Telling the Truth in Difficult Times

The Ninety-third Annual Meeting of the AAUP combined plenary addresses by three distinguished speakers, business meetings, panel presentations, lobbying visits, award presentations, and an art exhibit.

Two plenary luncheon speakers gave talks relating to the annual meeting’s theme of telling the truth in difficult times. Joan E. Bertin, executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship and consultant to the Association’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, addressed the annual meeting at a plenary luncheon Friday, June 8. She discussed taboos related to race and gender that have been prominent on college and university campuses. Such taboos reflect genuine social concerns about discrimination, but they also serve to demonize disfavored views and speakers, she said. Since September 11, 2001, criticism of the U.S. response to terrorism has become taboo, with the result that disciplinary actions have been taken against professors for statements about the September 11 attacks and a catalog of "anti-American" events on campus was compiled by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. The taboos include speech about Israel and Palestine. For example, the David Project has accused Middle East studies faculty at Columbia University of anti-Semitism; outside critics denounced Norman Finkelstein and sought to block his bid for tenure at DePaul University because of his book The Holocaust Industry; Brandeis University cancelled an art exhibit featuring photographs of Palestinian children because the exhibit was not "balanced"; former U.S. president Jimmy Carter has been attacked as anti-Israel because of his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid; professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer were labeled anti-Semitic for an article, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy"; and the efforts by some British academic and labor unions to boycott Israeli scholars and academics met with charges of anti-Semitism. Bertin noted the atmosphere of "mutually destructive reductionism" that prevents recognition of alternate views. As an alternative model, she cited a current educational effort to create separate historical narratives representing competing perspectives, and using these to defuse taboos and foster discussion, debate, and dialogue.

The conference included an exhibition of twenty-four portraits by Maine artist Robert Shetterly, from his nonpartisan series "Americans Who Tell the Truth." These portraits of past and current Americans are intended to remind us of the dignity, courage, and importance of some of America’s prominent truth tellers. Shetterly addressed the annual meeting at the plenary luncheon on Saturday, June 9. He described how he came to paint the portraits: formerly a political cartoonist as well as a painter, Shetterly came to feel cynical toward and distanced from his subjects. Believing himself to have an artistic obligation to do something about injustice and acting on an impulse to protect himself from being either complacent in or complicit with this moment in our history, he began researching American history and painting portraits of American role models. In painting the series—which has grown from one painting to 108 and counting—Shetterly identified what he believes to be the necessary ingredients for a successful democracy: consent based on truth, dissent, a free and non-corporate press, active citizenry, accountability, and a society donations. The artist now spends most of his time working with children, talking about his paintings and the role models that they portray. At the end of next year the entire collection will be donated to an as-yet-unspecified institution. More information is available at www.americanswhotellthetruth.org.

The keynote address at the annual meeting’s Saturday night banquet was given by Andrew Ross, professor in the Program in American Studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University and author of Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade—Lessons from Shanghai. Ross talked about the "stampede" by U.S. and other anglophone institutions of higher education to establish overseas operations in places such as Asia and the Middle East, with training of foreign workers for highs kill jobs a primary function and profit a primary motive. Like the offshore operations of Western corporations, these offshore campuses are largely exempt from Western labor standards and expectations. For example, Ross said, some Australian universities operate what are essentially franchises, producing syllabi that are taught by lowly paid foreign teachers to foreign students who will earn a degree from an institution without ever setting foot on its main campus. In contrast to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which has chosen to make available online, for free, the materials for the same courses that it offers to its U.S. students, many other institutions are exporting only Western-style skills necessary for the foreign employees of Western companies. Ross posited that, given the pace of increase in outsourcing and offshoring, it is only a matter of time before U.S. universities will start off shoring functions currently performed in the United States, such as online teaching and data-driven research. The offshoring trend promises diminishing job security for both American and foreign workers in all sectors of the economy. However, Ross said, the picture is more complicated than the simple transfer of corporate values and practices to higher education that is commonly referred to as "corporatization." While it is true that universities are increasingly run like (and sometimes by) corporations, it is also true that corporations, increasingly knowledge- rather than product-based, are in some areas adopting the values and practices of higher education, such as sharing information, methods, and general brainpower.

