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On getting our act together

Last week, I wrote two very long posts about my recent adventures on the MLA’s Delegate Assembly Organizing Committee.  This week, I have two followup posts.  Fortunately for all concerned, neither of them are very long.

Over the past five years I’ve learned that people propose all kinds of things to the MLA.  Not just resolutions about withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan, and not just motions in support of graduate student employees and part-time professors, but also resolutions about events and disputes at individual institutions.  The very first resolution I came across, in fact, asked the MLA to condemn an incident at a college during which campus security allegedly overreacted to something or other.  When I read that one I wondered to myself, “who writes to the Modern Language Association about something like this?  This is like calling your local public library to complain about the potholes on your street.  Yes, surely something should be done, but the library, for all its immeasurable value as a public institution, does not have a pothole-filling team at the ready.”

If I sound a bit put out by proposed resolutions like this, well, there’s a reason.  I can’t count the number of times I’ve spoken to colleagues about assaults on academe, from the PC days of the late 1980s and early 1990s right through last month, only to hear them tell me they plan to draft a motion and get their disciplinary association to take a strong stand for or against X.  “That’s all very well and good,” I usually say, “but does your disciplinary association have a legal wing?  Does it have an investigative apparatus?  Does it censure institutions for violations of academic freedom and due process?” Well, no, people say.  Disciplinary organizations aren’t like that; the important thing is that we speak out as scholars through our disciplinary organizations, and thereby take public positions for or against X.

“Have you thought of joining the American Association of University Professors and bringing this to their attention?” I ask.  “The AAUP?” people reply. “The AAUP doesn’t get anything done; they’re like a faculty club or something.  If you want to get things done, you’ve got to make a statement through the American Historical Association or the American Philosophical Association or the American Anthropological Association or the. . . .” (In fact, in the modern languages this attitude can take even weirder micropolitical forms, whenever professors get it into their heads that the MLA is just too large and impersonal and what they really need to do is to work through their subdisciplinary association.)

I’m not exaggerating when I say this attitude is depressingly pervasive in academe—and that it has things almost entirely backwards.  Not that I have anything against disciplinary associations; I’ve been plenty active in mine.  And despite all the grief it gets, the MLA actually does do plenty of stuff worth doing.  We were out in front on academic labor issues long before most of our sister organizations, and we’ve come a long way toward making our convention physically and intellectually accessible to scholars with disabilities.  The Bibliography and the Handbook remain the gold standard for such things, and though we need to catch up with developments on the Internets, our online language map rocks the house.  Still, when you’re dealing with governance disputes on individual campuses, or Horowitzian attacks on academic freedom launched in the name of academic freedom, or unfair labor practices and unjust firings, the most you can do in the MLA is make general statements of principle.  If you want something investigated or you want something done, the place to go is the AAUP.

Who do you think defined academic freedom in the first place, and remains its determined and principled defender today?  And academic freedom is just the foundation; the rest of the organization is a many-layered edifice.  Check out their definitive statement on procedural standards in the renewal or nonrenewal of faculty appointments, if you like.

Or their position on student rights and freedoms.

Or on collegiality as a criterion for faculty evaluation.

Or on speech codes.

And hey, if your disciplinary organization has a Governmental Relations Office this good, more power to you.  But I’m willing to bet it doesn’t.

The AAUP doesn’t just fling those standards into the ether, either.  They actually enforce them, they file legal briefs to support them, and they censure colleges that flout them.  They do this not just for AAUP members; they do it for everyone.

I want to emphasize that last bit.  Penn State didn’t even have an AAUP chapter until a handful of colleagues and I founded one last month.  But the AAUP didn’t stop to check its membership roster in Pennsylvania before sending representatives to Pittsburgh to testify before the House of Representatives Select Committee on Student Academic Freedom, which, as you may already know, is investigating liberal “bias” on Pennsylvania campuses (today they’re at Temple U in Philly).  The AAUP works for college faculty regardless of whether they’re members of the organization.  If there’s a bill that might give legislators direct control over departmental hiring and curricular content, the AAUP will show up to argue against it.  If people are running around the country arguing that academic departments and curricula should be overseen by state legislators in the name of academic freedom, the AAUP shows up to argue that these people haven’t the faintest idea what “academic freedom” means or why it’s critical to a free society.  And when misguided universities come up with kangaroo courts in the name of conducting “student judicial proceedings,” the AAUP insists on the due process rights of the accused, regardless of whether the accused is liberal or conservative or what-have-you.  If you’re teaching at a college in the United States, you ought to be an AAUP member just as a matter of principle.

