In her Academe piece, Political Repression and the AAUP from 1915 to Present, Schrecker notes in passing that:
Unlike their equally well-educated peers in law and medicine who had the power to delineate the parameters of their professions, the distinguished academics who established the AAUP did not have complete control over their work lives. They were salaried workers, subject to the authority of boards of trustees, whose members included some of the most powerful industrialists in the United States.
Nearly 110 years later, academics remain salaried workers, a circumstance initiated with the introduction of salaried lectureships some 600 years earlier, and a practice that was by the 16th century widely adopted across Europe in the higher education institutional (HEI) model of universities and colleges. For over a quarter of a century I have tried to get people to see something the “distinguished academics” of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) ought to have seen from the start: they had (and still have) “the power to delineate the parameters of their profession,” but they backed (and still back) the wrong model to do so.
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| Arthur O Lovejoy |
As the creator, developer and promoter of the professional model for HE called, the Professional Society of Academics (PSA), I see this as a glaring failure of insight and responsibility on the part of the AAUP. Distinguished, intelligent, knowledgeable academics that assume the role of champions for the social pillar of HE, on behalf of workers they call professional, should not have missed the rather obvious PSA response of academic self-regulation, direction and protection of the academy. This failure is especially egregious given that, as Schecker notes, the founding of the AAUP occurred when the United States was “experiencing the most widespread episode of violent labor unrest in its history,” in close historical proximity to the successful rise of the professional service model established in law and medicine, where to become a licensed practicing member of the profession, individuals must be “well-educated” and properly credentialed – conditions that are with irony met through the labor of salaried faculty workers.
To be fair, the HEI model of universities and colleges was
established well before the 1915 founding of the AAUP and its formulation of
academic freedom meant to “protect their new profession’s status and freedom
from interference by trustees, politicians, and other outsiders.”(Schrecker) Indeed, the so-called “profession” was also anything but “new” by 1915, nor was
its subordination to the institutions of the HEI model. In fact, this
centuries-old model of universities and colleges presents a powerful inherited
assumption when it comes to HE.
However, one of the principal responsibilities of academics
(and in particular philosophers such as myself, Arthur O Lovejoy, or John Dewey)
is to expose assumptions, to test them, to dismiss or embrace them, to use them
to innovate or solve problems. Assumption of universities and colleges is a
deep problem for organizations such as the AAUP that fail to even consider an
alternative model such as PSA – a model which promises to correct the many
deplorable deficiencies of the university and college legacy, including their
repeated failure to protect academic freedom.
PSA Exposes AAUP Irony
Schrecker opens her Academe piece saying,
I gave up my academic freedom when I was interviewed to teach history at Yeshiva University in the late 1980s. I had just published a book about the impact of McCarthyism on American higher education and expected to field questions about it. Instead, I was asked, “Are you a Marxist?” The question was inappropriate, but if I wanted the only full-time tenure-track opening in my field in New York City for several years, I would have to deal with my interlocutors’ real question: “Are you a radical who might make trouble on campus?” I fudged the answer.
The demands of academic integrity meet the demands of academic employment. As exculpatory context for the “fudging,” she relies on the singularity of the employment opportunity and what was presumably her preferred residency in NYC. Some 40 years later, without a hint of irony, she identifies HEI model employment challenges as a threat to academic freedom and integrity, saying:
Nearly three-quarters of the instructors in American higher education have little or no protection for academic freedom. They are non-tenure-track faculty members with part-time or temporary appointments, most of whom, unless they are covered by strong union contracts or AAUP-recommended due-process standards, can be let go at any time, for any reason, or for no reason at all.
While adding financial austerity (often precipitated by economic calamity) to the list of major challenges faced by the academy, Schrecker announces some of her qualifications for writing the Academe piece, including that she is an historian of political repression and higher education. She then goes on to repeatedly overlook an obvious solution to the serious global, bi-partisan, systemic, persistent faculty employment and institutional funding problems of the HEI model: professional licensure and independent practice.
