Jane Buck, Ph.D.

Remarks for the AAUP Annual Meeting
Washington, DC
10 June 2000


Distinguished guests and colleagues in the Newspaper Guild /CWA and AAUP, it is with the greatest pleasure and anticipation that I contemplate the beginning of my term as president. I thank all of you who voted in the election and assure those who voted for my friend Jim Richardson that he and I will continue to work together as we always have for the good of the association and the profession.

The theme of this annual meeting is at the core of the concerns shared by the Association and the Newspaper Guild/CWA. It is not an accident that the First Amendment guarantees free speech. It is not an accident that the incident that impelled John Dewey and Arthur Lovejoy to found the AAUP involved the denial of academic free speech. Nor is it an accident that the first of AAUP's committees is the Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure. Rather, these are testimony to the primacy of unfettered speech in the continuing struggle to maintain individual liberties and academic integrity in the face of increasingly vicious attacks on tenure and academic freedom.

Tyrannical political regimes and academic governing boards and administrations accomplish their mischief by first silencing dissent. In the middle of the 20th century, Senator Joseph McCarthy and his infamous House Un-American Affairs Committee targeted and effectively silenced writers, film directors, and professors. He did not need to build concentration camps for his victims, when he could accomplish his goals through economic terror. We should be always mindful that, despite our relatively privileged status, we are part of the proletariat, wage slaves who serve at the mercy of those who control the purse strings of our institutions. Never have so many who know so little about our enterprise wielded so much power over it. Governing boards and legislators who seek to impose a corporate model on academic institutions would severely limit, if not eliminate, faculty prerogatives and academic freedom. The stakes are high, because the control of higher education is ultimately the control of the larger society.

Collective bargaining is one of the most effective ways of guaranteeing our principles. Even with a strong contract, it is not always easy, but without one, it is too often impossible. As one who served for over 20 years as president or chief negotiator for my local bargaining unit and as an active participant in the Collective Bargaining Congress, I am convinced that, were it not for collective bargaining, there would be no shared governance, no tenure, and no academic freedom on many of our campuses. Even with collective bargaining as the guarantor of shared governance and academic freedom, autocratic administrations and governing boards spend far too many of their waking hours inventing ways to eviscerate the agreements they have negotiated rather than promoting the welfare of the institutions to which they owe fiduciary responsibility.

A month ago the AAUP staged the first demonstration in its 85-year history at Bennington College. Bennington has been on our list of censured administrations since 1995 following the dismissal the previous year of a third of its faculty and the abolition of presumptive tenure. The demonstration took the form of a teach-in and the presentation of a petition protesting the continuing denial of academic freedom by Bennington president, Elizabeth Coleman. The most recent outrage, as you are probably aware, was the summary dismissal in mid-term of the college's only philosophy professor because he had the temerity to publicly criticize Coleman.

As the General Secretary and I approached the president to present her with the petition, Colemanized students silenced all dissenting voices by playing deafening music. The atmosphere at the teach-in we sponsored off campus was in sharp contrast. We invited comments from faculty, administration, staff, students, and graduates. Some were critical of us, even hostile. Many were emotional, even tearful. All were articulate. One recent graduate, now a teacher and graduate student in California made the trip back to Vermont just to participate and share her grief at what she perceived to be the destruction of her alma mater. What was striking is the contrast between the atmosphere on campus where all dissent was viewed as a threat and that of the open session off campus where everyone who spoke received a polite and attentive hearing. To Coleman's plea that we let Bennington be Bennington, I would respond that we indeed hope that Bennington will once again be Bennington, not Coleman's fiefdom.

Some of the other threats to academic freedom are more subtle, but equally pernicious. The rapid proliferation of online courses by both traditional and nontraditional institutions raises important questions about intellectual property rights and professorial prerogatives. Who designs and owns course content? Who decides how to conduct classes? Are professors' online utterances protected in the same manner as those in a traditional classroom?

Many of the threats to academic freedom in medical schools are similar to those encountered elsewhere, but others are unique to those institutions. Faculty are seeking long term contracts in place of tenure track appointments, and annual income is based on clinical practice or research incentives with no guarantees. For many clinical faculty scholarly research is an option, not a goal, and effective teaching is measured by adequate performance on external standardized tests. These changes are destructive of collegiality and profoundly erode academic due process and academic freedom

A very recent development in Austria is troubling, given the rapidity with which both good and bad ideas travel and put down roots in alien soil. A professor at the University of Innsbruck was found guilty of defaming Jörg Haider, a controversial right-wing political figure, and fined the equivalent of $4000. The professor, Anton Pelinka, had made remarks about Mr. Haider's views that he claims were based on documented evidence. Nonetheless, the Viennese Criminal Court found Mr. Pelinka guilty. If his conviction is allowed to stand on appeal, or if he loses the civil suit Mr. Haider has filed pursuant to remarks Mr. Pelinka made to CNN, the effect on academic freedom in Austria could be devastating.

Although as an association we have recognized and rewarded the contributions of minorities and women, the record is not so salutary in the profession as a whole. Women continue to lag behind their male counterparts in salary, rank, and tenure. They are concentrated at the lower ranks, are promoted and tenured more slowly than men, and dominate the growing body of part-time, adjunct and non-tenure-track faculty. African-Americans and Latinos continue to be under-represented in the profession, and the assaults on affirmative action have exacerbated the problem.

Attacks on tenure are less overt and shrill than they were a few years ago. The new tactic is to impose standards for promotion and tenure that are so exigent that few can meet them. If colleges and universities are genuinely committed to providing students with a real education, they will have to institute reasonable standards for promotion and tenure for those who aspire to the profession. How can any rational person expect highly qualified individuals to pursue graduate degrees at great personal and financial expense only to obtain underpaid, temporary positions with no hope of promotion or expectation of job security? Other professions that offer greater rewards for similar effort will skim off the best and brightest.

I had lunch recently with a friend from undergraduate days. Although not a member of the profession, she holds five master's degrees and has many friends in the professorate. So it wasn't unusual for our conversation to turn to problems in higher education. Playing devil's advocate, she asked one of the standard questions: Where else can one obtain the amazing job security provided by tenure? I answered her question with a question: Where else can one expect to serve a probationary period of seven years, during which one is expected to be a brilliant teacher, a cutting-edge scholar with a published book or two, and a productive member of several time-consuming committees, only to be told to find a new job at the end of that time, despite excellent evaluations by colleagues, students, and lower level administrators? My friend was shocked. Despite her lifelong and relatively intimate involvement in the academy, she had no idea that denial of tenure is tantamount to being fired. Nor was she aware that the typical probationary period is seven years. My point is that the task of educating the public is monumental. If my friend is ignorant of the facts, how vast the swamp of misinformation must be.

If higher education is to survive the bean counters and demagogues, tenured faculty must abandon the relative security of writing only for our colleagues. We must inform the public who are the ultimate beneficiaries of our work by writing opinion pieces for our local newspapers and mainstream national journals. We must develop effective ways to reach our lawmakers. The halls of our state legislatures must become as familiar to us as our own campuses. The public is ultimately best served when we continue to fight for our traditional values of academic freedom, tenure, and shared governance. We must continue to oppose efforts to turn education into merely the delivery of information, presidents and deans into CEOs and managers, and students into consumers and cash cows. We must meet assaults on affirmative action, remedial instruction, and professorial autonomy with principled argument and irrefutable data.

The price of tenure is a continuing and life-long moral obligation to exercise academic freedom by speaking out against assaults on our principles. We are not always right when we speak out, but we are always wrong when we do not.