From the General Secretary: I Love the Academy

By Roger W. Bowen

I love the academy, the teaching profession, the interaction with students and colleagues, the opportunity to think deeply about my discipline, and those rare instances when ragtag notions suddenly come together into an exciting theory. I relish the dialectic of academic life: prepping for class or preparing an article, discussing the material with the students or with critical-minded colleagues, and reconstructing the same ideas into a meaningful learning experience or publication.

Never did I fully appreciate all that is good about the academy until I left university life to run a natural history museum. It's great to be back and to be part of an organization whose raison d'être is to defend and promote my life's passion, the academy. The AAUP is at one and the same time the most conservative higher education organization in America and the most progressive: it is our mission to conserve the progressive values of academic freedom and shared governance and to set standards for the profession based on the progressive values of fairness, equity, democracy, and reason.

The AAUP broke with tradition in hiring me. My last academic position was university president in a university system that is as vast and ungovernable as it is bureaucratic and politicized. But I thoroughly enjoyed that job, more I think for the bird's-eye view it gave me of the academy—call this intellectual growth and professional development—than for the prerogatives it provided. The position, I learned, is all about service, trying to do good for the common good in an atmosphere in which people feel free to speak their minds.

I thought of myself as an academic president, one who refused to forsake the intellectual life. I wrote a new book, and I taught a course every third semester. It was not mere coincidence that those semesters were the most enjoyable. Teaching allowed me to see the students and the institution as my faculty colleagues saw them, and served as a healthy reminder of why I entered the academy and thrived in the environment.

I have always known that the faculty is the heart and soul of any college or university. Fifty- and sixty-hour weeks spent in preparing classes, lecturing, grading essays, advising students, meeting with colleagues, serving on committees, doing research, writing, traveling to conferences, and developing new courses—faculty do all this for modest compensation and the prospect of receiving tenure, job security, a place to call their own and be part of a profoundly human enterprise that values creativity and indulges eccentricities. Ergo, I am appalled by the academy's over-reliance on contingent faculty. This exploited group enjoys too few of the rights the academy offers to its full-time citizens.

Academic life in higher education is extraordinarily demanding, but also emotionally rewarding for the individual faculty member. Yet at this time in the history of the American academy, as a profession we seem not to command the same degree of the public's respect that medicine, organized religion, and even the law do. Instead, our profession is too frequently slandered by pundits, tinkered with by politicians, and devalued by anti-intellectuals. Our critics wish to transmogrify the academy into a business and to enforce inappropriate corporate standards of productivity to judge our work.

Thank goodness, then, that the AAUP stands as the faculty's most valuable bulwark against assaults on the academy and as keeper of the professional realm we constitute. Our founders recognized that the professoriate needed an organization that would combat, in founder Arthur Lovejoy's words, "academic crimes." Roughly a thousand such "crimes" are handled by the AAUP each year: the less serious ones we resolve quietly; the egregious ones require investigation, and the unforgivable ones may result in censure. That latter punishment we use sparingly. My own judgment is that regional accrediting agencies should require institutions to achieve removal of the AAUP censure as a precondition for reaccreditation. I must ask, how can any college or university receive accreditation if it has been shown to violate academic freedom, shared governance, and academic due process?

In the months and years ahead, I intend to use this forum for casting light on the major problems facing the nation's faculty. Thank you to all our members for bestowing their confidence in my leadership. If you wish to comment on my remarks or on what the AAUP is doing (or not doing), please send me an e-mail at rbowen@aaup.org.

 Printer-Friendly Page