She says employment and funding challenges have undermined the “power and prestige of the professoriate.” Though a nice alliteration, this characterization clashes with her allusion to how academics lack the sort of power and prestige that lawyers or (real) doctors enjoy, while it ignores the historical reality that academics have fallen in and out of power and prestige across the history and geography of HE. For centuries academics have been considered employees, in line with institutional administrators, cleaning staff, office assistants, vice presidents, grounds keepers, fund raisers, football coaches, café baristas, graduate assistants, recruitment officers, among a plethora of other employees that comprise the modern HEI model. This historical reality regarding the status of academics ought to be clear to Schrecker, as it ought to be clear that so long as the HEI model remains, HE remains vulnerable to confrontation and calamity from within or without.
The AAUP effort that she highlights as response to the many serious problems of the HEI model is demonstrably tired, largely ineffectual, fundamentally vulnerable, and utterly unnecessary. Declarations, recommendations, reports, letters of protest, op-ed pieces, all of it is inadequate sideline defense of HE and the people it impacts.
In cases where tenured professors’ jobs were at stake, the 1915 Declaration demanded that faculty members participate in the decision-making. Outsiders, like politicians or trustees without academic training and expertise, “have neither competency nor moral right to intervene.”
Says the AAUP on behalf of Schrecker to her institutional
employer, to whom she sacrificed her academic integrity with the hope of
securing a full-time faculty job that against all the systemic odds and perhaps
with further instances of sacrificed integrity resulted in a tenured position
to which the 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic
Tenure exclusively applies. The unconscious bitter irony that laces her Academe
piece is overwhelming, while the historical record of AAUP efforts that she
reviews is underwhelming.
As further example of this irony, Schrecker notes that though
born in a climate of violent labor unrest, it was over half a century before
the association would tolerate labor unions and, as a means to its own survival, officially the organization became itself a labor union in the early 1970s:
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| In 1971, the AAUP wins the vote and defeats the National Education Association to become the bargaining unit for the University of Rhode Island |
The AAUP’s ambivalence about the campus unrest of the 1960s coincided with a major internal debate about whether to engage in the collective bargaining that was just then emerging within the academy. The Association’s more circumspect national leaders feared that unionization would undermine its identity as an organization of professionals, while many local chapters, especially at regional public colleges and universities, looked to the labor movement to gain more control over their working conditions. Finally, in 1971, fearful of losing members to competing organizations, the AAUP’s leaders agreed to countenance collective bargaining.
[Italics added to highlight the irony: The AAUP claims to represent professionals while the professionalization movement in (say) law and medicine relies on (union represented) faculty employee labor to meet necessary licensing qualifications of the professional service model. It’s like being a lifeboat builder drowning in a sea surrounded by lifeboats only to grab a piece of driftwood.]
I can hear it now: Shawn, you are no Lovejoy or Dewey and fail to understand that a healthy HEI model is one where shared governance and tenured employment are properly embraced by institutions that enjoy full secure funding and effective insulation from external undue interference. This is the dream for which the AAUP and its growing team of union and activist affiliates fights.
Sure. But centuries of history has demonstrated this is indeed a dream, while decades of my argumentation has demonstrated the dream is insufficient custody for HE and that PSA is superior. So, to demonstrate (yet again) what I do understand, employing a common tactic of philosophers I will grant the AAUP team its dream academy and show that even a healthy HEI model remains inferior to PSA. With this in place, Part 1 of the series ends by exposing a deep-seated and false assumption regarding universities and colleges that provides good reason for the team to pursue the PSA model. In Part 2 of the series, I will show that the dream academy prescribed by the AAUP team is not only self-defeating to the point of absurdity, if false assumptions regrading the HEI model are dropped, then the team will see that in the end their prescription implies the PSA model.
Dashing the AAUP Team Dream
As I have extensively argued for the superiority of PSA
across this blog, only conclusions that illustrate the inferiority of the AAUP
team dream for HE are provided here:
1) PSA requires at least 50% less funding than the HEI model
consumes, as it continuously cries poor. This translates into public (and
private) savings that can be used to expand access to HE for academics and
students, or increase research grants across the spectrum of academic fields,
or provide better roads, healthcare and other services to the tune of 10s of
billions of dollars in the United States, with comparable savings in most other
countries that use the model. This cost reduction also insulates HE from the
more egregious interferences of local, national and global financial,
political, economic, and special interest forces. In short, the power of the
purse over HE is dramatically reduced.
