The American Association of University Professors
and the State of Higher Education in the United States
Today
The American Association of University Professors
(AAUP), founded in 1915, is the oldest professional
organization in the United States for faculty across all
disciplines and has long been recognized as having
played the central role in the development of the American
conceptions of academic freedom and shared
governance. Today it has approximately 45,000 members,
approximately sixty percent of whom are in
AAUP chapters that engage in collective bargaining at
their individual institutions.
Although the AAUP is still widely regarded as the
principal faculty voice in higher education, over the
last three decades, as unionization slowly spread
among American colleges and universities, other
unions, such as the American Federation of Teachers
and the National Education Association (which focus
on primary and secondary school teachers), have also
begun to organize faculty. Although overall union
membership among faculty has grown, court interpretations
of the country’s labor laws and the hostile stance
of many state governments have made unionization
a virtual impossibility for faculty at most American
colleges and universities.
One million teachers and researchers
Among the most striking characteristics of American
higher education today are its remarkable diversity
and immense scale. There are over four thousand
colleges and universities, employing approximately
one million teachers and researchers. Approximately
forty percent of these schools are two-year junior or
community colleges that do not offer the baccalaureate
degree. Four-year institutions include small
liberal arts colleges with fewer than a thousand students
and large research universities with fifty thousand
or more students. More than half of American
colleges and universities are so-called “private” institutions with governing boards that are independent
of government. However, approximately seventy-five
percent of America’s seventeen million students attend
public institutions under the control of state or local
governments (the federal government does not
directly authorize or control institutions of higher
learning). Historically, private colleges and universities,
whether large universities or small liberal arts colleges,
were organized as non-profit institutions, but
in recent decades, for-profit universities, such as the
University of Phoenix, which claims the largest student
body (71,000) of any single institution in the
country, have gained prominence.
Students as “customers” and faculty as
“employees”
Ever since the modern American university emerged
in the late nineteenth century, there have been politicians
and businessmen who have pressured American
institutions of higher learning to adopt business
models of organization and “efficiency.” Such pressures
have become increasingly intense over the last
twenty years, so that today the greatest problem confronting
the AAUP and the American professoriate, as
a whole, are the pressures coming from governing
boards and legislatures to have American colleges and
universities follow a corporate model that sees students
as “customers,” faculty as “employees” who
should follow directives from their superiors in a hierarchical
chain of command, and “productivity” as
being measured in simple statistical terms.
Growing use of contingent labor
One of most disturbing trends in American higher
education that stems from this effort to apply a corporate
model has been the rapidly growing use of contingent
labor as a cost-cutting device. In 1975, the majority of faculty (fifty-seven percent) had full-time
tenure or tenure-track status. Of the remaining nontenure
track faculty, thirty percent worked on a parttime
basis. By 2003, over forty-six percent of faculty
worked only part-time, and the percentage of faculty
with tenure or tenure-track status had fallen to thirty-
five.
One of the great successes of the AAUP in its first
half-century of existence had been its ability to gain
widespread acceptance of the institution of tenure in
American colleges and universities, largely as a
means of protecting academic freedom. In this same
period, the AAUP was also instrumental in gaining
widespread acceptance of the principle of shared governance,
which in the American context meant
assigning primary responsibility for determining educational
policy, including curriculum and hiring decisions,
to those who had academic expertise, that is,
the faculty.
The number of administrators has
increased
The move toward a more corporate model of organization
has, in essence, represented an effort to deprofessionalize
the professoriate. The use of contingent
faculty with no job security has undermined academic
freedom, because many faculty are no longer in a
position to determine the content of their own teaching
and research. Moreover, the rapid decline in the
number of full-time tenure or tenure-track faculty has
also been accompanied by a substantial increase in
the number of administrators who are increasingly
assuming a larger role in setting educational policy.
The logical culmination of this trend is the situation
at the University of Phoenix, which employs virtually
no full-time faculty, and teachers are hired
simply to follow administratively determined course
plans with the goal of making profits for the
entrepreneurs who own the so-called university.
Pressures to be more business-like
Pressures to be more business-like are affecting colleges
and universities in other ways, as well. Even in
the public sector, access to higher education is becoming
more difficult as states cut back on funding and
insist that public institutions generate more of their
own revenues, either by engaging in externally
funded (corporate or federal government) research or
by increasing tuition for students. Not only is the cost
of education for students rising rapidly, but there is
also increasing pressure on administrations to cut
back or eliminate programs, typically in the humanities,
that cannot generate external funds.
Thus, taken as a whole, the trend toward corporatization endangers the democratic basis of American
higher education both by limiting access to those who
can afford the higher costs and by eroding the place
of those disciplines that have traditionally been associated
with a liberal, humane education that equips
students to act as informed citizens.
AAUP defends the principles of academic
freedom
While it is hard to be optimistic about current trends
in American higher education, the AAUP continues to
be a leader in the fight to defend the principles of academic
freedom and shared governance, and in the effort
to rebut the notion that education is just an “industry”
like any other industry. The AAUP has, however,
had to adapt new strategies in this fight. Before
the 1970s, the AAUP was exclusively a professional
association of full-time faculty, most of whom regarded
unionization as an inappropriate option for the
professoriate. Since that time, the AAUP has come to
affirm the value of unionization as a means of defending
the values of the profession and the quality
of higher education, and though many faculty in the
United States still do not have the practical option of
engaging in collective bargaining, over sixty percent
of AAUP members are now in collective bargaining
chapters. Moreover, with the growth of non-tenure
track faculty, the AAUP has increasingly begun to
reach out to part-time and contingent faculty and has
developed recommended institutional guidelines for
their treatment.
Although the process of corporatization of higher
education may be further advanced in the United
States than elsewhere, America is not alone in facing
many of the challenges posed by this process. Those
in other countries who study the current battles over
the future of higher education in the United States may
well be able to learn some important lessons.
Larry Gerber
Professor of History, Auburn University
First Vice President, American Association of University
Professors
The American Association of
University Professors (AAUP)
• perustettu 1915
• vanhin yliopistoalan järjestö USA:ssa
• noin 45 000 jäsentä
• USA:ssa yhteensä yli 4000 collegea ja yliopistoa
• näissä noin miljoona opettajaa ja tutkijaa
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