Yet AAUP membership has declined drastically over the past thirty years.  It’s declined even more drastically as a percentage of the professoriat overall (which has grown in the past thirty years, particularly in the part-time and non-tenure-track ranks), and even more drastically if you look exclusively at AAUP membership among faculty at research universities.  What gives?

Well, I know the dues are a bit high, at least as far as young assistant professors are concerned. $150 a year or thereabouts can be a lot of money to some people—almost as much as a small-town gym membership.  (For new members, the dues are roughly half of that for the first four years of membership.  Graduate students may join as well; their dues about one-quarter the full fare.) But if money’s an issue, don’t make me climb up out of this blog and say academic freedom isn’t free.  Because you know I’ll do it.

And all the while AAUP membership has been declining, too many faculty members have been thinking to themselves that if they just send a sharply-worded resolution to their disciplinary organization, they’ll get something done that needs doing.

Listen, folks.  By all means join or stay in your disciplinary organizations.  But if you’re a college professor or advanced graduate student in the United States and you’re not a member of AAUP by now, I don’t know what to tell you.  Are you thinking that perhaps the next couple of years are going to be happy, placid times for college professors?  Or that over the next decade, the 68 percent of us who are teaching part-time, or off the tenure track for one reason or another, are suddenly going to be granted tenure?  Or that people are going to stop attacking the very institution of tenure?  Or that academic freedom would survive just fine without it?

You want my advice?  I say join the AAUP today if not sooner.  Form a local chapter, if need be.  And vote for my dear and trusted friend Cary Nelson for AAUP President.  His website includes his statement of candidacy, and if you look it over you’ll see why he’s just the right man for the job.

Posted by on 01/10 at 03:23 PM

  1. Thanks for the post Michael.  I’m ashamed to say that I’ve been a PhD Candidate (in EngLit at UW-Madison) for two years now and had only the faintest awareness of the AAUP.  I think I’m going to need to join. 

    As for the “bias” silliness you’re facing in PA, we had something like that in WI last year.  Some GOP legislator introduced a version of the Horowitz bill in the Assembly.  It didn’t get anywhere (this time) but it did set off a brief flurry of really stupid media coverage.  One of the student-targeting free weekly papers (the one owned by the local daily paper monopoly) ran a big editorial condemning the bias of oppressive liberal academics and generously quoting Horowitz, but when it came time to cite examples of this quashing of dissent, all they had was a student reporting an offhand joke by a professor (for whom I was TAing at the time) in which he compared the evil machines in _The Matrix_ (which he was teaching) to the Reagan administration.  And even the student complaining was quoted saying this: “I didn’t agree with that, and it seemed off-topic, but it’s not a big deal and he’s a really good teacher.”

    So I’m not surprised no one came to the bias hearing at Temple.

    Posted by  on  01/10  at  05:28 PM

  2. Union! Union! Union!

    Oh, wait, that’s a different movie.

    But seriously: well said. If I were a UP and hadn’t already joined (but I would have already joined, at least at the time Graham Larkin wrote his rejoinders to Horowitz, if not sooner), I would join right now.

    “If people are running around the country arguing that academic departments and curricula should be overseen by state legislators in the name of academic freedom, the AAUP shows up to argue that these people haven’t the faintest idea what “academic freedom” means or why it’s critical to a free society.”

    Exactly the point I made in In Focus article on the subject in (I stagger slightly to see) September 2003 (jeez, it was that long ago?). These are the people who are supposed to hate social engineering and big gummint? How exactly are they planning to implement all this? By hiring a lot of spies who can pass for undergraduates?

    Posted by Ophelia Benson  on  01/10  at  05:48 PM

  3. The funny thing, Ophelia, is that even though it’s a different movie, there are people who think the AAUP is a union.  (There are individual chapters that have collective bargaining agreements with their universities, but the AAUP as a whole is not a union, and the Penn State chapter won’t be one either.) Good to hear you were on the case in ‘03, though.  Technology has progressed since then, however, and they no longer need to hire spies.  Nowadays they simply scan the Internets and . . . hey!  What are those strange IP addresses doing in my referral stats?