The meeting also featured four panel presentations. "Whatever Happened to the Faculty?" moderated by Mary A. Burgan (Indiana University) and featuring Ann Franke (Wise Results, LLC) and Marcus Harvey (Canadian Association of University Teachers), drew its title from a recent book by Burgan, who served as AAUP general secretary from 1993 to 2004. Burgan told the audience that faculty, over the last two or three decades, gradually have withdrawn—or been removed—from their traditional roles in shared governance and in matters such as curriculum and tenure and promotion decisions. Although structural changes in faculty appointments and faculty work are partly responsible for the current situation, faculty members also share the blame for failing to defend the necessity of engaging in teaching and service in addition to research, she argued. Harvey discussed the results of overuse of contingent faculty appointments, which include routinized learning experiences for students and unfulfilling career opportunities for faculty. He suggested the importance of support from full-time, especially tenure line, faculty in organizing their contingent faculty colleagues to improve the situation. Franke, former AAUP staff counsel, urged faculty members to get involved in planning for crisis situations on campus, such as crime or a natural disaster, to avoid having administrative measures imposed on them without due regard for possible unintended impacts on teaching and research.

The AAUP's Committee on Historically Black Institutions and Scholars of Color hosted a panel focused on the documentary What’s Race Got to Do with It? Social Disparities and Student Success. The film chronicles the experiences of a diverse group of college students over the course of a semester at the University of California, Berkeley, in the aftermath of Proposition 209, which prohibited affirmative-action programs in the state. The film showing, which was attended by faculty from a wide range of institutions, was followed by a facilitated discussion focusing on such issues as race and class in the classroom, the difficulty of recruiting and retaining faculty of color, and ways in which the AAUP could become more attentive to the needs of minority faculty. The panel was moderated by committee chair Marybeth Gasman (University of Pennsylvania) and Charles Betsey (Howard University).

"Organizing Around Gender Equity," a panel presentation by the Committee on Women in the Academic Profession, highlighted the Association's 2006 report on faculty gender equity indicators, and the use of those data for faculty organizing around gender equity issues on their campuses. John Curtis (AAUP national staff) provided a brief overview on the compilation of the data for the report, committee chair Ann Higginbotham (Eastern Connecticut State University) used selected indicators to detail the condition of faculty gender equity at Connecticut colleges and universities, and Marty West (University of California, Davis) demonstrated how data from the report were instrumental to her work on gender equity at the University of California. Presentations were followed by a workshop discussion with participants keen to organize faculty on their own campuses.

Finally, Neil Gross (Harvard University) and Solon Simmons (George Mason University) presented a panel titled "The Social and Political Attitudes of Professors."

Censure Actions

Delegates to the Ninety-third Annual Meeting of the American Association of University Professors voted June 9 to place on the AAUP's list of censured administrations four New Orleans universities as a result of actions each had taken in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The universities are Loyola University New Orleans, Tulane University, the University of New Orleans, and Southern University at New Orleans. The delegates agreed to hold over until the 2008 annual meeting a fifth New Orleans institution, the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center. At the meeting, the delegates also voted to impose censure on the administrations of Our Lady of Holy Cross College (Louisiana) and Bastyr University (Washington).

In other decisions, the delegates voted to remove Tiffin University (Ohio) and New Mexico Highlands University from the censure list. For information about these two institutions, see "Developments Relating to Censure by the Association" in the May–June 2007 issue of Academe.

Censure by the AAUP informs the academic community that the administration of an institution has not adhered to the generally recognized principles of academic freedom and tenure jointly formulated by the AAUP and the Association of American Colleges and Universities and endorsed by more than two hundred professional and educational organizations. With these changes, forty-seven institutions are now on the censure list. 

