Invisible Adjunct

Is the AAUP's Censure Policy Deserving of Censure?

Bennington? I pondered the question for days. I believe in solidarity, and I had some concern that the AAUP censure was essentially a picket line -- that to cross it, figuratively speaking, by sending in a job application might be tantamount to treason. However, the conflict at Bennington is long past, so the effect is not the same as it would be had I applied in 1995. Communication with some local AAUP leaders led me to conclude that AAUP censure is more a guild's warning about poor working conditions, a shaming exercise, than a union's inviolable picket line.

-- Max Clio, "Bennington or Tenure?"

The AAUP censure as a guildlike shaming exercise sounds about right. The censure does not in itself carry any direct institutional or legal weight, though as the AAUP notes in "What is Censure?" "courts have often referred to AAUP principles and standards in addressing what is customary in the academic world." In that document, the AAUP defines the practice as follows:

Censure results from the Association's findings that conditions for academic freedom and tenure are unsatisfactory at a college or university. The 1940 Statement of Principles asserts that institutions of higher education are conducted for the common good, and that the common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free expression. An institution that disregards the concepts of academic freedom and tenure will have difficulty in fulfilling its basic purpose.

Interestingly enough, the AAUP includes Eric Marshall's "Victims of Circumstance: Academic Freedom in a Contingent Academy" in its list of Resources on Academic Freedom and Tenure. Marshall's article, which I blogged about here, points out that "the usual and customary understanding of academic freedom has also long wedded it inseparably to tenure, thereby greatly diminishing its relevance for adjuncts and largely excluding them from the conversation." On the front page of its website, moreover, the AAUP also provides a link to its recent Draft Policy Statement on Contingent Appointments and the Academic Freedom. This statement, which I briefly considered a couple of weeks ago (more to follow when I get a chance), argues that "currently, neither peer review nor academic due process operates adequately to secure academic freedom for most contingent faculty members."

At the moment, there are about 50 schools on the AAUP's list of Censured Administations. Not bad, eh? Only 50 out of how many thousands of community colleges, 4-year colleges, and universities (I don't have the total figure, though this would be worth looking up; I do know that it's in the thousands). But wait. How many community colleges, 4-year colleges, and universities rely on contingent faculty who lack any sort of security or academic freedom? According to the above-linked policy statement on contingent appointments:

As of 1998, [non-tenure track] appointments still accounted for nearly three out of five faculty positions, in all types of institutions. In community colleges, more than three out of five positions are part-time non-tenure-track positions, and 35 percent of all full-time positions are off the tenure track. Non-tenure-track appointments make up an even larger proportion of new appointments. Through the 1990s, in all types of institutions, three out of four new faculty members were appointed to non-tenure-track positions.

Given this high proportion of contingent academic appointments, and given the AAUP's contention that such contingent appointments violate the principles of academic freedom as the association has itself defined it, it seems to me that the AAUP applies its censure very selectively indeed. Why does it not censure those institutions that rely too heavily on part-time contingent appointments? ("too heavily" is obviously open to interpretation: I'll throw out "more than 20 percent of undergraduate courses taught by contingent faculty members" as a rough guide). It looks as though the censure system focuses on isolated incidents involving egregious violations, while ignoring a systematic violation that is slowly but surely undermining the very bases of academic freedom.

I suppose that if the association took the larger threat to academic freedom more seriously, the list of censured institutions would be so lengthy that the practice might lose its rhetorical force? Still, for the AAUP to ignore the lack of academic freedom for nearly half of those it claims to represent does not strike me as very effective guildlike behavior.

Posted by Invisible Adjunct at September 23, 2003 01:24 PM