The AAUP and the Idea of the University

As evidenced by the elaborate costumes of most commencement ceremonies, the century-long history of the American Association of University Professors is part of a much larger story, one that, as sociologist Elliot Krause argued in Death of the Guilds, extends back to medieval times.

The earliest universities, those in Bologna, Paris, and Oxford, were embodiments of the guild movement, self-governing bodies that controlled and monitored the activities of their members, eschewing external government. In the Latin lingua franca of the time, the term universitas magistrorum et scholarium referred not to a campus or buildings but to a guild, a body of individual people, teachers and students, with a specific professional competence, who had secured the right to govern themselves. There was no mention of contemporary concerns about tenure or academic freedom as they are understood today. There was, however, consensus about the basic elements of higher education, the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy). Professional training in medicine, law, or theology was deferred.

As centuries passed, the impact of the exploration of the planet, the Protestant Reformation, and the Enlightenment broadened the notion of higher education. Academic journals emerged and intellectual domains were redefined.

It fell to Cardinal John Henry Newman, as part of his argument for the establishment of a new university in Ireland, to deliver a series of lectures in 1852 meant to define the purpose of a modern university. In the lectures, later published as The Idea of a University, Newman maintained that the purpose of higher education was cultivation of the intellect for its own sake. He argued that students who lived in a community that included the full range of intellectual endeavors and who were privy to the discourse, in and out of the lecture hall, of those professing the full range of knowledge, would stimulate a perspective of tolerance and judgment—a liberal education in the most freeing sense.

Newman acknowledged that the university also played a useful role in more specialized studies and vocations, but he insisted that its central mission was not to make students more moral or more proficient in their field of endeavor; rather, its mission was the cultivation of the intellect for its own sake, best achieved by immersion in the whole community of scholars.

The American Context

Tension between the university’s role in vocational training and in providing liberal education played itself out in American higher education. It was manifested most clearly in a pragmatic questioning of the value of institutions dedicated to “classical studies” as opposed to specialized, state-supported institutions committed to agriculture and mechanical skills that the new industrial age seemed to demand. That real and important tension, however, was not what led to the birth of the AAUP a century ago. The evolution of concerns about academic freedom, the core of the Association’s concerns, is the focus of a 2012 book by Timothy Cain, Establishing Academic Freedom.

The first part of the nineteenth century was characterized by sectarian disputes over clerical matters in American colleges. In the early 1800s Thomas Jefferson was forced to abandon efforts to recruit his favored candidate, Thomas Cooper, for a professorship at the University of Virginia because of objections by his Presbyterian constituents to Cooper’s deistic and materialistic views. Cooper did go on to the presidency of South Carolina College, but there, too, his provocative views stirred up controversy that led to his resignation. It is worthy of note that one of the contentious issues was his support of states’ rights—a political, not a philosophical, issue.

In the 1850s, advocating for the abolition of slavery could also lead to the termination of academic appointments, as demonstrated by the cases of Edward G. Loring at Harvard and Benjamin S. Hedrick at the University of North Carolina. These early examples reflect a concern about extramural political speech rather than constraints on research or scholarly publication, presaging contemporary cases like that of Steven Salaita at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Economist Edward A. Ross’s dismissal from Stanford University following the recommendation of a trustee who objected to the professor’s views on immigrant labor and railroad monopolies added to a general and growing concern about the role of trustees and administrators in the management of the university. Progressive intellectuals like Thorstein Veblen and James McKeen Cattell were among those most critical of the growing prevalence of business practices in the management of the universities.

The issue came to a head in 1913, when Willard Fisher was dismissed from Wesleyan University for voicing criticism of church attendance and when John Mecklin was forced to resign from Lafayette College, in large part because of his incorporation of Darwinian theory into his teaching. Mecklin appealed to the American Psychological Association and the American Philosophical Association. The two organizations established a joint committee to investigate the situation and issued a report describing the situation at Lafayette as unacceptable.

That investigation reflected a growing consensus that there was a need for an organization to supplement existing professional associations, one that represented the professoriate as a whole. In 1914, an interinstitutional and interdisciplinary committee formulated a purpose statement for such an organization: it should bring about “more effective cooperation amongst the members of the profession in the discharge of their special responsibilities as custodians of the interests of higher education and research in America . . . and maintain and advance the ideals and standards of the profession.” The new association, which became the AAUP, quickly formed a committee on academic freedom and tenure that would later evolve into Committee A.

