"Adrift in a semantic fog, the AAUP voice was clear"
23. Why Join the AAUP?
I realized I had to join AAUP one Thursday afternoon in 2003 in a spartan university conference room.
A thick semantic fog was rolling in over yet another interminable Faculty Senate debate. This time it was shared governance. Yawn. I had brought along some grading to stave off the boredom.
Faculty at my school had been complaining for many years that procedures and committees had been shuffled to exclude them. Right. What else was new?
But soon I realized that we wouldn’t be sleeping through this debate. A local news crew arrived, and then another one. They had been invited by the administration. TV cameras started rolling. Voices across the room belonging to mid level administrators and their flacks raised up on cue.
Shared governance? Absurd. Why not just hand the university over to these wild-eyed rebels, these outlaws of the professoriate?
Shared governance? This was nothing less than a referendum on the university president.
It was n astonishing slight of hand. We had started off talking about a complex collaborative problem. We were actually willing to take on more work. Then suddenly the debate had become a simple referendum on loyalty – tories on one side, whigs on the other.
The bovine gaze of the TV cameras would record the division. We knew exactly how it would play on the evening news: Faculty rebelled today (or did not rebel today) against their university president. Nice choice.
Outmaneuvered and adrift in the semantic fog, I had to wonder what desert island this faculty senate would wind up on.
But there was one voice that could not be ignored. It cut through the fog like a clean brass bell on harbor buoy.
“I’d like to point out that shared governance is part of a centuries old tradition,” an AAUP representative said in a tone that carried a surprising amount of clarity and weight. “Shared governance has long been accepted in American universities. Even the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, an organization to which our university administrators belong, agree with the AAUP that there should be full opportunity for appropriate joint planning and effort.”
There was more, of course, but the thought that struck me at that moment was that I had been a fool. I should never have been caught off guard by simplistic maneuvering.
If you’ve spent your life becoming an expert in a narrow academic field, like most professors, it’s not always easy to take your bearings in these larger educational debates. What’s right? What’s usual? Where do you look for standards? We never took a course in that. \
Peter Marshall, the Chaplain of the US Senate, once prayed for “clear vision, that we may know where to stand and what to stand for—because unless we stand for something, we shall fall for anything.”
I realized in that moment that, in a university, AAUP is where we go to stay in touch with time tested traditions. It is the standard. You don’t have to fall for fake appeals to “loyalty” or for “collegiality” or for a more “business-like” structure. You don’t have to be a doormat for administrators who insist on unquestioned obedience.
But you do have to know where to stand, and what to stand for.
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