2) PSA empowers academics to exercise full independent
professional prerogative over virtually all aspects of working conditions,
which in broad terms includes: what, who, where, when and how to teach; what
research to conduct; and what community service to provide. A part of this
prerogative includes a form of shared governance (over HE) but streamlined to
professionally licensed academic practitioners and the students with whom they
form service relationships – sans institutions, university presidents, boards
of governors, corporations, politicians, donors, unions, investors, and the
like, who
4) PSA increases the quality of HE by extending to the
undergraduate level a tweaked version of the best practices in graduate
education. This includes objective crowd-based, academic peer-based evaluation
of not only student work but the materials and methods used in evaluation,
conducted using triple-blind anonymity and published results. This form of
evaluation mitigates integrity corruption, raises and normalizes the standards
in HE, while it provides taxpayers and employers with a more meaningful litmus
of student and academic (service provider) performance – two important measures of HE quality.
5) PSA offers better community integration than the HEI
model, by (inter alia) creating a socio-physical meshwork between the academy
and the community, with practices located throughout the communities in which
academics chose to live and work – as one finds with lawyers, psychologists,
accountants, physicians, and others that provide equally valuable services
under the professional model – something Schrecker might appreciate, given the
sore confession of her employment anecdote.
6) PSA improves the protection and assurance of integrity across the academy, with (inter alia) democratically determined codes of ethics and conduct and a professional society that publicly welcomes complaints, conducts hearings, and issues decisions that include disciplinary actions for academic and student members of the PSA model.
7) PSA improves the protection of academic freedom across the academy, by (inter alia) making institutional employment optional, rather than a necessary condition of earning a living as an academic in HE. Removing the employment exclusivity of the HEI model reduces the power that universities, colleges, and their government overseers and financers have to undermine academic freedom - or as I would prefer to phrase it, the freedom of academics.
After giving the AAUP team all that it dreams of for the HEI
model, PSA remains the preference based on: cost-savings; self-governance; HE
access; education quality; community integration; academic integrity; and
academic freedom.
But things are worse still for the AAUP team. A widely recognized keystone of proper education and research is academic freedom, which according to the AAUP is best protected when faculty exercise shared institutional governance and are employed in tenured positions. Unfortunately, this architecture is routinely renovated by the realities of the HEI model – with more on this in Part 2. As Schrecker insists, “if the AAUP is to respond realistically to the [most recent] war on higher education, it must adapt its traditional mode of operations to the academic community’s current condition.”
But what is the current (though not new) condition of the academic community, according to the voices of the AAUP? Sampling articles published on the Academe, portrayal comes:
a) From Sara Kilpatrick, executive director of the Ohio AAUP conference:
Of greatest concern to faculty members are the sections [of SB 83] that trample academic freedom (particularly by seeking to prohibit the teaching of topics deemed “controversial,” “divisive,” or “political”), tenure, or collective bargaining rights and those that target policies related to faculty evaluations, syllabi, or workload. Of greatest concern to administrations are sections that touch on institutional speech, mission statements, and a myriad of policies that colleges and universities already manage effectively themselves. And there is an overlap of concerns in regard to restrictions on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs as well as the sheer cost and complexity of implementation.
b) From Jay M Smith, president of the North Carolina AAUP conference:
For the first time in living memory in our state, a governing board is dictating the shape of a university’s curriculum, what is to be considered in hiring decisions, and the goals and values of the institution. The board’s complete disregard for shared governance, and for the principle of faculty control over the curriculum… House Bill 715 proposed a series of changes to the nuts-and-bolts operations of universities. The bill would “prospectively eliminate academic tenure.” Beginning in 2024, all new faculty members would be appointed on short-term contracts of no more than four years. …The bill did not stop at withdrawing tenure protections. It would also require the governing boards of both two- and four-year institutions to establish “minimum class sizes”—on the common assumption that faculty don’t work hard enough. … Arguably the most unsettling of the bill’s provisions was its demand that each institution in the state “shall study all noninstructional research performed by higher education personnel at the institution and report this information” to their respective governing boards. The “costs and benefits” of each “noninstructional” research project, along with an estimate of the number of hours devoted to such projects, would be specified in regular reports sent to the boards, whose overriding commitment would be “to increase instructional time for students and faculty” at each institution.
