Letters

Letters to Academe of three hundred words or fewer are encouraged. Academe reserves the right to edit letters. Submit them by mail to the AAUP or by e-mail to wmaloney@aaup.org. Submissions must include the writer's name and phone number.

Call to Action for Junior Faculty

AS A NEW MEMBER OF THE AAUP, I want to thank you for printing Kathy Newman's "Confessions of a Junior Professor" in the May-June issue. Having recently earned tenure and promotion, I was especially interested in her words of wisdom and inspired by her call to action. Although many colleagues advised me against it, I have always, even as a tenure-track junior professor, spoken out against censorship and the increase in corporate contracts at the university and in defense of tenure and workers' rights. When I won an Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching award, colleagues told me to "be careful, to lay low for a while." The award is known as the kiss of death for junior faculty, supposedly because it means that you're not focusing on your research.

I am a political artist and activist as well as a member of the Carolina Socialist Forum and the adviser to Students for Economic Justice on campus (the group recently won a progressive victory against sweatshop-produced collegiate apparel after a four-day sit-in at the chancellor's office). These roles have heightened my awareness of the need to organize-not just full-time faculty, but teaching assistants, adjuncts, housekeepers, and all university workers. However, in North Carolina, it is illegal for state and public employees to bargain collectively.

Despite this intimidating roadblock, the increase in paperwork and bureaucratic demands for accountability, the decrease in institutional support, and the proliferation of corporate contracts that jeopardize challenging and diverse research, we are imagining, organizing, and fighting for a safer and more equal workplace. While it is crucial for junior faculty to be actively involved in collective action, it is equally critical for senior faculty to exercise their academic freedom and relative power vigorously in the creation and defense of the university as a model for utopian possibilities.

ELIN O'HARA SLAVICK (Studio Art) University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

AAUP Fails to Make a Case Against Online Education

PERHAPS THE AAUP IS RIGHT TO BE concerned over the accreditation of institutions such as Jones International University, but the article in the Nota Bene section of the May-June issue did not give sufficient grounds for this concern. The substance of James Perley's objections, as rendered by your article, concerned the infrastructure of a new kind of organization whose working environment is so different from that of traditional educational institutions that it cannot be assessed by traditional criteria. It may be that Jones's infrastructure is indeed questionable in professional terms, but your article did not establish that.

The Web is a medium that offers opportunities to rethink pedagogical models, and if Jones has done this successfully, full marks to it! The test of the institution's success is not the conformity of its infrastructure with the traditional norm, but the quality of its courses and graduates. Your article did not address these issues. Perley said that "only a truly remarkable program could duplicate in a virtual world the mindexpanding experiences of a student on a university campus," but he has not established that Jones's program is not "truly remarkable." Not only is a drop in quality not a necessary concomitant of online education, but mind expansion is not a necessary concomitant of the campus.

I have many reservations about education, online and off, but I think that the potential for virtual institutions is exciting and full of opportunity for growth and exploration. Let us do what we can to ensure that their standards are high, rather than to deplore the mere fact of their existence. Meanwhile, I'm off to investigate Jones. Then I'll decide about its quality.

PIPPIN MICHELLI (Art History St. Olaf College

What Is Our aparoduct?

IN THE MAY-JUNE ISSUE, ROBERT Birnbaum wrote about the pressures to induce university systems to assume the characteristics and behavior patterns that are typical of the industrial or business style of management. To elaborate on his analysis, one might ask, What is our product? In business, it might be an automobile (or the ad campaign to sell it). Such products allow for relatively quick assessment of employee productivity. So, in the academic world, we have simply to identify our product (our graduates?) and then proceed to market that product. Since we cannot put a lien on the future profits of our graduates, what do we produce?

If we must change, our current system of values must also change. We, the faculty, spend our time in education (production) or in R&D: research and development. We see our education product when we direct a class or student to complete an exam, a term paper, or a dissertation. The result may reveal common or novel answers, or new insights, for instance, into the philosophy of William Shakespeare.