Jane Buck, Ph.D.
As the immediate past president of the Association* and a member since my graduate student days, I am passionately concerned about its future and the future of American higher education, whose three supporting pillars–academic freedom, tenure, and shared governance–are under attack in both familiar and novel ways. Extremist ideologues have attempted, so far unsuccessfully, to convince state legislatures to impose, under the guise of protecting students from indoctrination, unacceptable limits on professorial speech.
Rogue administrators and governing boards have used natural disasters and genuine or manufactured economic hardship as pretexts to limit or eliminate tenured positions. The substitution of underpaid, overworked, part-time–and, increasingly, full-time–contingent faculty for tenured and tenure-eligible faculty threatens both academic freedom and shared governance. Without the protection of tenure, faculty are vulnerable to arbitrary personnel decisions, too often predicated on faulty or questionable criteria: popularity among students (now frequently and bizarrely referred to as "customers" or "consumers"), loyalty to administrators, or the pursuit of popular or "safe" lines of research, among others. There is evidence that many contingent faculty members, especially those struggling to cobble together a living as part-time adjuncts, avoid challenging their students academically and succumb to pressure to inflate grades.
A series of troubling legal rulings have had a chilling effect on both academic freedom and shared governance, most notably the application of the Garcetti case to professorial speech. AAUP Senior Counsel Rachel Levinson has provided an excellent analysis, which is available on our web site.
Genuine shared governance suffers from the overuse and abuse of contingent faculty for at least two reasons: (1) These professionals are either formally excluded from the governance process or are too overworked to participate even when they are invited to do so; and (2) the tenured and tenure-stream faculty on whom governance must rely are already overburdened by overly stringent requirements for tenure and promotion, requirements that give little if any credit for service. The pervasive use of a corporate model of organization, including the hiring of upper-level administrators with no background in higher education and occasionally without advanced degrees further degrades the process.
My long-standing involvement with the Association includes service at every level. I was instrumental in organizing my chapter at Delaware State University for collective bargaining and served at various times over a period of two decades as its treasurer, contract administrator, chief negotiator, and president. I have served as secretary and president of the Delaware Conference of AAUP Chapters, as a member of the national Council as a district representative for three terms, and as a member of several national committees, including the Committee on Government Relations and the Committee on the Historically Black Institutions and Scholars of Color.
I was honored to be the first AAUP president to be elected from a historically black institution and the first from a collective bargaining chapter. During my three terms I had the opportunity to observe at first hand the problems facing our colleagues across the country, and I count among my proudest achievements the Association’s support for contingent faculty, including graduate student employees, who enjoy full voting rights and the right to serve on national committees and to run for national office. We signed agreements of mutual support with our sister organizations in Canada, the UK, and Scandinavia and participated in several international conferences.
In 2004, in response to a perceived need to change with the times, I appointed two task forces. The first was charged with making recommendations on our election procedures for the Association as a whole as well as for the Assembly of State Conferences and the Collective Bargaining Congress. The work of that group has been successfully completed. The second, the Restructuring Task Force, comprising some of the Association’s most distinguished leaders and chaired by former Association president and legal scholar Robert Gorman, was charged with reviewing the entire structure of the Association so that it can operate most efficiently. Delegates to the 2008 Annual Meeting overwhelmingly approved the plan to create three AAUP entities, subject to approval by the Internal Revenue Service. Details of the plan are available on the AAUP web site. We are currently in the process of seeking that approval.
It would be a great privilege to serve the Association once more as a member of Council.
*Institutional affiliation provided for identification purposes only and does not imply any endorsement by the organization.
