March-April 2001

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AAUP Welcomes New and Reactivated Chapters

Every year, the AAUP welcomes new chapters at colleges and universities around the country. Education professor Dan Basalone, president of the AAUP chapter at National University in San Diego, says that concern over his institution’s lack of a tenure system was a primary motivating factor behind the formation of a new chapter. "You can be doing a great job but still not have security," Basalone says. According to National University spokesperson Hoyt Smith, the university has 140 full-time and 85 associate-faculty positions, and it employs about 1,500 adjunct faculty members. There is no collective bargaining at the institution.

Last fall, faculty members decided that they needed to organize, and that the best way to do it was through the AAUP. "Faculty here have grave concerns about the lack of tenure and its potential to curtail academic freedom," Basalone says. "We think affiliating with the AAUP will allow our faculty to achieve the same professional status that faculty at hundreds of other universities have."

At New York University, the reactivated AAUP chapter was born from widespread concern that the faculty role in university governance was diminishing and that faculty views were being ignored. The NYU administration was censured in 1990 by the AAUP for violations of academic freedom, tenure, and due process.

"We had both an immediate crisis and long-term issues," says Ellen Willis, a professor of journalism at NYU and the AAUP chapter president. "The immediate crisis was the university administration’s campaign against graduate-student unionization. The long-range problem was an erosion of faculty governance and prerogatives in such matters as hiring, tenure decisions, salary structure, and program funding."

After a protracted battle, NYU’s graduate assistants won the right to unionize, making NYU the first private university to formally recognize collective bargaining rights for graduate students. But many faculty members felt that their concerns were ignored throughout the process. More than 125 faculty members signed a petition urging the administration not to fight a union, according to Jeffrey Goodwin, professor of sociology and secretary of the NYU chapter. But the administration disregarded the petition and took the case to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). When the regional NLRB ruled in favor of the graduate students, the administration appealed and lost again.

"Administrators made a show of holding meetings with faculty, but it was obvious that they had already made up their minds," Willis says. When the university’s faculty council, without announcing that it would consider the topic or soliciting input from the faculty at large, voted unanimously to support the administration’s position, "it was a real wake-up call for us," Willis says.

"We realized that we had to form an independent faculty organization, not only to do battle with the administration and bring our issues into public view, but also to pressure official governance bodies like the council into actually representing us. There are so many issues on which there is a lot of faculty discontent—a shortage of housing, huge salary inequities, the construction of a massive student center on Washington Square Park—and we have had no real collective voice."

At a meeting organized by faculty last spring to discuss the situation, some suggested reviving the AAUP chapter, which had died out in the mid-1980s. Despite the chapter’s long period of inactivity, many NYU faculty members had maintained their AAUP memberships, and when the new chapter held its first meeting in November, there were 133 members already on the books.

In the past year, new or reactivated chapters have also been instituted at Caldwell College (N.J.), Darton College (Ga.), Jacksonville University (Fla.), Loyola University (La.), Manatee Community College (Fla.), Midway College (Ky.), Nicholls State University (La.), Schreiner College (Tex.), St. Michael’s College (Vt.), the University of Dallas, the University of Missouri–St. Louis, the University of Missouri–Kansas City, and the University of St. Thomas (Minn.).

"It is very encouraging to see our membership grow simultaneously at flagship campuses, at community colleges, and at satellite campuses," says Iris Molotsky, director of AAUP membership development. "To me, our diversity indicates our strength as an organization and confirms the integrity of our beliefs."