Annual Meeting Celebrates Decade of Challenge

Academe, Jul/Aug 2004

Panelists, speakers, and participants in the 2004 AAUP annual meeting, held June 10-13 in Washington, D.C., celebrated the Association's successes and explored its challenges over the past decade. The conference also served as a farewell to general secretary Mary Burgan, who led the AAUP's staff for ten years, and a welcome to her successor, Roger Bowen.

Keynote speaker Robert O'Neil, founding director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, analyzed the relationship between academic freedom and national security. He discussed transcripts, released last May, of closed-door hearings led by U.S. senator Joseph McCarthy as part of McCarthy's large-scale investigation of potential communists in the 1950s, and he described the reaction of two current senators to the question whether similar investigations could occur today in the atmosphere of heightened concern about national security that has arisen since the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

O'Neil said that Senator Carl Levin argued in an interview with National Public Radio that an awareness of the dangers of McCarthyism made similar investigations unlikely to occur today, while Senator Russ Feingold disagreed, saying that a climate of fear persists. O'Neil concluded that "the jury's still out," although he said developments since September 11 suggest that Feingold's view may be overly bleak. O'Neil also said, however, that "all bets would be off if there were another terrorist attack like that of September 11, 2001."

O'Neil chronicled several cases in which academic freedom was threatened because of national security concerns, including one in which a historian at the University of New Mexico told his students after the September 11 terrorist attacks that "anyone who can blow up the Pentagon gets my vote." In another case, a professor at Columbia University, commenting during a teach-in on the war in Iraq, wished for "a million Mogadishus," a reference to a 1993 encounter in Somalia in which U.S. troops were killed. Despite pressure from citizens and legislators to dismiss the professors, their universities declined to do so. After carefully investigating the case on its campus, the University of New Mexico administration issued a letter of reprimand to the professor in question and temporarily removed him from teaching first-year classes. The president of Columbia University insisted that "under the principle of academic freedom, it would be inappropriate to take disciplinary action" against the professor who made provocative comments at the teach-in.

O'Neil noted the central role the AAUP has played in preserving academic freedom since September 11. In particular, he praised the Association for establishing the Special Committee on Academic Freedom and National Security in a Time of Crisis to assess risks to academic freedom and free inquiry posed by the nation's response to the September 11 attacks. (The committee issued a report published in the November-December 2003 issue of Academe.) O'Neil concluded his presentation by commending Mary Burgan for "leaving our Association much stronger today than I believe it ever has been."

Plenary speaker Debra Castillo, Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow and professor of Romance studies and comparative literature at Cornell University, gave an address titled "The Trouble with Tenure" in which she raised concerns about the tenure process. She described the emphasis on publishing in order to gain tenure, often called "publish or perish," as a situation in which academics are motivated to write not by "a desire to increase and share human knowledge but by a fear of academic death." Yet, she said, despite frequent discussion of this problem, tenured professors continue to view publishing as their "real" work and teaching as secondary. "How often do we speak condescendingly to each other about teaching?" Castillo asked the audience. "How often do we speak poorly of teaching, but then get excited about our 'work'?"

Castillo noted that a disproportionate number of the many faculty members today who hold contingent positions are women and minorities. She said that attaining tenure has become unreasonably difficult and complex, so that it is available only to a subset of the population. To address the problems with the system, Castillo recommended that institutions ensure that women and minority professors receive appropriate mentoring from their colleagues and establish mechanisms to foster appreciation for excellence in teaching. She called on the academy to launch serious, high-level gender and race bias studies of hiring, promotion, and tenure.

CENSURE ACTIONS

Delegates to the annual meeting voted on June 12 to place Philander Smith College in Arkansas on its list of censured administrations. Censure by the AAUP informs the academic community that the administration of an institution has not adhered to generally recognized principles of academic freedom and tenure. For additional information about Philander Smith, see the investigating committee's report in the January-February 2004 issue of Academe.