women (and easier for men) to advance. Experiments have shown, she said, that people see boys and men as capable of independent action, while women are seen as expressive and nurturing. Both women and men therefore tend to defer more to men and to perceive them as leaders. It is important for faculty to understand how such processes work and to take them into account when evaluating students and recommending them for advancement, Valian argued.

Douglas Foard, who recently stepped down as executive secretary of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, recounted the history of his organization, the oldest student honors society in the nation. Despite its venerable history, the faculty-run organization has been struggling in recent years to reverse the decline of its name recognition among students, Foard reported. As part of that effort, the society has reached out to form partnerships with other groups, such as the National Honor Society and Phi Theta Kappa, Phi Beta Kappa’s counterpart at community colleges. Right now, Foard said, the society is also involved in a project with the Kettering Foundation to engender a national discussion of the social value of liberal learning. Foard noted the society’s practice of not recognizing new chapters at institutions whose administrations are on censure by the AAUP.

At the final gathering of the annual meeting, former AAUP general secretary Ernst Benjamin, who recently began a phased retirement from the Association, reminisced about his long career in higher education.

Marc Lendler, one of the plaintiffs in the recently settled case against Bennington College, thanked the AAUP for its actions on behalf of the plaintiffs. Seventeen professors, including Lendler, who now teaches government at Smith College, filed a suit against Bennington for wrongfully dismissing them in 1994 as part of a sweeping reorganization introduced by the college’s trustees and president. The college settled with the plaintiffs last December, following which the surviving plaintiffs allocated $35,000 to create a fund to sponsor an annual Neil Rappaport Lecture on Academic Freedom and Shared Governance at the AAUP’s annual governance conference. "The AAUP provided invaluable support," Lendler said, "including the best record of the events that took place at Bennington."

In 1995, after a committee visited the campus to investigate, the AAUP’s annual meeting voted to censure the Bennington administration. Several years later, the Association published a follow-up report on the situation at the college. And in May 2000, the AAUP held an off-campus teach-in to protest curbs on academic freedom at Bennington. (See pp. 17–18 of the March–April 2001 issue.) Lendler said the plaintiffs refused to sign a confidentiality agreement because they wanted to talk about the lessons learned from the ordeal at gatherings such as the AAUP annual meeting. "When authoritarian methods are accepted without protest," he said, "they become the norm."

Capitol Hill Day

Honors and Awards

At the meeting to collect certificates of appreciation were fifty-year members Rolf Hubbe, a retired professor of classics at the University of Maryland, and Kenneth Harwood, professor emeritus in the communications school at the University of Houston. See page 22 for a list of all the fifty-year members recognized at the annual meeting.

The Tulane University chapter of the AAUP received the 2001 Beatrice G. Konheim Award, which recognizes a chapter for "outstanding achievement in advancing the Association’s objectives in academic freedom, student rights and freedoms, the status of academic women, the elimination of discrimination against minorities, or the establishment of equal opportunity for members of college and university faculties."

Assembly of State Conferences

The ASC gives awards each year to recognize exceptional service to the AAUP and the profession and to help AAUP members travel to the annual meeting. The ASC’s Tacey Awards went to Robert Hughes of the University of the South and to Berch Berberoglu of the University of Nevada-Reno for outstanding service to the Tennessee and Nevada conferences over a number of years. Jeffery Roberts of Tennessee Technological University received the Sumberg Award for his effective program of state-level lobbying on issues furthering the interests of higher education. Greg O’Brien of the University of Southern Mississippi and Rebecca Shapiro of Westminster College received John Hopper Scholarships, which are awarded to individuals attending their first annual meeting. George Monsma of Calvin College and Hank Ottinger of Westminster College received Konheim Travel Awards, which are granted to chapters engaged in activities advancing the Konheim Award objectives to help the chapters send delegates to the annual meeting.

This year, the Hofstra University AAUP chapter won the ASC Award for the Outstanding Chapter Newsletter, the Illinois conference won the ASC Award for the Outstanding Conference Newsletter, and the New Jersey conference won the ASC Award for Outstanding Conference Web page.

