From the President: No Campus Is an Island
By Cary Nelson
When the University of Minnesota board of regents launched its infamous assault on tenure years ago, faculty all across the country soon realized it put them at risk as well. The national AAUP joined with local leaders to win that battle. Despite that experience, many faculty members today—with the frequent exception of AAUP activists—fail to recognize when local events have systemic implications. When they do, they may feel there is little or nothing they can do about them. It is time to reverse both forms of defeatism. Now, as then, faculties have sufficient power to enforce the principles that guide their profession.
In some respects, of course, faculty at different institutions are in competition with one another. Certainly, we compete for students and staff. Yet in the areas of academic freedom and tenure, we have and must hold common cause. To be sure, the potential for universal professional solidarity is not helped by the increasing disparity in disciplinary salaries and career support at some institutions. How much solidarity should an assistant professor of art feel with an assistant professor of business earning more than twice as much? How much solidarity should a part-time faculty member earning $1,500 a course feel with a faculty member earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, let alone with a million-dollar university president?
The inequities that divide us call out for redress, the sooner the better. Yet we need to recognize and act on common interests. In our national capital, of course, legislators can be opponents on one issue, allies on another. It is a strategy that faculty increasingly need to adopt. A diminishing commitment to humanities, arts, and interpretive social science disciplines is an international trend. So, too, is increasing reliance on contingent labor throughout the academy. Contempt for shared governance is embedded in the bones of far too many administrators. In this context, a victory for one campus faculty is a victory for all. And a defeat sends shock waves across the whole academic ocean.
As the only effective voice for all the faculty on matters of principle and policy, the AAUP is an organization we all have a vested interest in strengthening. There is otherwise little hope of reversing the most insidious trends in higher education and shaping our future for the common good.
We also need to be concerned about the strength of our local chapters everywhere. Collective bargaining chapters certainly know that good contract provisions on one campus make for good models elsewhere. All members at unionized chapters should care deeply about the health and fate of their brother and sister chapters. Although AAUP-style unionization means that each local chapter sets its own goals and priorities, all collective bargaining locals benefit from the broad recognition that AAUP bargaining units have clout on their individual campuses.
Faculty victories for AAUP principles—as well as improvements in working conditions, benefits, and salaries—raise boats everywhere. Collective bargaining victories even benefit faculty in states where public employee collective bargaining is prohibited. All of us gain nationally every time good local patterns and practices are enhanced. So it is in our interest to care about all our brothers and sisters.
In the same way, local advocacy chapters can help not only themselves but also one another by proving themselves decisive in promoting due process, shared governance, and academic freedom on their individual campus. Even those elite university faculties who see themselves as wholly self-sufficient are subject to national and international pressures. Think how much good could be done by effective, newsworthy AAUP chapters at Columbia, Duke, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale universities, among others.
I sometimes meet faculty members at all sorts of schools—private universities, state universities, liberal arts colleges—who are confident they can make it on their own, as if the last local faculty on earth endorsing academic freedom could stand alone. Perhaps we would be better off not testing this thesis.
All our members—not just those of us in the national AAUP leadership—should be devoted to maximizing the strength and visibility of every local chapter. We are not all in the same boat across the whole range of issues that confront us, but our fates are deeply interconnected nonetheless. No campus is an island unto itself.
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