From the President: Restructuring and the ASC
By Cary Nelson
The restructuring plan the AAUP has developed will clearly enable us to work more effectively with the educational advocacy groups and private foundations with which we regularly have dealings. In addition, restructuring will align our activities in ways better understood by government agencies and the public. As I have pointed out in my previous two Academe columns on the subject, however, restructuring also gives us numerous opportunities to enhance all of our internal activities. With assistance from leaders from the Assembly of State Conferences—the umbrella organization for individual state AAUP conferences—in this column I outline some of the benefits restructuring offers for state conferences.
As our updated constitution will make clear, the ASC has a unique status within the organization. The ASC is at once an independent voice for each state that has established a conference and an integral part of our national professional organization. State meetings enable members from different campuses with shared interests to schedule frequent face-to-face meetings. They help each other monitor academic freedom and shared governance issues, they advocate for higher education at the state level, and thus they amplify local activism. For chapters under development and for chapters under stress, for well- organized campuses and for campuses that need more leaders to step forward, an active state conference provides both a collective voice and critical assistance.
Once the ASC is part of a more clearly defined professional organization, its ability to promote and publicize all of its state-level activities will be substantially strengthened. We will be better able to share our state successes and strategies with one another. We will be better able to make building stronger chapters and state organizations a visible national priority. That will immediately mean more chapter and conference development resources on the national AAUP’s Web site. It will enable us to advertise our coordination efforts more aggressively. An ASC organized within a professional organization can increase its activism and publicize the fact that it is doing so.
A critical area where restructuring will free the ASC and the national office to do more work is in lobbying state legislatures. The ASC is often the key on-the-ground organization confronting legislation that would do damage to higher education. And many state conferences have supported legislation increasing full-time faculty lines and increasing contingent faculty benefits.
Simply being able to disseminate details of local and state organizing and activism will make a significant difference—both by inspiring conferences to imitate each others’ successes and by building a sense of participating in a national movement. One example of such a success is the 2007 annual meeting of the North Carolina State Conference. More than 125 faculty members, graduate students, and administrators attended the keynote address.
The audience included a college president and a state senator. The breakout sessions the next day— whose quality matched the best sessions of an annual meeting of a major academic discipline—all had attendance of at least thirty five people. Hard, creative work by conference leaders made that wonderful event a reality. Meanwhile, four new AAUP chapters have started up in North Carolina this year.
We now have almost all AAUP member e-mail addresses, so the logistics of communication has become much easier. The more we can make clear that participation in the ASC is a major member benefit, the more the ASC in turn will strengthen the organization as a whole. Among the projects the ASC has initiated is one encouraging chapters and conferences to record their histories. Our restructured AAUP will be better able to share those histories and celebrate them. Increasing the vitality and visibility of existing conferences should help us increase their sheer number as well. Our goal: an effective conference in every state.
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