Capitol Hill Day

After an orientation session organized by the AAUP's government relations staff, groups of AAUP members from different states visited their senators and representatives to emphasize the importance of higher education. Members discussed current issues in accreditation with legislators and staffers and communicated their hopes for the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act.

The day ended with a reception in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill to honor Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island with the Henry T. Yost Congressional Recognition Award. In conferring the award, the AAUP's Committee on Government Relations honored Reed for his consistent and vocal advocacy for affordable access to higher education. A worthy successor to the seat of Claiborne Pell, Reed has pushed for increases in grants and the expansion of programs that help students with financial need to attend college. He is also a staunch advocate of libraries, to ensure that everyone has access to the tools they need to learn.

Honors and Awards

Carolyn R. Mahoney, president of Lincoln University in Missouri, received the Ralph S. Brown Award, which recognizes administrators or trustees who have made an outstanding contribution to the practice of shared governance. In presenting the award on behalf of the selection committee, Gregory Scholtz, chair of the Committee on College and University Governance, said,

This is my third year as a member of the selection committee for the Brown Award, and I must say that during these three years I have found the task of reviewing applications to be positively inspiring. This year was no exception. In eloquent letters, Lincoln faculty and staff expressed their heartfelt gratitude for the steps that President Mahoney has taken to involve them in joint decision-making—and particularly in restoring equity to faculty and staff compensation, improving internal communications, and revising university regulations.

During Mahoney's tenure as president, the university has made significant progress in all these areas, and faculty morale has reached new heights. Scholtz noted also that, while praising the president's governance accomplishments, faculty and staff expressed an even greater personal appreciation and regard for Mahoney. In the words of one nominator: "As I thought of what to say about Dr. Mahoney’s impact on this campus that would illustrate the extent to which she has changed our campus culture, I realized that in its most basic form, shared governance is simply a reflection of good character and the qualities that allow us to trust each other, to treat each other with courtesy and respect, and to share in the responsibility of making our institution better for all its constituents. It is who Dr. Mahoney is that has changed us."

The Brown Award was established in 1998 in memory of Ralph S. Brown, who served as AAUP president and general counsel and headed many AAUP committees during his forty-four years of service to the Association. The award is not conferred annually; the Association reserves the distinction for those occasions when some accomplishment in the area of shared governance is identified as so outstanding as to merit being singled out.

Lillian Taiz of California State University–Los Angeles was selected as the recipient of the Georgina Smith Award. Ann Higginbotham, chair of the Committee on Women in the Academic Profession, presented the award to Taiz, president-elect of the California Faculty Association (CFA), an AAUP affiliate which represents 23,000 faculty in the California State University system. Taiz has also served as statewide vice president (2001–present) and as both vice president and president of her chapter. While serving as leader of the CFA contract campaign, Taiz worked tirelessly to organize faculty on campuses spread out over 1,000 miles. As a result of her efforts, the faculty averted a first-ever strike, and brought the CFA to "the best contract in our history," in the word  of Elizabeth Hoffman and Susan Meisenhelder, CFA leaders and AAUP Council members who nominated Taiz for the award.

The Georgina M. Smith Award was established in 1979 to honor the memory of an AAUP leader at Rutgers University who was a committed feminist and a strong supporter of her local faculty union. The award is presented at the AAUP’s annual meeting to a person who has provided exceptional leadership in improving the status of academic women or in academic collective bargaining and through that work has improved the profession in general. Rather than awarding such recognition annually, the Association reserves the distinction for those occasions when some accomplishment in either area is defined as so outstanding as to merit being specially singled out.

Editor Jodi Upton and reporters Steve Wieberg, Michael McCarthy, Steve Berkowitz, and Kelly Whiteside of USA Today were this year's recipients of the Iris Molotsky Award for Excellence in Coverage of Higher Education. The winning entry, "How Coaches Cash In," was a two-part series on the trend of skyrocketing compensation for college football coaches. Led by database editor Jodi Upton, the paper used freedom-ofinformation requests, tax records, and news reports to acquire the salary and benefits packages of 113 Division I-A schools. The team reported for the first time that forty-three coaches at Division I-A schools make more than $1,000,000 a year in salary, excluding generous perks and bonuses, and that the average football coach's pay at Division I-A schools was $950,000 a year. The series not only quantified escalating coaches' compensation, but it also revealed trends such as coaches negotiating large pools of money for assistant coaches' raises and bonuses, being represented by sports agents, and being awarded bonuses for keeping athletes academically eligible and for beating rivals.