Collective Bargaining Congress

Glenn received the CBC’s Sternberg Award, which is given annually to the AAUP member who best demonstrates a concern for human rights, courage, persistence, political foresight, imagination, and collective bargaining skills.

The CBC council endorsed an agreement with New York State United Teachers/American Federation of Teachers to engage in joint ventures to unionize private-sector institutions in New York State; an agreement with the Association of University Teachers of the United Kingdom that provides reciprocal membership and other privileges for members working in the other’s country; and the Fair Labor Practices Code of Conduct.

Censure and Sanction Developments

Policy Statements and Resolutions

An Instance of Arson

The Eighty-seventh Annual Meeting of the American Association of University Professors deplores the arson in May that destroyed a research laboratory at the University of Washington’s Center for Urban Horticulture. The loss of research notes, slides, and rare species of plants is irreparable. The arson has been justified as an appropriate response to the "genetic engineering" of the nation’s forests. This annual meeting condemns the brutal anti-intellectualism that apparently motivated this reprehensible action.

Corporate Influences on Academic Life

 The Eighty-seventh Annual Meeting of the American Association of University Professors expresses great concern over the growing reliance on corporate managerial concepts in the governance of American higher education. Under budgetary and political pressures, colleges and universities are, with increasing frequency, invoking notions of accountability and efficiency that are more appropriate to an industrial enterprise than to an institution of higher learning. This can be seen in unilateral decisions by administrations concerning such fundamental matters as the content of curriculum, methods of instruction, faculty salaries, and the termination of faculty appointments. It can also be seen in the growing number of contingent faculty positions among all types of institutions.

This meeting affirms the continuing importance of principles of academic freedom, tenure, and academic governance that are set forth in the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure and the 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities. Faculty, administrations, and governing boards are jointly responsible for protecting and advancing these principles, which are central to the vitality of teaching and learning in higher education. The Eighty-seventh Annual Meeting calls upon the academic community to resist the application of corporate models of behavior and decision making to the complexities of academic life, and to examine with great care the nature and consequences of corporate influences to make certain that such influences are consistent with the basic principles upon which higher education in this country rests.

Academic Freedom and the Assignment of Course Grades

The Eighty-seventh Annual Meeting of the American Association of University Professors notes with concern a recent panel decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in the case of a professor who claimed that an administration’s demand that he change a grade violated his academic freedom and his rights under the First Amendment (Brown v. Armenti). The court ruled that "[b]ecause grading is pedagogic, the assignment of the grade is subsumed under the university’s freedom to determine how a course is to be taught. We therefore conclude that a public university professor does not have a First Amendment right to expression via the school’s grade assignment procedures."

This Annual Meeting calls attention to and reaffirms the long-held position of the Association that the assessment of student academic performance, including the assignment of particular grades, is a faculty right, a direct corollary of the teacher’s "freedom in the classroom" which the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure assures. Administrative officers should not on their own authority substitute their judgment for that of the faculty concerning the assignment of grades. This meeting reiterates the position of the AAUP that review of a student complaint over a grade should be by faculty, under procedures adopted by the faculty. Any resulting change in grade should be made only by faculty authorization.

Professor Saad Eddin Ibrahim

The Eighty-seventh Annual Meeting of the American Association of University Professors protests the imprisonment of Professor Saad Eddin Ibrahim of the American University in Cairo. Professor Ibrahim was sentenced to seven years for having harmed the "dignity of the state" and its reputation. The action against Professor Ibrahim, who holds dual Egyptian and American citizenship, focused on an educational documentary under preparation at the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies that was critical of recent parliamentary elections in Egypt. More than two dozen of Professor Ibrahim’s staff colleagues at the Ibn Khaldun Center have also been imprisoned. This annual meeting views the action by Egyptian authorities against Professor Ibrahim as inimical to the free pursuit of knowledge. Consistent with principles of academic freedom, we call upon the Egyptian government to release Professor Ibrahim and his staff colleagues and allow them to resume their professional work.

Fifty-Year AAUP Members Honored