David Rabban Appointed Committee A Chair

By Leigh A. Neithardt

David M. Rabban, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Law, has been appointed chair of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure.

Rabban has been with the AAUP in one capacity or another for thirty years; in 1976, he joined the Association’s staff as associate counsel, leaving the staff in 1983 to join the University of Texas law faculty. Over the next dozen years, he served on several AAUP committees, and in 1998 he began eight years of service as the Association’s general counsel. At the School of Law, he is currently a University Distinguished Teaching Professor.

Rabban has an extensive publication history in labor law, higher education, and American legal history. He has published articles, book reviews, encyclopedia entries, and review essays in the law reviews of Colombia and Yale universities and the universities of Texas and Virginia and in the Industrial Labor Relations Review, the Journal of American History, and the Journal of Legal Education. In 1997, Cambridge University Press published his book, Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years.

He has also been the recipient of several fellowships, including, most recently, one from the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, the University of Michigan Law School, and the College of William and Mary.

“It is a great honor and responsibility to be the new chair of Committee A,” Rabban says. “I attended my first Committee A meeting soon after I joined the staff as associate counsel in 1976. I have closely followed its work ever since, in my six years on the staff, as an active AAUP member at the University of Texas since 1983, and particularly during my terms as AAUP general counsel from 1998 to last June. Defending academic freedom and tenure is the core function of the AAUP, and I look forward to working closely with the excellent members and staff of Committee A.”

Committee A, which is the AAUP’s oldest standing committee, is charged with developing principles and standards of academic freedom, tenure, and due process; working for the implementation of these principles and standards in the higher education community; and approving reports of investigations of unresolved issues in particular cases in its areas of concern.

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