The AAUP is reaching out to offer you the chance to participate in one of our remaining fall webinars: 

• Get an overview of the concept of academic freedom, including freedom in research, teaching, and governance. We’ll also discuss extramural speech, along with the differences between academic freedom and free speech. November 10, 1 p.m. eastern time. Register here. 
• Explore AAUP Faculty Compensation Survey data with new interactive tools (described in the item below). December 7 at p.m. eastern time. Register here.

Fall 2022 | Vol. 108, No. 4

The fall 2022 issue of Academe calls on faculty to become actively engaged in budget and finance issues on their campuses and in their states. Contributors to the issue explore the power of coalitional organizing to push back against austerity measures, demand transparency, and hold institutions accountable for their obligations to faculty, staff, students, and the communities beyond their campuses. Aimee Loiselle, assistant professor of history at Central Connecticut State University, and Jennifer M. Miller, associate professor of history at Dartmouth College, served as guest editors of this special issue of the magazine. They are members of Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education. Additional articles will appear in a forthcoming online supplement to this special issue.
Follow the links in the table of contents below or download a PDF of the entire issue at https://www.aaup.org/issue/fall-2022 using your member log-in information.
If you have forgotten your password for the AAUP website, or wish to update your subscription preferences, please visit our member portal.
FEATURES
Organizing Faculty through Budget Activism
Preemptive cost-cutting as a call to action.
By François Furstenberg and Naveeda Khan
Austerity, Labor Exploitation, and the Academic Stretch-Out
On job losses and expanding workloads.
By Jill Penn
Building a New Framework of Values for the University
Emerging from the ivory tower’s shadow.
An interview with Davarian L. Baldwin by Jennifer Mittelstadt
System Error for Connecticut’s Community College Consolidation
Promising, but failing, to put students first.
By Colena Sesanker
American Higher Education's Past Was Gilded, Not Golden 
A missed opportunity for genuine equity.
By Elizabeth Tandy Shermer
Stop Trying to Find the Money—Create It
A proposal for universities and public money.
By Scott Ferguson and Benjamin Wilson
Standing Up to Money and Power with Cross-Sector Organizing around Endowments (online only)
Collaborative communities of shared interests unite.
By Kelly Grotke
Student Debt Cancellation on Campus (online only)
An executive order begins a virtuous cycle.
By Charlie Eaton
Budget and Finance Rucksack (online only)
Tools and resources for tackling austerity.
By Aimee Loiselle with Jennifer M. Miller
BOOK REVIEW

The Myth of Higher Education’s Magic
Jeffrey Melnick reviews The Education Trap by Cristina Viviana Groeger.
Saving the Seed Bank and Defending Academic Freedom
Diane Kemker reviews Dirty Knowledge by Julia Schleck.
A Meditation on Restoring Faith in Our Nation
Stephen Parks reviews What Universities Owe Democracy by Ronald J. Daniels.
COLUMNS
From the Guest Editors: Revolutionizing Higher Education Budget and Finance
Legal Watch: The Supreme Court’s Hard Right Turn
From the President: Stronger Together
NOTA BENE
AAUP and AFT Affiliate in Historic Partnership
New Council Members Elected
New AAUP Data Website
2022 Summer Institute in Reno
Student Debt Update
Contract Wins for Collective Bargaining Chapters
AAUP Criticizes Purdue’s Presidential Appointment

  
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In the days after Labor Day, we’re also celebrating the recently finalized historic alliance between the AAUP and the American Federation of Teachers. Now, together, we represent more higher education workers than any other union. Our game-changing partnership brings together the AAUP’s academic expertise and the AFT’s power and reach, and creates a movement with the strength of hundreds of thousands of higher education workers. Together, we will be stronger in our work to dismantle systemic racism and fight white supremacy; we vow to bring a racial equity lens to all aspects of all of our work. Together, we will be more effective at beating back outrageous legislative intrusions into the academy—intrusions that obliterate the academic freedom needed for effective teaching, research and free inquiry. Together, we will be united in our efforts to ensure that higher education plays its essential role as a public good in a democracy.
Join or renew your AAUP membership today.
Because the affiliation builds on our successful joint organizing work, we anticipate bringing even more academic workers into our movement and being able to disseminate AAUP’s essential work on academic freedom and shared governance more broadly throughout the higher education community. We will be working together to organize a more powerful academic labor movement around our principles on campuses, in statehouses, and in Congress.
We’ll be fighting with you and for you. It’s an exciting time and we have never been stronger.
Join or renew today.

