RESOLUTION

Members approved the resolution that appears below during the annual meeting.

Mary Alice Burgern. We pay tribute today to Mary Alice Burgan, gifted teacher, insightful scholar, wise administrator, and courageous public intellectual, on the occasion of her retirement from the position of general secretary of the American Association of University Professors.

Born in Charleston, West Virginia, Mary pursued her undergraduate studies at Seton Hill College in Pennsylvania, where she graduated magna cum laude, and her graduate education at the University of Illinois, Urbana, where she earned an MA and a PhD. For thirty years, Mary served at Indiana University as assistant professor, associate professor, and professor of English, chair of the English department, and associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. She was actively engaged in faculty governance at IU, and was elected leader of the IU-Bloomington and University Faculty Councils.

Mary's scholarly writing encompasses broad areas, including nineteenth-century English and American literature, children's literature, women in literature, and nineteenth-century social history. Her book, Illness, Gender, and Writing: The Case of Katherine Mansfield, was published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in fall 1994. Mary has served on the editorial board of Victorian Studies, and as a referee for numerous university presses and prestigious journals.

Mary was a member of the faculty of the Lilly Endowment Workshop on the Liberal Arts for seven years, was twice elected to the delegate assembly of the Modern Language Association, sat on the executive committee of the Association of Departments of English, and served a one-year term as a member of the board of directors of the American Council on Education. Her awards include a Danforth Associateship, Indiana University's Distinguished Service Award, and an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Marquette University.

In 1994, Mary was chosen to lead the American Association of University Professors. She has served in that post for ten years of historic change in the academic profession. During her decade as general secretary, Mary led the AAUP in many battles: the tenure wars at the University of Minnesota, the attack on affirmative action at the University of California, and, most recently, the post-September 11 threats to academic freedom. During this time of national crisis, Mary has spoken publicly and courageously in defense of free expression and free inquiry on our nation's campuses. In addition, she has brought to the office of general secretary a deep commitment to the values of shared governance, a special sensitivity to faith-based education, an understanding of the complexities of medical education, and a marked empathy for the plight of part-time instructors and graduate students.

As the Association of Departments of English so aptly described Mary when it awarded her the Francis Andrew March Award for Distinguished Service: "Sometimes gentle, sometimes forceful, always resolute, she has worked successfully to instantiate the life-affirming principles and values of humanistic study in our institutional lives as scholars, teachers, and students. She has made our profession a better place to be."

Copyright American Association of University Professors Jul/Aug 2004
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