    Justin, feel free to join anytime.  Glad to have you, and thanks for the update on liberal bias in Madison, the O’Reilly-designated world capital of Satan worship.

    Does UW-Madison have Satan-worshipping seminars, btw, or is it all large lectures?

    Posted by Michael  on  01/10  at  06:27 PM

  4. Well, Michael—you convinced me. I need to grovel a bit for the dues, but joining the AAUP is my number one New Years resolution.

    Posted by  on  01/10  at  06:52 PM

  5. Joining the AAUP was one of the first things that I did as a university professor. I just want to second or third or fourth the notion that they do terrific work on behalf of universities and colleges in the US.

    Posted by Tyler  on  01/10  at  07:22 PM

  6. You know what’s an embarassment?  The Bowl Championship Series.  Do you think maybe we could get the MLA to do something about that?

    Posted by Sean  on  01/10  at  08:03 PM

  7. Definitely, join the AAUP. Definitely, vote for Cary Nelson.

    As a purely facetious aside, I note that I look very similar to Cary Nelson. Does this mean that somewhere there is a picture of Michael in an attic, that looks similar to us?

    Posted by david ross mcirvine  on  01/10  at  08:40 PM

  8. Slightly off topic but I’d like to put a plug in here for the other AAUP, The Association of American University Presses.
    http://www.aaupnet.org/

    Not urging anyone to join--it’s an organizational membership for scholarly presses--but they’re great defenders of academic and publishing freedom, etc., and their website is full of fascinating stuff. Especially if you’ve never looked at their Books for Understanding lists, you should check it out.

    Posted by  on  01/10  at  10:19 PM

  9. No, no, no.  There is only the one true AAUP.

    And Sean, I will be happy to draft a resolution condemning the Bowl Championship Series.  Right after I put the finishing touches on my motion urging the MLA to prevent the release of Mission Impossible 3.

    Posted by Michael  on  01/10  at  11:52 PM

  10. I’m a member!  (And I’m also one of those people whose chapter has a collective bargaining agreement with the university.) So don’t crawl out of the blog at me, because that would be creepy—like the ghost girl in The Ring.  Shudder.

    Posted by Dr. Virago  on  01/11  at  12:54 AM

  11. So don’t crawl out of the blog at me, because that would be creepy—like the ghost girl in The Ring. 

    Exactly the image I wanted readers to think of, Dr. V.  And wait—listen—is that a phone ringing?

    Posted by  on  01/11  at  01:01 AM

  12. Prof. Berube:

    Well, as a grad. student in the ‘sciences’ portion of Arts & Sciences, I’ve always thought of AAUP as the sort of thing you guys on the other side of the campus do.  And I suspect that other grad students in the sciences think so as well.

    Kumar
    BTW, does advanced mean eternal grad student? wink

    Posted by  on  01/11  at  02:53 AM

  13. Kumar--let me say that as a researcher who has worked on both sides of campus, in fact the AAUP is the sort of thing that you do as well. You don’t say what flavor of ‘science’ you do, so let me give you a range of possible examples. Do you work within the information sciences? Well, you just may want to call on the AAUP to sit down with those angry lawyers from the recording industry to explain what it means to publish the analysis of the heuristics behind their encryption software. Do you wear a white (or in your case, a short) white lab coat? You might want to ask the AAUP what protections you have for thinking about (publishing or even writing and disseminating information about) chemical compounds that are not now, but could be, biological ‘weapons.’ Did some historically specific US administration send you a terse memo telling you that, yes, you did indeed have enough stem cells to do what you needed to do and, no, you should be fired for thinking that you need look for any more? You might want to ask your local AAUP group to back you in your request to defend your work, period, let alone help to get more stem cell lines. Wait! Did you just say that the same administration just kill your proposal to investigate the role of sexuality in evolution in your application for a grant to a national funding organization? Well ....

    If you haven’t been asking the AAUP to help you at those contentious moments, then I can only quote those immortal words ...

    There’s something happening here
    What it is ain’t exactly clear
    There’s a man with a gun over there
    Telling me I got to beware

    I think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound
    Everybody look what’s going down ...

    Posted by Tyler  on  01/11  at  03:29 AM

  14. I was an NYU grad student and now I work at a university outside the States where it is actually forbidden for students or teachers to “politicize” (i.e. I will be very politely asked to leave the school should I stick my nose where it does not belong.) Keep up the good fight, y’all . . . I’m hoping for a butterfly effect.