In April 1915, as the committee on academic freedom and tenure was being formed, seventeen members of the faculty of the University of Utah resigned to protest President Joseph T. Kingsbury’s dismissal of several of their colleagues. AAUP secretary Arthur Lovejoy, representing the committee, wrote to Kingsbury asking for the president’s cooperation in an AAUP investigation. Setting a template for later investigations, Lovejoy spent four days interviewing faculty, staff, and students before composing an exhaustive eighty-page report concluding that the dismissal of faculty members for engaging in private speech or to squelch their criticism of the administration was intolerable.

The emphasis on seeking collaboration with the administration in a detailed exploration of the facts of the situation remained a common feature of subsequent AAUP investigations. Over time, however, the consequences of investigations changed. In the early 1930s, the AAUP maintained a list of institutions whose faculty were not eligible for membership (though current members retained their status). Later, censure for violations of academic freedom or tenure rights came to be directed at the administration rather than the institution and was not relevant to faculty eligibility for membership.

A second enduring feature of AAUP investigations is their emphasis on seeking to change policies and procedures at the subject institution to bring them into conformity with Association-recommended standards. In this respect, the AAUP’s stance differs from that of other organizations that support academic freedom, such as the American Federation of Teachers and the American Civil Liberties Union, both of which place greater emphasis on individual redress. The American Civil Liberties Union, in particular, has also taken an interest in freedom of speech for students and been less concerned with the special features of academic freedom as a sine qua non of intellectual exploration.

Guild Status

Whether consciously intended or not, the 1914 declaration of a profession-wide commitment to “special responsibilities as custodians . . . of higher education” and responsibility “for maintaining ideals and standards” evokes guild-like status for the professoriate and asserts the guild powers of the original universitas celebrated in commencement costumes. The same can be said for the emphasis on faculty peer responsibility for determining professorial standing at the level of recruitment, advancement, and dismissal for cause.

Several factors militate against the assertion of guild status for the professoriate in contemporary America. Elitist claims run counter to a democratic ethos, and the consolidation of the professoriate runs counter to the current trend of professional specialization. In addition, the growth of higher education to include ancillary activities such as ownership of a physical plant, residential and dining facilities, and research technology has led to a competing managerial cadre—the administration. Further, the evolution of education as a state-supported enterprise has led to pressure for accountability to stakeholders beyond those directly involved in the educational enterprise— researchers, teachers, and students.

Guild control is thus diluted into what is called “shared governance,” raising the issue of precisely which areas of higher education should be subject to professorial guild oversight. A strong case can be made for professorial control over issues of faculty recruitment and faculty evaluation, including promotion and dismissal. Currently, it is too often the case that the faculty role in these matters has been reduced to offering recommendations to the administration; by contrast, guild status would take the peer view to be authoritative.

The events that led to the emergence of the AAUP prompted a focus on academic freedom. But, as indicated above, in those early days the concerns often were not primarily about the freedom to pursue or publish research findings or to present one’s findings in the classroom. Rather, attention focused either on criticism of the administration or what might be regarded as political or public speech.

In the recent case of Steven Salaita, as in earlier ones, the administration raised concerns about collegiality. For such concerns to be valid, it would seem essential for them to be raised by colleagues—guild peers—rather than by administrators or trustees and for a clear line to be drawn between what is said as a matter of professional expertise and what is said as a matter of personal conviction, whether that be religious or political. The freedom to express personal convictions, including criticisms of the administration, should be as broad as possible but neither specially protected nor confined to guild members.

A paradoxical element in the AAUP’s apparent concerns about guild prerogatives is reflected in its current lack of attention to curricular issues. The medieval universitas magistrorum et scholarium strictly defined the trivium and quadrivium; Cardinal Newman’s treatise argued forcefully for the importance of a university education that was comprehensive in content and that involved students in a wide-ranging community of scholars. Such a setting and such a curriculum are needed to serve the end of cultivating the intellect for its own sake. In present-day terms, these conditions are best met by undergraduate programs emphasizing general education and a residential faculty and student body.

The notion of the faculty as a community of scholars shaping its curriculum is being eroded. Fiscal pressures persuade some that universities require more businesslike management, attention to monetizing the value of higher education, and cost control. Cost considerations drive the shift from a tenure-track faculty toward a part-time, temporary teaching staff. Teaching is warped to fit massive open online courses while collective faculty consideration of the ends of higher education and how to shape the curriculum becomes increasingly rare.

The very notion of a general education, a liberal education in Newman’s terms, is under assault, eroded from above by graduate specialties and from below by vocational and technical programs. One can but wonder whether preserving guild powers without attention to a general education that cultivates the intellect for its own sake will leave us with a universitas without a soul.

Alvin G. Burstein is professor emeritus at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and past president of the Louisiana AAUP conference. His e-mail address is [email protected].