c) From the Executive Committee of the Columbia University AAUP Chapter:
Since October 7, Columbia University has experienced extraordinary, even unprecedented, challenges to academic freedom and violations of faculty governance. Untenured faculty have been harassed for organizing events squarely within their fields of expertise; a Barnard department that posted scholarly resources in their discipline specific to the Israel-Palestine conflict has seen its website peremptorily scrubbed; the most vulnerable of our colleagues, such as staff and graduate student teachers, have been targeted with new forms of intimidation, being compelled to remove political posters from office doors, or threatened with loss of stipend for legitimate political speech; administrators have denied space for events on the conflict organized by faculty, or have canceled them at the last minute; on-campus and helicopter policing and surveillance by the NYPD have taken place in violation of University rules and norms; donors have sought to influence academic programs and appointments.
In the past, attacks on academic freedom primarily targeted individual professors. Current attacks have broader targets: recent state legislation has sought to censor course content by imposing educational gag orders; abolish diversity, equity, and inclusion offices; weaken or abolish tenure; and undermine shared governance. This battle against higher education is a part of the larger war on all public institutions and on the vibrant civil society necessary to a well-functioning democracy. Although faculty have often been falsely accused of “indoctrination” over the years, today’s educational gag orders represent literal indoctrination: students can learn only the “truth” allowed by the state. By singling out content involving race, racism, gender, and sexuality, such legislation will curb research into these important areas and make careers for faculty in these fields much more difficult. Bills that attack tenure, meanwhile, are intended to intimidate faculty into silence. They will result in more cautious research projects, as well as anodyne readings and watered-down discussions in less challenging courses.
Dire circumstances indeed and only a drop in the bucket for
the centuries-old tradition that is institutional HE. The AAUP team responds by
insentiently assuming the HEI model, while rallying support for their version
of the academy, raising the usual paper voices of protest and relying more and
more on industrial action. It dawns on none of them that this response
apparatus is only necessary because the problems of HE are a consequence of the
university and college model, which their predictable responses only help to
legitimize and perpetuate. Because of this collective failure of insight, I do
blame the AAUP and its affiliated team members for the deplorable state of HE.
a) The institutional administrative concerns are eliminated by PSA, as there is no need for universities and colleges. As for the employed faculty of HEIs, collective bargaining and tenure are eliminated, since the professional model of service is self-representative, self-evaluative, self-supportive and self-regulative, while tenure in the professions is a matter of providing quality service over a lifetime of practice. The work conditions of academics receives professional translation under PSA, with independent professional prerogative and academic freedom among the parallel corpus.
b) None of this would be happening in North Carolina or anywhere else in the world, if HE was provided under the professional model of service where there is no tenure, no employment contracts, no state decisions about unnecessary or redundant personnel or AOS/FOS, no minimum class sizes, and no restrictions on the research conducted. To repeat, in PSA there are no HEIs that need protection. Professional societies such as the iconic examples found in law and medicine wield considerable political power, without the disruptive and divisive effects of institutional employment or union industrial action. At the same time, the model does not prevent the formation of academic partnerships, as one finds in law or medicine, though it does require that they be partnerships which provide to all workers equal democratic participation in the operation of an academic firm (if you will). One version of this is the cooperative demonstrated by Mondragon University in the Basque Region of Spain.
c) All of this conflict – harassing untenured faculty, removing academic websites, intimidating graduate student teachers, removing posters, denial of event spaces, cancellation of events, and undue influence by donors – is eliminated or mitigated by PSA. As indicated, the professional model eliminates tenure, which is only necessary in the first place thanks to the conflicted employment relations of the HEI model. Graduate students that work within the PSA academy are part of the professional society, enjoy the same work condition prerogatives as academics and are far better compensated for their contribution to professional academic practices, student studies, and HE in general: United States, Canada, Australia. In PSA, freedom of expression can not be undermined by institutional employers, financial donors, venture capitalists, bond holders, or government careerists because the grip of these containing forces is either eliminated or substantially reduced, with a legally sanctioned professional body as protection for the individual constitutional rights and freedoms of members, along with other documented rights, such as right to free HE and the right to earn a living.