    Posted by Caro  on  01/11  at  01:39 PM

  15. Many thanks, Tyler.  Kumar, I do hope you join by the end of the day, and get a dozen people in your department to sign up too.  If Tyler’s words and mine haven’t convinced you, try these:

    The reactionary politicians have managed to instill suspicion of all intellectual efforts into the public by dangling before their eyes a danger from without.  Having succeeded so far, they are now proceeding to suppress the freedom of teaching and to deprive of their positions all those who do not prove submissive, i.e., to starve them.

    --AAUP member Albert Einstein, 1953

    Posted by  on  01/11  at  03:19 PM

  16. One cannot overstate the importance of joining and supporting AAUP.  Thank you Michael.  Its power is generated collectively, and the larger the efforts the more profound the good.  Collaboration and conscious focus on the substantive issues surrounding the employment environment need be strengthened across the board.

    Posted by  on  01/11  at  08:27 PM

  17. Michael, Tyler:

    Thanks for the response.  I feel slightly sheepish about my lack of awareness of the AAUP’s nature--it’s indeed a pretty valuable organization.  FWIW, an unscientific poll of several other grad students in my dept. revealed a similar lack of awareness about the AAUP.  I wonder if the AAUP shouldn’t do more to raise its profile; which is not to excuse my lack of awareness, of course.

    Kumar

    Posted by  on  01/11  at  09:17 PM

  18. I wonder if the AAUP shouldn’t do more to raise its profile

    Damn right it should!  This is my first attempt to chip in on that front.  About two months overdue, just as my contribution to the NYU dispute is about two months overdue.  Check out Cary Nelson’s plan for profile-raising if you get a moment.  It’s one of the reasons he’s the right guy for the job.

    Posted by  on  01/11  at  11:42 PM

  19. Thank you, Michael, for the splendid call to arms.  And thank you, all, for your kind words and for joining AAUP. 

    Please vote for Cary Nelson in the upcoming election. There are many reasons why all thirteen living former national AAUP presidents join me in supporting Cary Nelson for the presidency.  A visit to Cary’s web site will be most instructive.

    Posted by Jane Buck, National President, AAUP  on  01/12  at  01:52 PM

  20. Thank you, Michael, for an excellent entry.  I’ve been a member for many years now and with your permission I’d like to distribute your blog message to my department.  Although it seems unlikely that my state would pass the Horowitz bill, it has been introduced and the representative who introduced it started in on the students last week in a hearing.  So we’ll be required to talk about it.  Mark Smith from AAUP Government Relations in DC keeps members up to date on current legislation at the state level as well as the national level.  Those of you reading this blog should check and see if your state’s legislature is considering the so-called academic bill of rights and if it is, then write your legislators and let them know that the bill is anything but an academic bills of rights.  And I’ll be sure to vote for Cary--an excellent choice!

    Posted by  on  01/16  at  03:26 AM

  21. This may be the long way to go to reduce your AAUP membership dues, but if you’re in a state and an institution and/or a job category that allows you to unionize, do it.  Then have your union ally itself with AAUP.  If you’re lucky and land a job at a place with a faculty-professionals union already in place, join up, do some work, and convince the leadership to ally with AAUP.  I didn’t even have to do that last part to get my free membership in AAUP through SUNY’s United University Professions.  I’ll pass this post along to my pals in UUP to help drum up support for Cary!

    Posted by Bruce Simon  on  01/16  at  07:30 AM

  22. Gail—please feel free to distribute this post anywhere you like, either by means of the url—

    http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/join_aaup/

    -- or by taking this mini-essay and lopping off the first and last paragraphs as well as the third through fifth sentences of paragraph five. 

    And thanks!

    Posted by  on  01/16  at  06:04 PM

  23. Michael--Thank you.  I will make the changes.  I would send out the URL (which has already appeared on our local AAUP list) but I’m going to send paper with the membership form along, in hopes of a better response. Our chapter has been successful at focusing our administration on faculty salary issues in the past two years and the chapter also initiated a compression policy change. We have a new president who has been willing to listen, but our need for better membership in AAUP has everything to do with the “outside” issues you describe. We will be better able to respond if our membership is larger. I think our more junior faculty may well respond to your call.
    Gail
    P.S.  I love the blog. It’s one of my favorites, bookmarked and visited often.

    Posted by  on  01/16  at  10:02 PM

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