AAUP Membership Woes

Mr. Nelson is on target when he says that many professors “aren’t comfortable with the association’s union role,” a factor which clearly is responsible for the AAUP’s membership woes. For many years, I was an enthusiastic AAUP member, but let my membership lapse when the organization became a faculty union.

I understand that many professors feel their institutions are under siege by hostile politicians, that their administrations seem too often to act unilaterally, and that their salaries and benefits have dwindled because of state cutbacks to their schools.

The problem with faculty unions, IMHO, is that they respond to these pressures in the wrong way. Rather than working with their administrations to accomodate the changing reality of declining state support, they circle the wagons and become confrontational, defensive, and resistant to change.

Faculty unions are antithetical to shared governance because they are fundamentally adversial. Unions replaces cooperation and good will by negotiation across a bargaining table. History shows they breed an environment of angry words, accusations, and confrontation. And while they sometimes pay lip service to merit, they mostly advocate seniority.

Faculty unions don’t take the large view of what is best for their institutions. They are advocates for their faculty membership’s self-interests, when what is often needed is a broader advocacy for the larger academic community and the well being of the profession as a whole.

Faculty unions pay lip service to the notion of collegiality, but in practice they destroy collegiality by reducing it to constituency-based politics and the raw struggle for power.

And finally, faculty unions are quick to defind the “rights,” of their members but much slower to challenge the abuses of those rights. They seldom discuss the responsibilities of faculty members. Unproductive tenured faculty, tenure and promotion standards that are too lax, the proliferation of easy courses, laborinthine governance processes that handicap necessary change, wasteful curricular duplication, and fast-rising costs are all issues that plague higher education, but about which the AAUP is notably silent. Many professors are worried pecisely about these kinds of issues, but cannot count on the “new” AAUP to address them.

And finally, the AAUP’s strident and inflexible defense of tenure has helped create a large academic underclass of poorly paid, temporary faculty members, who labor without benefits on subsistence wages.

So as the AAUP thinks about its future, I hope it will reshape itself into an oganization that looks more broadly at the issues and problems of higher education and tries to deal with them in a more productive manner. I, for one, would very much look forward to rejoining the organization.

Jim, at 12:30 pm EDT on June 18, 2007

AAUP Woes

I can’t feign surprise.

Really, the AAUP cares little for the group of contingent instructors who now comprise the large and growing segment of university professors. Only recently, and driven by declining membership, the AAUP started seriously rattling sabers about the plight of contingent faculty, and the AAUP seems to think that said faculty will not remember that they fought for themselves for years until the AAUP started seeing them as potential revenue sources.

The AAUP finds itself in a self-created hole surrounded by hosts of faculty wielding shovels full of dirt. The AAUP’s recent pitiful attempts to appease the masses with too little, too late support will ultimately serve as their demise.

Cal, at 4:25 am EDT on June 19, 2007