From the President: What Has the AAUP Done for Me Today?
By Cary Nelson
This question is not usually put so bluntly; faculty prefer to make their complaints sound more high-minded. But the challenge lurks behind restlessness one encounters in e-mail messages and in visits to chapters around the country. Why do faculty have difficulty answering the question? First, because the AAUP needs to do better at publicizing its accomplishments. Second, because many faculty now identify more fully with their departments and their disciplines than with their institutions or the professoriate as a whole.
Yet it only requires highlighting one or two issues to help faculty realize how dangerous it is to ignore their professorial citizenship. When a university decides that its faculty members do not have full academic freedom when they use e-mail or post research on university Web sites, it is not addressing disciplinary identities. It is undermining the rights and responsibilities of all faculty as faculty. The only sure way to defend those rights is to invoke AAUP policy. Simply informing local faculty members and administrators of our policies may be enough. If not, local chapters and the national office can educate all interested parties and apply pressure as necessary.
The e-mail and Web site examples demonstrate that academic freedom is not guaranteed when new technologies emerge. New arguments have to be made. New policy has to be written. The range of policy documents the AAUP disseminates could not be produced by any one campus. We involve people from a variety of colleges and universities in crafting statements. We have a professional staff devoted to researching issues. We are the only game in town, and we do this work very well indeed. The strongest advocacy chapter, the strongest collective bargaining local, the strongest faculty senate, could not build the necessary support for academic freedom into its rules or contracts without Academe and the AAUP’s Redbook as sources.
Over the last decade alone, we have published over thirty policy statements and some twenty-six investigative reports. Recent policy statements range from The Faculty Role in the Reform of Intercollegiate Athletics to Academic Freedom and National Security in a Time of Crisis, from Academic Freedom and Electronic Communications to Academic Freedom and Outside Speakers, along with statements on the rights of graduate students, part-time faculty members, and academic professionals. These documents offer campuses detailed language they can incorporate directly into their regulations.
Your AAUP membership is often described as an insurance policy for the professoriate. It is that and more. Your dues pay for this elaborate process of researching and writing policy about emerging—and often unanticipated—matters that are critical to the survival of an effective professoriate. These policies are necessary if you are to do your job. Your academic discipline needs them; you need them in your daily life. The most powerful and the most vulnerable faculty members benefit from them every day. Without them, the academy would be a chaos of conflicting policy established by administrative fiat.
What would the academy be like today without the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure? At-will employment and summary dismissal without cause or due process would rule the day. There would be hundreds of wildly different employment policies across the country, many of them concealed from the faculty. Take scores of AAUP policies off the books, eliminate our history of censuring rogue administrations, withdraw the many legal briefs we have sponsored, cancel tens of thousands of academic freedom cases we have negotiated, erase our assistance to local chapters, and virtually all colleges and universities would be outlaw institutions.
I used to tell my colleagues they needed to join the AAUP to support their friends at schools without strong academic freedom traditions. Not any more. Administrators throughout the country now often try to undermine shared governance and whittle away at academic freedom. What are your administration’s policies for faculty use of e-mail and university Web sites? In a world increasingly characterized by vulnerable contingent faculty, we need the AAUP now more than ever. Perhaps most of you will have anticipated my closing line: ask not what the AAUP has done for you but what you can do for the AAUP today.
|