Academe Article

This issue of Academe coincides with the inauguration of the forty-fourth president of the United States, a historic occasion by any reckoning. And our concerns in the world of higher education in many ways echo the challenges to the nation at large. First, in this issue of Academe, we address the youth vote—the concerns of graduate students and young faculty members—in a few different ways.

I was using my standard syllabus for my seminar in the poetry of Langston Hughes and Claude McKay during the fall 2008 election season. As serendipity would have it, the night Barack Obama won the presidency the poems my students were assigned to read included Hughes’s “Children’s Rhymes.” Here is the second stanza:

By what sends

the white kids

I ain’t sent:

I know I can’t

be President.

In the eyes of budget balancers with blinders, professors are labor costs, to be capped,  urloughed, and riffed. To those with more vision, however, we are the nation’s key intellectual capital, the wellspring of future knowledge workers, and drivers of our country’s cultural, political, and economic revitalization.

The AAUP is here, working for you, to ensure that public policy and administrative practice recognize the value of the academic profession and provide the conditions that unleash the full potential of that intellectual capital.

The AAUP recently achieved three significant victories in court cases in which we submitted amicus briefs. In the first case, Otero-Burgos v. Inter- American University, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit issued a ringing endorsement of the economic basis for tenure and the interconnection among tenure, economic security, and academic freedom. In reaching its decision, the court relied heavily upon the AAUP’s brief and recommended policies.