American Association of University Professors Advocacy: Paranoia, Radical Disclosure, and the Difficulties of Collective Action Without a Common Identity

• In Event: Inside Educational Activism and Organizing: Insurgent Insights on the Advancing Endgame Revolt in U.S. Education

Abstract

This paper will describe one small liberal arts college’s experiences creating an AAUP advocacy chapter to protect the faculty and institutional endeavors from the ever-creeping corporate, militarized, anti-intellectual, neoliberal ideology in higher education. In particular, this analysis will include the chapter’s struggles to avoid the paralysis of wholesale paranoia among the faculty as they sought to organize, meet, and educate other faculty across campus, as well as the power of radical disclosure to build a collective identity as professors beyond the confines of our academic disciplines.
The original call of 1915 that invited faculty to participate in AAUP described the aims of the association:
to facilitate a more effective co-operation among the members of the profession in the discharge of their special responsibilities as custodians of the interests of higher education and research in America; to promote a more general and methodical discussion of problems relating to education in higher institutions of learning; to create means for the authoritative expression of the public opinion of college and university teachers; to make collective action possible; and to maintain and advance the standards and ideals of the profession (Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors, 1916, p. 11).

Although many think of AAUP’s central aim as that of academic freedom, the original call reminds us of the various aims the association offers the professoriate. The call for “custodians of the interest,” “methodical discussion,” “authoritative expression of public opinion,” and “to make collective action possible” will frame the analysis of the chapter’s formation and experiences organizing. However, the central concern of the paper will interrogate the difficulties of organizing within an institution that has grown up in academic, disciplinary silos. Thus, do professors in fact recognize their identity beyond the confines of their discipline to achieve these more universal aims, and what are the consequences of not having a common understanding of the role of faculty in higher education?
Thomas Kuhn (2012) described the role of paradigms within different professional specializations of science, and why revolutionary forces of change are not universally felt by all specializations—what he labeled the “specialization’s effect” (p. 50). Although sub-specializations were aware of such changes, in this case the arrival of quantum mechanics, each individual stakeholder experienced these changes through his or her own disciplinary assumptions: “undoubtedly their experiences had had much in common, but they did not, in this case, tell the two specialists the same thing” (p. 51). If applied to higher education, the non-universal experience of faculty with neoliberal agendas in higher education, due to disciplinary assumptions, are significant roadblocks when forming a broad based will to engage in collective action. Finally, this presenter will offer suggestions for how this can be overcome through the radical disclosure of experience by faculty, for faculty.

Author

• Jessica Heybach, Aurora University