The AAUP in 1970 established a Higher Education Writers Award, which was presented for outstanding interpretive reporting on higher education. In 2001, the award was renamed in honor of Iris Molotsky, who retired from the AAUP in 2001 after nineteen years of service as director of public information.

State Conferences

Flo Hatcher (Southern Connecticut State University) was re-elected as chair of the Assembly of State Conferences, and Cat Warren (North Carolina State University) was elected vice chair. Gregory Scholtz (Wartburg College) was elected member atlarge of the ASC executive committee and liaison to Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure.

The Assembly of State Conferences presented its annual awards recognizing exceptional service to the AAUP and to the profession. The Al Sumberg Award, which is presented to a person or organization that has been particularly effective in lobbying on issues furthering the interests of higher education or in furthering such lobbying efforts on the state level, was presented to Brian Turner (Randolph Macon College) for his vigilance and leadership in government relations efforts on behalf of academic freedom and governance in Virginia. Turner has been the driving force behind the Virginia AAUP conference's annual lobbying of the Virginia General Assembly, and he has kept Virginia's AAUP members abreast of the status of educationrelated bills as they pass through the mysteries of the legislative process.

The ASC Award for the Outstanding Conference Web Page was given to the North Carolina conference and the award for the Outstanding Tabloid-style Conference Newsletter to the New York conference. The ASC Award for the Outstanding Chapter Web Page went to the Wartburg College AAUP chapter and the award for the Outstanding Chapter Newsletter to the University of Cincinnati chapter.

A Hopper Travel award, for individuals attending their first annual meeting, went to Beth Mulvaney (Meredith College) of the North Carolina conference. Konheim Travel Award Grants, which are given to help chapters send delegates to the AAUP annual meeting, were awarded to the Seminole State College AAUP chapter (delegate Christian Morgan) and the University of North Carolina –Chapel Hill AAUP chapter (delegate Y.H. Patt). Preference is given to chapters that previously have been unable to send delegates or have not sent delegates in recent years; that lack sufficient funds or are at distant locations; and that have demonstrated outstanding achievement in advancing the Association's objectives in academic freedom, student rights and freedoms, the status of academic women, the elimination of discrimination against minorities, or the establishment of equal opportunity for members of college and university faculties.

Jeffey Halpern (Rider University) was elected chair of the Collective Bargaining Conference and Howard Bunsis (Eastern Michigan University) vice chair. Three new at-large members of the CBC executive committee were elected: Stanley Aronowitz (City University of New York), Mohey Mowafy (Northern Michigan University), and Gerry Turkel (University of Delaware).

Ron Cramer of Oakland University was the 2007 recipient of the Marilyn Sternberg Award, which is given annually to the AAUP member who best demonstrates a concern for human rights, courage, persistence, political foresight, and collective bargaining skills. Cramer, who first went to Oakland in 1967, helped establish the university's early childhood master’s degree and the Lowry Early Childhood Education Center. He has published hundreds of articles and many books on reading and writing. His "Spelling" series has served as an official textbook in elementary schools since the 1970s. He is a Distinguished Professor of Education and continues to teach courses in reading, writing, and language arts.

Resolutions

Members approved four resolutions during the annual meeting. They appear below.

