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Gary Rhoades to Be New General Secretary
By Martin D. Snyder
The AAUP is pleased to announce the appointment of its new general secretary, Gary Rhoades. Rhoades is currently professor of higher education at the University of Arizona and director of the university’s Center for the Study of Higher Education, a position he has held since 1997. He will begin his term of office at the AAUP in January 2009 and will replace the current general secretary, Ernst Benjamin, who is retiring. As general secretary, Rhoades will head the Association’s national staff in Washington.
“I am delighted by the opportunity to serve as general secretary, and look forward to working with the national staff, elected leaders, chapters, and members to further strengthen the AAUP and its important work. Among the priorities I hope to see the AAUP address are the expansion of dueprocess rights for contingent faculty and graduate employees, the enhancement of professional development opportunities for graduate students, new faculty, and academics generally, the broadening of the Association’s membership and diversity, and the positioning of faculty and a faculty perspective more centrally in national and state policy deliberations about higher education,” Rhoades says.
Rhoades holds BA, MA, and PhD degrees in sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on professions in academe, university restructuring, and science and technology issues in higher education. In a project funded by a National Science Foundation grant Rhoades and his colleagues Jen Croissant and Sheila Slaughter have been studying the use of new information technologies in instruction. In addition, with colleagues at the University of Arizona’s College of Education and Early Academic Outreach office, he has participated in a GEAR-UP project aimed at enhancing college preparation, access, and success for local low-income minority populations (particularly Latinos) in Tucson.
Rhoades has worked in the field of higher education for more than twenty-five years and is widely respected as a meticulous researcher, incisive writer, and engaging lecturer by an international audience. He has an extensive record of journal articles and is the author of Managed Professionals: Unionized Faculty and Restructuring Academic Labor and Restructuring Academic Labor, with Sheila Slaughter, Academic Capitalism and the New Economy. He is currently working on two books, one on strategic positioning in higher education and the other on academic unions. He has given keynote addresses recently to researchers and policy makers in England, Finland, Italy, Japan, and Mexico, and has spoken at the national meetings of groups including the European Association for Institutional Research, the American Educational Research Association, the Society for Social Studies of Science, and the American Sociological Association.
Rhoades is the former president of the Association for the Study of Higher Education and has worked at the local, regional, and national levels with the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association as well as with the AAUP. He notes that “the AAUP is at the core of what it means to be a faculty member in a democratic society: being able to pursue one’s ideas where they take you, playing a key role in shaping the direction of academic departments, colleges, and universities, and having the due-process rights and job security to make academic freedom and shared governance realities in practice.”
Cary Nelson, Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and president of the AAUP, comments that “Gary is one of the very best people in the country to do this job. His commitment to AAUP values and his knowledge of higher education are impeccable. I am already tremendously enjoying working with him.”
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