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From the General Secretary: From Those to Whom Much Is Given
By Roger Bowen
The maxim “from those to whom much is given, much also is expected” captures a moral desideratum that fortunate faculty members should honor. By “fortunate,” I mean tenured faculty, especially those at elite institutions around the nation.
Not long ago, I visited a small, private, elite New England college—let’s call it Eden College—at the invitation of the AAUP chapter president. The chapter members wanted to discuss three concerns: criteria for promotion to full professor, the definition of “long-term visiting faculty,” and merit compensation. At the appointed hour of our meeting, only four faculty members showed up. Coffee and pastries had been set out (optimistically, as it happened) for perhaps thirty or so people. Conversation was cordial and relaxed, and all three issues were addressed, apparently to the satisfaction of the few attendees.
Why, I asked the chapter president later, did so few faculty members attend? Are the issues you asked me to discuss not real, or are they of concern to just a few faculty members? He answered that the faculty at Eden College have it too good: small classes, excellent students, a light teaching load, off-the-charts compensation, great benefits, a healthy relationship with the administration, and strong support for research. In other words, the faculty there are generally fat and happy and have no burning issues for the AAUP to address. Essentially, he told me, at Eden the principal articles of the Redbook are honored, so the AAUP is not relevant, ironically.
I asked him why he remained loyal and involved. “I believe we need a professional association that sets standards, protects academic freedom, and speaks for the professoriate,” he said. “The AAUP does all that, hence I am loyal.” I asked whether his colleagues felt the same. He assured me that they do, but confessed that it is difficult to get them to renew memberships and attend meetings.
What would work better in mobilizing his colleagues, I asked, appeals to reason or to emotion? Barring the emergence of a tyrannical president or provost, he said, emotion would work best, appeals to their “liberal guilt” for being free riders—benefiting from the work the AAUP does but not paying for it by taking out or retaining membership.
I challenged him to challenge his colleagues to make a substantial contribution to the Campaign for the Common Good, the AAUP’s first capital campaign, and offered that the campaign can be wisely used to boost membership. I followed up later by e-mail and have yet to hear back, let alone receive a donation. Meanwhile, the AAUP has received, for example, a $12,000 donation from the AAUP chapter at Oakland University in Michigan, an excellent university whose faculty are not as highly compensated as the faculty at Eden College.
The faculty members at Eden seem to be “bowling alone,” a phenomenon that Harvard public policy professor Robert Putnam famously addressed in both book and article form. Faculty who are isolated, asocial, disengaged from the wider profession, and perhaps indifferent toward less fortunate colleagues on other campuses may be growing in number while the profession itself is being “hollowed out” by dramatic reductions in tenure-track lines, attacked as too liberal by extremist ideologues, and preyed upon by legislators who systematically reduce funding for higher education.
I am reminded of all those American isolationists who mindlessly consume the world’s resources at an ever-faster rate and bask in good fortune while millions starve or freeze or die of disease in the less fortunate continents around the world. In truth, no faculty at any college can today afford to forget that they are members of a global profession where injustice toward their colleagues is as commonplace as manure in a horse barn.
For American faculty, the AAUP has battled academic injustices, successfully, for nearly a century. Arguably, the faculty members at Eden College have it as good as they do because civic-minded colleagues of an earlier generation built the school’s governance model atop AAUP principles and policies. So I would urge Eden’s faculty members of today not to ask, What have you done for me lately? but instead, Will you be there to help me in the future? If the AAUP cannot re-earn the loyalty of the Eden Colleges of this nation, that latter question is, alas, the most important of them all.
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