Violence at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech)

On April 16, 2007, five faculty members and twenty-seven students were killed at Virginia Tech. We grieve this senseless loss of life, a grim reminder that our campuses are not immune from acts of violence that can disfigure the broader society. We extend to the faculty, students, and administration of Virginia Tech our collegial sympathy and our deep admiration for their determination to continue to teach and learn in the aftermath of this horrific carnage. Colleges and universities face complex challenges and difficult choices in guarding their communities against individuals intent on taking lives. They cannot become fortresses of security, but they must take every reasonable step to protect those who study, work, and live on their campuses. This annual meeting encourages the continuing search for realistic and appropriate measures that will help ensure campus safety.

Arrests in Iran

The Ninety-third Annual Meeting of the American Association of University Professors deplores recent actions by the government of Iran to detain or arrest three Iranian-Americans, two academic researchers and a journalist, as well as a French-Iranian journalism student, on grounds of having worked "against the sovereignty of the country." Particularly outrageous is the case of Dr. Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. She was prevented from leaving Iran last December after one of her periodic visits to her elderly mother, was questioned at length over several months by Iranian intelligence officials about the activities and programs of the Wilson Center, and was jailed in the notorious Evin prison on May 8.

We are appalled that a scholar can be imprisoned because government authorities are displeased with scholarly projects with which she is associated. Such action not only injures the individuals but also potentially impairs opportunities for the educational and scientific exchanges that are vital to our academic endeavors. This meeting joins with others in calling upon the government of Iran to release Dr. Esfandiari immediately from prison and allow her to return to her academic work in the United States. We also urge Iranian authorities to free the other researcher and journalists who have been detained and allow them to leave Iran if that is their wish. We urge the government of the United States to be unremitting in peaceful efforts to secure their freedom.

In Appreciation of Duane Storti

In 2004, Professor Duane Storti, president of the AAUP chapter at the University of Washington but acting on his own initiative, brought a class-action lawsuit against the university for violating provisions of the faculty handbook by having failed to provide a two-percent salary increase to faculty for the 2002–03 academic year. In an October 2005 decision, a state court ruled that the university had breached its "mandatory duty" to award faculty an annual increase as required by the faculty handbook. In March 2006, the University of Washington agreed to pay $17.45 million in back pay and interest to settle the lawsuit.

The Ninety-third Annual Meeting of the American Association of University Professors commends Professor Storti for his singular achievement in protecting the economic interests of the faculty of the University of Washington and the authority of the university’s faculty handbook. We applaud his initiative in behalf of the University of Washington faculty and of the profession.

The Fiftieth Anniversary of Sweezy v. New Hampshire

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the United States Supreme Court's decision in Sweezy v. New Hampshire. In an investigation conducted by the attorney general of New Hampshire to determine whether there were "subversive persons" in the state, Paul Sweezy, a visiting scholar at the University of New Hampshire who had given a lecture on Marxism, answered most questions asked of him but refused to answer questions related to the content of the lecture. Ruling in favor of Sweezy, the court expressly recognized for the first time that college teachers may claim legal protection for their expressions and affiliations. Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing for the majority, declared that "the essentiality of freedom in the community of American universities is almost self-evident," adding that "teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise our civilization will stagnate and die." Justice Felix Frankfurter, in an eloquent concurring opinion, gave even greater stature to the embryonic constitutional doctrine of academic freedom. Although faculty interests have not always prevailed in litigation, the Supreme Court has never disavowed or even seriously questioned the principles it first announced in the Sweezy case, and has applied those principles in myriad contexts beneficial to the academic community. 

Consistently during the past half century, the AAUP has played a vital role in the shaping and strengthening of the legal principles that protect academic freedom, chiefly by filing amicus curiae briefs in cases that challenged disclaimer-type loyalty oaths, intrusive legislative investigations, and other government actions that threaten or diminish free expression and free inquiry in the academic community. Indeed, on several occasions courts have invoked AAUP statements and policies as authoritative sources of views and values to guide relations between the campus and the larger world. This process began precisely a half century ago.

The Association's Ninety-third Annual Meeting, noting this anniversary of judicial recognition, in the Sweezy case, of basic precepts of academic freedom reaffirms the Association's commitment to academic freedom as essential to institutions of higher learning.

Fifty-Year AAUP Members Honored

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