July-August 2002

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AAUP Elects New Officers and Council Members

Following the AAUP annual meeting in June, two faculty activists assumed new leadership positions as officers of the AAUP, and two continued in office. Jane Buck, professor of psychology emerita at Delaware State University, was re-elected AAUP president, and Larry Gerber, a professor of history at Auburn University, was elected first vice president. Cary Nelson, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was re-elected second vice president, and Jeffrey Butts, a professor of biology at Appalachian State University, was elected secretary-treasurer.

An AAUP member since 1965, Buck has served as president of the Delaware AAUP conference and for many years was a member of the national AAUP Committee on Historically Black Institutions and the Status of Minorities in the Profession. In addition, she served three terms on the national Council. A strong advocate of collective bargaining, Buck was president of the Delaware State University AAUP chapter when it was certified as the faculty bargaining unit in 1977. She was the first national AAUP leader to be elected from a historically black university, and the first president elected from an institution engaged in collective bargaining.

"For almost ninety years," Buck observes, "the Association has fearlessly defended academic freedom and excellence in higher education. Colleges and universities must abandon the hierarchical corporate model of management, which has proven to be disastrous in the for-profit sector for which it was designed. The future of our grand experiment, in which an educated citizenry governs itself, is in danger unless we restore the autonomy of the academy."

Gerber has served as chair of the Alabama AAUP conference, as a member of the AAUP’s national Council, and on the Council’s Executive Committee. He is a member of the Committee on College and University Government and has been active in the Auburn University senate as well as heading Alabama’s statewide organization of faculty chairs. Gerber’s work has been particularly focused on fostering shared governance, combating the corporatization of higher education, and explaining academic values to the general public.

Nelson chairs the AAUP’s Committee on Academic Professionals and serves on the Academe advisory board. He has been a member of the national Council, and he served on the subcommittee of the Committee on College and University Teaching, Research, and Publication that drafted the Association’s statement on graduate students. Nelson is also a member of the Executive Committee and the Delegate Assembly of the Modern Language Association. His activism has focused on exposing and fighting higher education’s shift toward an increasingly untenurable and contingent workforce and on the responsibility of tenured faculty to become the "moral center" of academia, devoted to protecting the rights of all campus employees.

During his more than twenty-five years as an AAUP member, Butts has served as president of his institution’s chapter, president of the North Carolina AAUP conference, and chair of AAUP’s Assembly of State Conferences. He has been a member of the Committee on College and University Teaching, Research, and Publication and of the national Council. He has also served on two academic freedom and tenure ad hoc investigating committees. As secretary-treasurer, Butts will work with the staff on financial operations, lead the Investment Committee, and communicate the financial implications of actions of the Council and Executive Committee to those bodies.

All of the officers will serve two-year terms. In addition to the officer elections, ten new members were elected to three-year terms on the Association’s governing Council, and one new member was appointed to serve out the term of a Council member who stepped down.