Since October 7, the administration and Board of Governors of Columbia, Cornell, and other universities have strained to meet their obligation to protect institutional brand and bottom-line, while each navigates the actions of students they select through admission and the faculty they select through employment. These acts of selection can be interpreted as tacit and explicit acts of institutional endorsement of students and academics. But if as PSA enables, HEIs are removed from the HE equation, what remains are individuals exercising their constitutionally protected rights and freedoms. Individuals who also happen to be engaged in mutually beneficial education relationships within the professional HE model of independent academic practitioners.
i) Karma R. Chávez, who serves on the executive committee of the Texas AAUP chapter:
Our strategy involved several components. First, we worked to build our local membership base, including people...referred to as “AAUP enthusiasts”—those who were curious about the Association but not yet members.
ii) Jennifer Ruth, professor and associate dean at Portland State University:
Accreditation agencies, which some saw as a source of hope in the defense against these attacks, are themselves now targets of legislation and lawsuits. Writing in April 2023 about the role of accreditation agencies in checking overreaching partisan politicians, Lawrence Schall observed that “it may very well be the job of accreditors, as unpopular as it may be with some, to hold our institutions—and those who would choose to control what’s taught in them—to the long-standing principles that have served us all very well.” The next month, Trump boasted that he would “fire” accreditors. Also in May, Burgess Owens, a Republican state representative in Utah, introduced the Accreditation for College Excellence Act, designed to prevent accreditation agencies from including DEI criteria in their evaluations of colleges and universities. In June, anticipating the possibility that the federal government might seek to withdraw federal funding from Florida’s public universities if his racist and transphobic “reforms” passed into law, DeSantis sued the Biden administration over the role of accreditation agencies in enforcing standards, calling them “cartels.” “This lawsuit,” a statement released by DeSantis’s office declares, “seeks to strip private, unaccountable accreditors of their authority to stand in the way of Florida’s higher education reforms.”
iii) Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities and a philosophy professor who served as the eighteenth president of Mount Holyoke College:
Florida already has a law in place mandating that public institutions change accreditors periodically—a rule widely seen as retaliation against the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools for questioning state overreach into university hiring practices and infringements on the faculty’s academic freedom. Nevertheless, conservative activists regard this additional step as necessary, given that the nation’s six major regional accreditors all have DEI requirements to which institutions must adhere in order to fully meet the standards for accreditation.
iv) Schrecker, who after recounting the history of repeated challenges to academic freedom and integrity leveled by academic institutions, government bodies, or economic calamities, along with a recital of AAUP paper voice responses, she ends her Academe piece thus:
Ultimately, however, the nation’s faculties must take collective responsibility for defending themselves. Naturally, the AAUP should support them. But we can’t continue with business as usual. We will have to adapt our organization to the massive structural changes within higher education and the hollowing out of the nation’s full-time tenured faculties. Ironically, and in a perverse way, the current campaign against the university by Ron DeSantis and others offers us an unparalleled opportunity to reorient many of the AAUP’s operations to reclaim our position as the main institutional voice for the academic profession. Empowered by our recent affiliation with the AFT, we can reconceptualize academic freedom, encourage solidarity and collective action within the academic community, and intensify the AAUP’s unconditional commitment to the struggle against the reactionary forces of ignorance that threaten us all. Our jobs, our students’ educations, and our currently endangered democracy may depend upon it.
Rah, rah!! An opportunity wasted with more of the same. Shame on you all.
Make PSA the New AAUP Team Dream
The suggestion to “reconceptualize academic freedom” is a distraction. The AAUP has done a good job of defining the concept. What it has not done is a good job of is defending it. To do this we must do something more fundamental, like reconceptualize the model for HE provision. If you want to support academics with a rally cry of “solidarity and collective action,” do so without leaning on union rhetoric that is merely a term in the capitalist labor equation of the HEI model. Rather, make the cry from within the self-described original function of the AAUP, as the professional (not “institutional”) voice for academics. Take action within the academic community to turn the vocation into an actual legislated profession. This is taking real “collective responsibility for defending [academics].” But more than that, given the systemic benefits of PSA, this is also taking real responsibility for defending HE and all those whom it impacts – leading us out of the traditional institutional shadow in which we languish.
