From the President: Politics and the AAUP

The AAUP should be more involved in working for a progressive social-justice agenda. Indeed, we must become more involved, even though some believe that in becoming more political we risk alienating some members.

The corporatization of higher education, along with privatization of public higher education, have led to rising tuition, increased student debt, and the growing use of faculty working on contingent appointments. The result can only be termed an all-out assault on academic freedom, shared governance, and the economic security of the profession.

Nowhere is this development more evident than in the recent budget proposal put forth by Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. Walker’s proposal would create a public authority to run the University of Wisconsin, cut $300 million from the UW budget, and remove both tenure and shared governance protections from state statutes. Walker has argued that individual campuses would be able to adopt policies that allow for tenure and shared governance. But when UW’s board of regents asked for the authority to protect tenure and academic freedom, right-wing Republican legislators responded that they might reconsider the whole notion of a public authority if the regents did not use its creation as an opportunity to eviscerate or even eliminate tenure and shared governance.

To understand why we must be involved in politics now, we need to review how we arrived at the present moment. In the 1960s and ’70s, working- and middle-class Americans enjoyed a period of unprecedented gains. Under both Democratic and Republican administrations we saw civil rights legislation; expanded voting rights; the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the Mine Safety and Health Administration; and the passage of the Employment Retirement and Income Security Act. The minimum wage was regularly increased, and economic inequality declined. Not coincidently, this period saw growing support for public higher education, including the creation of many new public universities and community college systems. Why did all of these progressive changes happen? The answer is simple: organized mass movements that involved ordinary working- and middle-class Americans.

When did this period of unprecedented gains end? The reversal began under the Carter administration and accelerated during the Reagan years. Why did it end? The answer has been well documented in the book Winner-Take-All Politics by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. The reversal of fortune for what we now refer to as the 99 percent occurred because the 1 percent got organized. During the 1970s, the Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business grew dramatically. Powerful corporate political action committees emerged. The supporters of the 1 percent began to create their own think tanks, like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, funded by the Olin Foundation, beer magnate Joseph Coors, the Mellon Foundation, and, more recently, the Koch brothers.

The agenda of the 1 percent included rolling back government regulation, cutting taxes for the wealthy to “starve the beast” and thereby downsize government, and privatizing public services. To accomplish this agenda, the 1 percent broke the back of the labor movement (beginning with President Ronald Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers) and started the “War on Drugs” and the consequent mass incarceration of African Americans, documented in Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow.

This period also saw the Supreme Court’s Yeshiva decision, which effectively ended faculty unionization at private universities and colleges; the beginning of the corporatization of higher education; the first major cuts in state appropriations for higher education; and the rapidly increasing overuse of contingent appointments.

We now see what has ensued. Dependence on (and abuse of) faculty on contingent appointments is at an all-time high. State appropriations for higher education are plummeting, and, not coincidentally, student debt is skyrocketing. The Lumina Foundation (which rides on the back of massive student debt), the Gates Foundation, the Koch brothers, McGraw-Hill, Pearson, and others escalate the attack. Money provided by the foundations supports so-called competency-based education as well as the hiring of faculty who advocate “free enterprise,” while the corporations’ products provide course content and assessment to replace real faculty.

That’s how we arrived at the present moment, when a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination advocates ending tenure and shared governance.

That’s why AAUP must remove its head from the sand and engage in progressive political action.