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Commentary-Take the Shackles Off!
Cary Nelson, AAUP President
If the AAUP wants to grow and prosper, if it wants to adapt to the evolving needs of the professoriate, it must restructure. There really is no choice. We can be more effective—both for our members and for higher education as a whole—if we become a more versatile organization.
Our structure has long limited what we can do and say. The absence of a given discussion topic or action agenda may not be apparent to our members, but it is ever on the minds of the leadership. The consequences are not always dramatic, but they are real. As a charitable organization, we concentrate on serving the public good. When we issue a policy statement on how to treat contingent faculty or pursue a violation of academic freedom, we do so in the firm belief that the country as a whole—not just the professoriate— benefits from our elaboration and enforcement of our principles. On those commitments we are (and will continue to be) unyielding. But sometimes we want to perform services that benefit faculty members more narrowly. And sometimes we simply want to come to the aid of a chapter or a cause close to our hearts. In such cases, as a charitable organization, we have to ask ourselves who benefits.
For example, as a professional organization, the AAUP could create a voluntary, password-protected member database; many professional organizations already have such online databases. Some of our members have good reason not to make the fact of their membership known, but many others would like the convenience of being able to look up member contact information and have their own information available. I’d like to be able to contact AAUP members when I am traveling. Inclusion would be completely voluntary, and entirely for the benefit of AAUP members and leaders.
Like other charitable organizations, we are limited in the amount of lobbying we can do. As a professional organization, we could offer to coordinate higher education lobbying for a number of like-minded disciplinary groups. We could offer to pool funds and significantly increase the impact of all the contributing groups.
The Assembly of State Conferences and the Collective Bargaining Congress would also be freed up to be more activist entities. We could give more visible emphasis to chapter organizing; we could multiply the chapter and member services on our Web site. Of course, the ASC and CBC already exist as coherent entities, so their relation to the AAUP as a whole would not notably change, but, as a division of a professional association, the ASC would be able to more fully represent all members, both advocacy and collective bargaining members, and the CBC could become a full-fledged union. The CBC has been eager to join Education International, a move that would cost about $15,000 less if the CBC joined as a union, rather than as a subsidiary of our current organization. Exploring affiliations with other unions becomes more realistic if the affiliation is with our labor union, rather than with the AAUP as a whole. Meanwhile, there would be a clearly separate charitable entity to raise funds to support our universally beneficial academic freedom activities.
Restructuring would not divide the AAUP and alienate one constituency from another. It would simply enhance and empower the organizational structure we already have. All individuals—collective bargaining and non–collective bargaining—would be individual members of the AAUP, just as now; the legal status of the AAUP would change to a professional organization, which is how many members perceive us now. It’s time to take the shackles off. These are some of the reasons why I support this important next step for the AAUP.
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