The AAUP, University Employer-Enrollers, and AI are Not Compatible

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) might have become something it should have. Instead, the organization opted for shoring up institutional employer shortcomings, first as a professional association and later as a faculty employee union. While the AAUP has made itself an authoritative functionary of the inherited institutional model, 110 years ago when the organization was founded, 55 years ago when it morphed into a labor union, or at any time along the way, why did its members not wonder if there is a different way to serve and steward the social good of higher education?

In the history of the AAUP you will find no ad hoc committees or research reports of any kind that pose this question. Like the rest, exclusive institutional employment and enrollment remains the unexamined assumption of its members. As such, all AAUP action amounts to a (defensive) reaction to the dynamics of this unchallenged, inherited, monopolistic mode of higher education earning and learning. This makes everything the AAUP says on the question of AI in the academe both irresponsible and predictable, as evidenced in its July 2025 report, "Artificial Intelligence and Academic Professions."

Though the title indicates that the AAUP has in mind a narrow band of dues-defined concerns for its report, the PSA response to AI has in mind a more inclusive, direct, explicit concern for the entire social good and all those who depend upon it. In comparing the ad hoc committee and PSA responses, I find myself increasingly concerned about the future of higher education and so this post addresses each of the report's findings and recommendations on AI in the academe.

Institutions Are Essential, But Not for Higher Education (Part 2)

In the first post of this two-parter the Professional Society of Academics (PSA) apparatus for gatekeeping and oversight was compared to that found in the institutions of our inheritance. The tradition of institutional employment and enrollment is not required or recommended in the facilitation of academic service and stewardship to higher education. At the same time, universities and colleges are positioned as the sole legal means by which individuals can earn and learn in higher education.

How’s that for open pursuit and propagation of knowledge? How’s that for the right to earn a living or the right to free higher education? How’s that for academic stewardship of a social pillar? How’s that for freedom of speech and expression in the academe?

No one knows.

Universities and colleges are part of the problem and solutions meant to improve them are footnotes to facilitation failure, mends for mangled mechanics, band-aids like tenure, shared governance and academic freedom. Oxford, Stanford, Rutherford, and other ‘fords of the academe are examples of an institutional inheritance that I disclaim, and offer in its stead, a model that boasts better elegance, economics, and emancipation than does a heritage of monopolistic employers and enrollers that organizations like the American Association of University Professors struggle generation after generation to tape up and put back on the field.

Irony and Absurdity in the AAUP – Part 2

In Part 1 of this two-part series bitter irony was the focus, along with a scolding for the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and its growing team of union and activist affiliates, including the likes of the America Federation of Teachers (AFT), the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA), and Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education (SFNDHE). Their entrenched assumption of the higher education institution (HEI) model of university and college higher education (HE) provision is a principal cause of their failure to adequately address the many serious problems in HE. My alternative model called, the Professional Society of Academics (PSA), makes their failure all the more personally embarrassing, but publicly fixable.

Part 2 provides further reason to criticize the AAUP team for the irony and absurdity of its response to what ails HE. The aim is to open the eyes of the AAUP team to their folly and force proper consideration of the PSA model. It is recommended that Part 1 be read before continuing, but the following content can be managed without it.

Irony and Absurdity in the AAUP – Part 1

The former editor of Academe and current member of Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, Ellen Schrecker, claims, “the AAUP is not to blame for [the] deplorable situation” in higher education. She is mistaken. Like other supposed champions of the academy, the AAUP has failed the individuals that depend upon higher education (HE).

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 [faculty] were salaried workers, subject to the authority of boards of trustees, whose members included some of the most powerful industrialists in the United States. 

Historical Roots of the PSA Model – Part 3

First in Bologna and then in Paris, this series has looked at the 12^th and 13^th century origins of the modern higher education institutions (HEIs) we refer to as universities and colleges. Described as a process of confluence and conflict, the heritage was casually framed within power analyses common to sociology. Then, as today, there were macro economic and political forces that acted to transform and maintain the functions of higher education (HE), while individuals and groups jockeyed for favourable position within the system social milieu. We have seen that the modern conception and expression of a university are derived from the Latin, universitas, which in its original academic form were groups of teachers and students united in pursuit of intimately related and mutually beneficial goals that had manifest and latent impact on HE and society at large (Merton, 1957). We have also seen how the introduction of endowed colleges and salaried lectureships inserted a wedge of powerful papal and royal interests into the teacher-student relationship. As a result, our inheritance was not a university of masters and scholars, but of bloated buildings, budgets, and bureaucracies.

Historical Roots of the PSA Model – Part 2

In revealing the historical roots of PSA, part one of this series looked to the emergence of higher education in 12^th century Italy, where, “Emphatically, Bologna was a student university…” (Haskins, 1923). The final installment of the series looks at its professional pedigree in the 19^th and 20^th centuries; while this second post looks to Paris, France, for the medieval choreography of confluence and conflict that produced modern higher education institutions (HEIs). With power dynamics adjusted through economic and political maneuvering, Paris adds momentum to the shift in higher education (HE) from individuals to institutions – a shift that PSA aims to reverse.

Historical Roots of the PSA Model – Part 1

When people first learn of PSA, they tend to view it as something without precedent. It is not. Like most “new” ideas, it is merely a mix of what came before. This first of a three-part series identifies one such precedent – Medieval higher education in Bologna, Italy. Part two examines emergence of the same in Paris, France. While part three explains how the 18^th century introduction of professions and professional societies instructs PSA. Together, they provide historical grounding for the PSA model of higher education (HE).

[NOTE: See Part 2 and Part 3 of the series.]