Jane Buck, Ph.D.

As the immediate past president of the American Association of University Professors* and a member since my graduate student days, I am passionately concerned about its future and the future of American higher education, whose three supporting pillars–academic freedom, tenure, and shared governance–are under attack in both familiar and novel ways. Extremist ideologues have attempted, so far unsuccessfully, to convince state legislatures to impose, under the guise of protecting students from indoctrination, unacceptable limits on professorial speech.

Rogue administrators and governing boards have used natural disasters and genuine or manufactured economic hardship as pretexts to limit or eliminate tenured positions. The substitution of underpaid, overworked, part-time–and, increasingly, full-time–contingent faculty for tenured and tenure-eligible faculty threatens both academic freedom and shared governance. Without the protection of tenure, faculty are vulnerable to arbitrary personnel decisions, too often predicated on faulty or questionable criteria: popularity among students (now frequently and bizarrely referred to as "customers" or "consumers"), loyalty to administrators, or the pursuit of popular or "safe" lines of research, among others. There is evidence that many contingent faculty members, especially those struggling to cobble together a living as part-time adjuncts, avoid challenging their students academically and succumb to pressure to inflate grades.

A series of troubling legal rulings have had a chilling effect on both academic freedom and shared governance, most notably the application of the Garcetti case to professorial speech. AAUP Senior Counsel Rachel Levinson has provided an excellent analysis, which is available on our web site.

Genuine shared governance suffers from the overuse and abuse of contingent faculty for at least two reasons: (1) These professionals are either formally excluded from the governance process or are too overworked to participate even when they are invited to do so; and (2) the tenured and tenure-stream faculty on whom governance must rely are already overburdened by overly stringent requirements for tenure and promotion, requirements that give little if any credit for service. The pervasive use of a corporate model of organization, including the hiring of upper-level administrators with no background in higher education and occasionally without advanced degrees further degrades the process.

*Institutional affiliation provided for identification purposes only and does not imply any endorsement by the organization.