 BY ALEX ZUKAS
In the latest act in a continuing coup against the faculty at National University that started in spring 2020, the interim president and board of trustees just imposed a faculty handbook that defines academic freedom and shared governance in ways that are unrecognizable to AAUP members as it completely hollows out those concepts. With regard to academic freedom the handbook asserts,

“The University supports academic freedom as a right and a responsibility within the academy. As a right, academic freedom ensures the freedom of thought and expression as it applies to the artfulness of teaching, as well as discipline/subject content publication, oral presentation, and extramural activities. Academic freedom as a responsibility include specific, intentional learning-science based strategies and andrological interventions, which will be designed collaboratively across academic stakeholders. While faculty members have the right to choose and use external, third-party materials . . . those material, syllabi and all content must adhere to the design standards as outlined by the president and provost office” (2).

In sum, the handbook gives complete academic freedom to the president and provost and curtails academic freedom of the faculty. What could go wrong? With regard to shared governance, it maintains,

“National University’s model for Shared Governance is one of Participatory Governance . . . Faculty participate in formal governance committees. Including but not limited to the University Senate and the Academic Affairs Council . . . The University Senate is forum for faculty, staff, and administrators’ input on matters of significance to the University . . . Each School will elect three (3) full-time faculty as nominees to the University Senate. The Dean will select one (1) of the three and propose that member to the provost for approval” (12).

Notice how faculty nominations have become rebranded as an “election,” while the dean and provost select the actual member who will represent faculty at the senate but is not directly elected by the school faculty. To call this patronizing and denigrating hardly begins to cover the outrageousness of an arrangement that is nothing more than administrators selecting faculty members (who are supposed to represent the views and opinions of faculty) to a purported shared governance body. It even gives fig leaves a bad name. Selection of faculty to the Academic Affairs Committee (14), which includes members of the faculty, staff, and administration and oversees all academic matters at NU, follows the same condescending and demeaning procedures as the university senate. The only constituents of these faculty senators are the dean and provost. The faculty did not vote for them, and they have no responsibility to represent faculty views and interests since they are not accountable to the faculty.

The handbook is a travesty, developed by a committee of appointed administrators and faculty, vetted by deans, the provost, and the interim president, who could suggest changes. Faculty did not vote to accept the handbook, as had been past practice with the previous faculty policies for twenty-five years. Faculty members were allowed to make suggestions but almost none of them made it into the final version vetted by administrators and the board. So, we can already see how this new “shared governance” system will work: faculty will be canvassed for opinions but the administration will decide the extent of academic freedom for faculty, how faculty get reappointed (or not), and what passes for shared governance. It is a form of institutional despotism that is trying to look benevolent but is transparently not.

The interim president and board of trustees look at National University as a business first and an educational institution second, and they run it like a business: they are the bosses and the hired hands do not talk back or control any aspects of their workplace. The handbook concentrates decision-making power around curriculum and faculty status in the administration. Department chairs are now faculty “supervisors” (see “Human Resource Management” in Appendix 3). This dystopian vision for higher education is a travesty. National University’s faculty policies once cited the AAUP Redbook in its clauses on academic freedom and shared governance. The new faculty handbook takes the deskilling and degradation of the faculty to a new level. Every faculty member I know is demoralized and looking to leave. The strange thing is that the administration and board are so callous and enamored of corporate practices that they don’t understand why faculty are disaffected: aren’t they just employees who are told what to do and accept the tenets of a hierarchical, capitalist workplace where power flows from the top and obedience from below?
The travesty that has happened to National University is also a result of a broken accreditation system. The NU faculty senate and the NU AAUP advocacy chapter filed complaints with the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) outlining the violations of shared governance, the breaking of faculty contracts, and the impact on student learning. WASC drew out its investigation of the senate complaint and did not meet its own deadlines for responses. In the end it found the university to be “in technical compliance” and vowed to visit the institution in a year. WASC has yet to respond to the content of the advocacy chapter complaint and is also not adhering to its deadlines for notification and resolution. It looks to many of us that WASC has been subject to regulatory capture by the very institutions, like NU, that it is supposed to oversee. As noted by Michael Itzkowitz in “The Accreditation System Is Broken,”

