Faculty Forum: The Future of the AAUP

By Cary Nelson

At the December 30, 2003, annual meeting of the Modern Language Association there was, I was happy to see, a session scheduled on the impact of September 11 on higher education. I was less pleased when it turned out none of the distinguished speakers dealt either with academic freedom or with the AAUP's timely report on September 11. Six months later, the Chronicle of Higher Education held a live conversation with our new general secretary, Roger Bowen. One of the first issues raised was whether the AAUP could continue to make itself relevant. Roger had no trouble answering the question, but I was annoyed that it was brought up at all, even as a provocation.

Over the past year, the AAUP had issued a thoughtful position paper on contingent labor and had intervened dramatically in the case of Sami Al-Arian, a professor at the University of South Florida, choosing principle rather than acquiescence. Relevance, it is clear, is as much a matter of perception as of reality, but perception also becomes the reality. The reality is that most faculty members live their lives blissfully unaware of what the AAUP is doing on their behalf.

When they do find out what we're doing, they often regard the acquisition of the knowledge as an unfair burden on their time. I thought the report on contingent labor was a marvel of intricate reasoning on the major crisis facing the academy. Yet all across the country, the most common reaction was "How the hell do they expect us to read something this long?" Perhaps we should not have been surprised that those benefiting from exploited labor found the report a distraction.

What the AAUP does it does superbly well. On many seemingly hot-button higher education issues, it is the only source of well-reasoned, reliable, and persuasive analysis. Such documents benefit hugely from the work of a fine national staff. The reports of our Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure sometimes make for riveting reading. Yet our non-collective-bargaining membership has suffered a massive, long-term decline. What can we do differently?

We need to make the AAUP a more participatory organization. Following the example of the activist group MoveOn.org, we need to send e-mails to members to involve them in petition signing and letter-writing campaigns. We need to lift the holy writ of secrecy that surrounds the development of AAUP position papers. As things presently stand, even the AAUP's elected leaders cannot see drafts of papers unless they are on the responsible committee. Early drafts of reports should continue to be kept secret, but penultimate drafts should be circulated to interested people so they can offer their input and thus feel they have a role in formulating policy. The AAUP should stop limiting official travel to a small group of people. Many articulate members could represent the organization on fundamental matters like academic freedom.

We need to automate the task of recruiting, especially on non-collective-bargaining campuses. We need to produce professional-quality AAUP recruitment DVDs that can be given out to all new faculty. With excellent picture and sound available from camcorders, production and distribution costs have fallen significantly. Composed of modules on AAUP history, academic freedom, and other subjects, there could be slightly different versions for research universities, liberal arts colleges, and collective bargaining chapters. Follow-up phone calls would often be sufficient to win new members, who would then be involved in activities like those above. If we increased membership, we could at least avoid dues increases.

We need to accept the realities of the sound-bite culture. That means continuing to issue the same thorough reports but also doing better at producing provocative headlines about our activities that could gain more news coverage. We need to accept the fact that faculty preoccupied with their careers have a short attention span for anything else. Send them news releases, too.

We would benefit from a massive re-education of tenured faculty across the country, many of whom do not understand how vulnerable their rights are in a time of crisis. But that undertaking makes a formidable task look easy. Meanwhile, we need practical, manageable ideas that can enhance members' loyalty to the organization, get more people talking about the AAUP, and rebuild membership levels. Despite a certain warranted fatalism about the profession, I also find that many academics are susceptible to an appeal based on principle and idealism. The AAUP is well positioned to make that appeal. This new column in Academe is one good step in that direction.

Cary Nelson is Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, second vice president of the AAUP, and co-author, most recently, of Office Hours: Activism and Change in the Academy. Academe accepts submissions from readers for this column. The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the policies of the AAUP.

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