Transform the AAUP from an organization that associates and affiliates the interests of academics, from an organization that consults on and advocates for their vision of the academy, from a union that bargains with employers over stewardship and compensation, to a movement that places academics at the center of HE power dynamics, within the protection and direction of a proper legally sanctioned professional bar, board, society, or whatever you want to call it – as the State Bar of California does for law or the Medical Board of California does for medicine. Anything else is a peripheral, feeble, vulnerable response, for which the AAUP team is to be held responsible.
If this were done in 1915 or in 1971, then there would be no need to recruit “AAUP enthusiasts” or rely on ostensive union and accreditation allies in the struggle to shape HE. In the professions, those who wish to practice must do so under licensure, within the self protection, direction and correction of their professional society – recruitment, unions, and accreditation are fundamentally irrelevant to the professional model.
Some might claim this rally cry for PSA ignores the familiar
criticisms of existing professions, in particular law and medicine. First, it doesn’t. Second, be careful of committing reasoning fallacies when issuing such
a charge. Third, recognize that PSA is not yet a reality or even finalized on
the drafting table, so such criticisms primarily serve as notes on construction.
Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, anyone who is honest about the HEI model
recognizes that from the beginning it too is riddled with authoritarianism,
cronyism, corruption, incompetence, self-interest, money-grabbing, employment
protectionism, political and corporate pandering, fraud, embezzlement, bribery,
assault, racism, sexism, conservatism, liberalism, theism, atheism, murder,
genocide, and more. PSA cannot escape human nature, but on balance it provides
a better response apparatus and greater benefits to all stakeholders, when
compared to the dream HEI model of the AAUP team.
To explain the “sort of” qualifier, consider an Academe
article authored by Jennifer Ruth, titled, Subnational Authoritarianism and the Campaign to Control Higher Education. She opens the piece with a comparison
between authoritarianism in the United States and China HE systems. Having worked in and studied the Chinese HE system for seven years, I can
assure you this equivalence is a rhetorical device. Say what you will about the
DeSantis government, it doesn’t disappear people for dissent. That said, in
her reasoning there is embedded something far more valuable: the deep-rooted common
assumption that is among the principal causes of all HE troubles.
Academic freedom is often understood narrowly in terms of individual faculty rights, but the concept also speaks to the degree of institutional autonomy necessary for colleges and universities to act as trustworthy sources of independent knowledge. This knowledge, specific to colleges and universities, provides a society with what law professor Robert Post, in his 2012 book Democracy, Expertise, and Academic Freedom: A First Amendment Jurisprudence for the Modern State, calls “democratic competence.” When knowledge is controlled by one political regime with an eye to perpetuating its rule, academic freedom cannot exist.
Do you see it? I have seen it for over 25 years. The AAUP
team should have seen it from the beginning. Schrecker, Ruth and other academics
should see it given their respective expertise and experience. Universities and
colleges are not and never have been “trustworthy sources of independent
knowledge,” because they are not sources of knowledge – at least no more so
than is Google. Knowledge is not “specific to colleges and universities,” but
to academics who are its generators and disseminators. Nobel Prizes are awarded
to individuals, not institutions.
HEIs are mere facilitators of knowledge production, like
electricity, pipettes, cafeterias, computers, plumbing, pens, microscopes, and
Google. But facilitation comes in grades and in the case of universities and
colleges these institutions are not necessary for the production of knowledge,
while it would be nigh on impossible to generate knowledge in biology without
microscopes. And if you muse, ‘But HEIs own the microscopes’, then you
only further expose your uncritical assumption of the HEI model. Consequently, autonomy and the admirable efforts to protect
it are wasted on HEIs, because they are unnecessary and therefore don’t require
autonomy, while individuals are necessary and therefore do require autonomy.
That the AAUP team talks about (threats to) HEI autonomy or freedom exposes
this deep mistaken assumption regarding the nature of universities and colleges.
The truth is these institutions are inessential middlemen
with a history of undermining the academy. To paraphrase Ruth, when knowledge is controlled by one institution or an association of such universities and colleges with an eye to perpetuating their rule, academic freedom cannot exist. To expend considerable
resources in the protection of institutional autonomy is confused, unnecessary,
irresponsible action on the part of people who should know better. But more
than that, it is self-defeating to the aims of the AAUP team because it helps
maintain these institutional weapons used by (subnational) authoritarians to
control the academy.
