CARY NELSON ELECTED AAUP PRESIDENT

Academe, May/Jun 2006 by Bradley, Gwendolyn

In April, Cary Nelson, a wellknown scholar-activist, was elected president of the AAUP for a two-year term. Nelson is professor of English and Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. An author or editor of twenty-five books and the author of 150 articles, he has served on the AAUP's national Council for ten years, the last six as second vice president.

In such books Manifesto of a Tenured Radical (1997), Academic Keywords: A Devil's Dictionary for Higher Education (1999), and Office Hours: Activism and Change in the Academy (2004), the last two coauthored with Stephen Watt, Nelson has written widely on most of the major issues confronting the academy: academic freedom, collective bargaining, contingent labor, corporatization, globalization, the Internet, political correctness, sexual harassment, and the relationship between teaching and research. He regularly lectures around the United States and abroad and is frequently interviewed about higher education.

Nelson praises the AAUP's accomplishments, but warns that change is necessary if the AAUP is to reach its full potential. His message to AAUP members: "The AAUP needs to do a far better job of communicating with you. We also need large numbers of you to step up to the plate and help us with our work. We are short-staffed and need to become a true participant organizalion."

Nelson's primary field of scholarship is modern American poetry. His books Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945 (1989) and Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left (2001) have been at the center of the effort to reform and expand the American poetry canon. But he has also been an academic activist for years, defending the rights of graduate students and part-time faculty, joining union rallies across the country. He has also served on the executive committee of the Modern Language Association.

In other election results, Larry G. Gerber, professor of history at Auburn University, was re-elected first vice president and Jeffrey A. Butts, professor of biology at Appalachian State University, was re-elected secretary-treasurer, each for third terms. Estelle Gellman, professor of Educational Psychology at Hofstra University, was elected second vice president.

The AAUP also elected new members to its national Council, the governing body of the Association. Council members serve for three-year terms. The members were elected from ten geographical districts representing colleges and universities in the United States, Canada, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. A complete list of the new Council members appears on the AAUP Web site.-G.B.