 “The accreditation system is broken. Accreditors regularly approve colleges that have no business operating. Without major changes in the system, they will continue to do so. While the short-term consequences of these unmerited endorsements are bad — particularly for the students who will probably have little to show for their time in college besides a heavy debt load — the long-term consequences could be devastating. Rubber-stamping inferior institutions devalues a college degree and threatens the entire legitimacy of higher education.”
​
This is a cautionary tale. NU had a robust shared governance structure for over twenty-five years. Under the cover of COVID, the board of trustees broke faculty contracts, fired about 20 percent of the faculty, issued new temporary contracts, abrogated the negotiated faculty policies, unilaterally imposed a new faculty handbook, demoralized the remaining faculty, and have wrecked the curriculum at NU. I suspect that what the faculty at NU experienced is part of a new playbook circulated by the forces that are corporatizing higher education. The AAUP’s report from a little over a year ago, COVID-19 and Academic Governance, highlighted the erosion of shared governance at National University and several other institutions of higher education in the United States. Your institution, like the University of Akron may be next.
_____________________________________
Read the full National University faculty handbook approved by the Board of Trustees on July 29, 2022. You can compare all of its articles and provisions to those of the National University faculty policies approved by a vote of the faculty senate (now abolished), the faculty, and the board of trustees in 2018.
_____________________________________
Alex Zukas is a retired professor of history at National University and Past President of CA-AAUP.

Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession Released
The AAUP's 2021–22 Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, released last week, found that real wages for full-time faculty members decreased 5.0 percent after adjusting for inflation, the largest one-year decrease on record since the AAUP began tracking this measure in 1972. Read more.

Delegates to the Biennial Association Meeting also voted for one at-large and five regional members of the AAUP's governing Council. See the council members here.

This year the AAUP was pleased to offer  this excellent new content  presented at this year's SUMMER INSTITUTE JULY 21-24 in Reno, Nevada..                   

• Fighting back against educational gag orders
• Governance, academic freedom, and institutional racism
• Writing bargaining proposals to foster equity
• Storytelling to build power and win

View the complete program HERE

On March 7, AAUP reached out to our members about a proposed affiliation with the American Federation of Teachers.

There are three components to AFT member benefits programs:
1) Individual member benefits including discount programs, life insurance, and car rentals;
2) benefits that help local chapters by providing coverages and services that are more expensive to source at the local level; and
3) benefits that chapters can purchase for members as part of their dues process.

As a reminder, a delegate vote on a proposed affiliation with the AFT will take place at the AAUP Biennial Meeting in June. Affiliation documents and more information (including more information on AFT benefits for members and chapters) can be accessed on the AAUP website here (member login required).

The 2022 AAUP Summer Institute is coming to Reno, Nevada! We’re excited to announce that the University of Nevada, Reno, is the site of this year’s program, to be held July 21–24.
In two years, the world of higher education has changed radically, with new COVID-safety concerns, more austerity budgets targeting faculty and staff, and rising governance and academic freedom violations. That’s why Summer Institute is needed more than ever. Faculty, students, and academic workers all over the country are rising up and taking a stand on their campuses to advocate for the standards and resources our students and communities need to thrive.
Join more than two hundred other higher education professionals for four days of exciting workshops and special sessions. Featuring presenters experienced in policy, strategy, organizing, and leadership, the training at this year’s Summer Institute will give faculty members the skills and tools to build a powerful voice on campus and to:

• become more effective advocates for AAUP policies and standards;
• establish and protect mechanisms of shared governance and shared decision-making, including negotiating in non-union contexts;
• organize and build membership and power in local chapters and state conferences;
• evaluate college and university finances as a means to hold administrations accountable for the priorities of higher education;
• launch new organizing projects by developing leaders, creating a campaign structure, using databases, and crafting messages.

There will also be plenty of time in the program for social events, informal networking, and exploring our beautiful host city. Sound fun? You can view photos from the 2019 Summer Institute (the last year we held this event in-person) on the AAUP’s Flickr page.
View the complete program and reserve your spot now for the 2022 Summer Institute, July 21–24 in Reno, Nevada!