The most recent Middle East troubles can illustrate this point, and as Schrecker makes clear there is a long list of examples that can be used, including the role that HEIs played in MacCarthyism or the Reagan crackdown on the Free Speech Movement in California. Notice how in such cases authoritarians use institutional (power) relationships to leverage control over academics and students: comply or jeopardize employment and graduation. The exercise of authoritarianism is made all the more convenient with the use of these inessential institutional intermediaries. This has been true throughout the vast majority of HE history, as it was true when the German Nazis fired, imprisoned or murdered academics with barely a chirp of protest and much cheer from their institutional colleagues, and has remained comparably true for over seventy years now in Communist China HE. In the latest authoritarian flex we see again how politicians, careerists, corporatists, donors, investors and the like weaponize these institutions against the individual liberty, rights, and freedoms that form the foundation of HE. As professor emeritus in history at California State University, Chair of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure from 2012-2021, and contributing editor to the Academe, Hank Reichman, writes in the Academe:
Last week the AAUP released a special investigative report, “Political Interference and Academic Freedom in Florida’s Public Higher Education System.” In interview after interview with faculty members in Florida, the investigating committee, which I co-chaired, “heard repeated complaints not only about the silence of their campus and system administrators but also about administrators’ direct complicity in implementing policies that would severely restrict academic freedom and faculty and student rights more generally.” Our report acknowledged that “institutions might suffer devastating retaliatory budget cuts” if university leaders more openly resisted policies promoted by the legislature and governor that provide their funding. Still, we concluded, “the approach of many of the administrators appears more cowardly than cautious.” At a December 6 press conference announcing the report, in conversations with reporters, on the AAUP Presents podcast, and on the Changing Higher Ed Podcast, which has an audience of higher education administrators and trustees, I and other committee members have repeatedly emphasized this theme, calling on more university leaders to “grow a spine.”
The AAUP team needs to “grow a spine” and pursue true reformation of HE through something like PSA. Unfortunately, the bitter irony is that the ruled – academics and students – desperately work to preserve and participate in the very institutions that the rulers created and use against them. By acting as a labor union, the AAUP has merely become part of this problematic institutional model. In light of this and given my uncompromising description of the inessential nature of universities and colleges, the extensive historical and other relevant expertise of academics, the repeated failure of AAUP and union-style action, the professional context of the founding of the AAUP, the reoccurring use of HEIs as leverage against academics and students, and the fact that for over 25 years I have offered an alternative model which the academy ignores, I charge academics and students with “direct complicity” in not only the co-authorship of their own bitterly ironic stories, but those of untold millions who have globally suffered under the HEI model.
Hank, you can check at the door any self-righteous
condemnation of people (administration) who are arguably just doing their
(difficult) jobs within the HEI model you help to sustain. You are in no
position to condemn because you are complicit, and more so than most.
Concluding Remarks
In August last year, I posted, PSA Takes Common Strategies to Logical Conclusions. It was a response to the ongoing “right-sizing” of West Virginia University (WVU) under the authoritarian direction of President E Gordon Gee and the Board of Governors. The PSA response was meant to offer an alternative to the usual rally, protest, op-ed, letter writing, paper voice response apparatus. Not surprisingly, it fell on deaf ears. Not surprisingly, the unwelcome changes continue to go through as WVU guts its R1 status. Not surprisingly, lots of education and employees are lost to the wind, with families displaced, homes for sale, childhood friends lost, colleagues and projects sacrificed, church societies dropped, a sense of belonging erased… The upset in human lives and higher education is pronounced.
The post was structured around a widely circulated document that provided evidence, analysis and criticism of the inner workings and consequences of the WVU right-sizing. With bitter irony, the document was released anonymously. The person or persons who published it were afraid, while HE is one of the few human endeavors in which understanding through the open, honest, reasoned pursuit of truth is the principal purpose. Such desperate use of anonymity in HE is a failure of the model and the people who perpetuate it. It is a bitter irony.
In the second part of this series, further argument is made in
favor of PSA as a model for HE that diminishes or dissolves fear of
suppression, unemployment, lose of home, friends, colleagues, our investment in
careers and lives. This must stop.
If you agree, then the invitation is open to participate in the development and promotion of the PSA model. I could use the help. If you disagree, I am also pleased to hear from you.
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