Missouri Conference
American
Association of University Professors
Missouri Academe
November, 2003
§
Annual Spring Meeting Set for Columbia, Saturday, March 6: Theme for the meeting: “The Civic
Work of the Professoriate: Defending Higher Education Funding”
§
Campus and Chapter Developments
§
Joint Misssouri Philological Assocation/UMKC AAUP “Academic Labor” Conference: February
26-28, 2004
§
Fourth Annual MO AAUP/Missouri Association of Faculty Senates
Lobby Day: Feb. 3, 2004
§
Higher Education Funding Symposium at Southwest Missouri
State University
§
Chapter Development Program
§
From the Keyboard, by David Gruber, editor
§
Has your membership lapsed?!
Annual
Spring Meeting Set for Columbia, Saturday, March 6
Theme for the meeting: “The Civic Work
of the Professoriate: Defending Higher Education Funding”
The Executive Committee has tentatively set the
Annual Meeting for March 6 in Columbia.
Date and location are subject to change, but mark your calendars now.
Details as to exact location and program are yet to be determined.
This year’s conference will be earlier because there
will be homework to do—after the meeting, which is early in the legislative
season. The meeting will combine
professorial analysis of the state of public education and the civic
commitment to the future with concrete action after the meeting. We will return to our campuses and
communities equipped to offer the leadership that will put faculty, administrations,
civic leaders, students and parents to work.
The quality and affordability of Missouri higher education—its future as the
catalyst for the quality of life in the state—is at stake.
Current plans call for two sessions in addition to
the usual business meeting, beginning with a speaker or panel who can explain
the current situation in Missouri and prospects and possibilities for
protecting higher education. Possible speakers include members of the recent
Governor’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education and/or legislators
who can speak to constructive, structural responses to the present
situation. Analysis will be promptly
complemented by a workshop by national AAUP staff and/or faculty leaders who
will help us build a campaign of public activism.
Note that this meeting will work in tandem with
other AAUP meetings and coalitions this spring as indicated elsewhere in this
newsletter.
Information will be announced as the meeting is
developed on the conference web site and in the spring newsletter.
Campus
and Chapter Developments
These are challenging times in Missouri for the profession and for
higher education. Our campuses face
shared challenges with local variations: astute AAUP chapters are responding with programs that respond to the needs of their campus circumstances.
At the University of Missouri-Columbia, the system
presidency of Elson Floyd continues to hold promise. Dr. Floyd has taken a more directive role
in the management of the University Hospital, turning red ink there to black,
and has taken steps to improve a situation that has been a particular source
of frustration for faculty: the backlog of grievances has been addressed and
some faculty grievances are even being upheld. The MU Faculty Council plans to take up the
question of contingent or “non-regular” appointments, in
hopes of restoring tenure-track positions.
The Lincoln University chapter of AAUP recently offered
University President David Henson the opportunity to meet with the chapter
and the faculty to discuss communication and governance, which were the concerns gathered by the chapter as it combined membership
recruitment and a faculty survey in a door-to-door campaign. The chapter is inviting the President to
participate in an ongoing series of such meetings. The chapter developed a “third
party comment” for the North Central Accreditation process and were
invited to meet with the visiting team.
As the chapter grows in membership and campus presence, its
representatives attended a Board of Curators meeting at which they were
successful in urging the Board to table a proposal that would have changed
standards on notice of non-reappointment to diverge from AAUP principles.
Southeast Missouri State University is operating in the second year
of a “financial emergency.” A first
round of program reviews recommended the elimination of programs and
reduction in faculty positions, some of which are held by tenured
faculty. A Voluntary Retirement Incentive Program seeks to reduce
the number of involuntary faculty terminations.
The Truman State University chapter sponsored a town meeting
in 2002 on the structure of faculty governance. Chapter members served on a university task
force that developed a proposal for a new Faculty Senate structure in which
18 of 20 voting members
will be faculty,
replacing a senate in which 10 of 15 voting members were faculty. In anticipation of the hiring process that
resulted in the appointment of Dr. Barbara Dixon the chapter sponsored a town
meeting to provide faculty the opportunity to develop ideas on the
characteristics for Truman’s next president, which was attended by a Board of
Governors member. Chapter members
worked closely with the administration, Faculty Senate, and the national AAUP
office to develop a model “stop the tenure clock” policy, which was adopted
as policy.
Westminster College faced serious challenges of
restructuring in light of a multimillion dollar deficit and rapid depletion
of the endowment. Enrollment and
finances have stabilized. The
administration has worked closely with faculty and the AAUP chapter to
respond to the situation with reflective consultation and the good practice
of AAUP standards; as an example, the chapter worked to persuade the
administration that the faculty group who had earned a positive tenure
decision should not be denied tenure due to the need for restructuring. As Westminster works its way through financial
challenges, the college and the chapter consult closely for the well-being of
the faculty and the institution.
The University
of Missouri-Kansas
City continues to be a model or a test case for the university of the future
as a “university without borders.”
Close of the heels of the partnerships of the life sciences initiative
will be the development of Institute for Urban Education, which will supplant
the traditional school of education.
The AAUP chapter continues to be vigilant and alert to the new nexus
of questions of governance, responsibility, and accountability in the new
domain of public/private/foundation partnerships, trying “to get to the
table, if we can even find where the table is.”
Joint
Misssouri Philological Assocation/UMKC
AAUP “Academic Labor” Conference
February 26-28, 2004
The Missouri Philological Association and UMKC AAUP
are jointly sponsoring an academic conference that will focus on academic
labor. In addition to “traditional”
academic sessions there will be panels and open discussions on the condition
and trends of academic work.
Topics will be broad and inclusive: teaching as
labor, the labor of teaching composition, academic labor organizing, the
experience of graduate students and TA’s, labor in the curriculum, threats of
restructuring to accountability and governance/workplace democracy, shared
concerns in schools and universities, to name just a few.
Speakers include Martin Espada
and Cary Nelson, AAUP Second Vice-President and well-known analyst of
graduate student and contingent faculty issues.
This conference is supported in part by grants from
Missouri AAUP and the National AAUP’s Assembly of
State Conferences. The conference will
be held at the Sheraton at Country Club Plaza. Check the UMKC AAUP web site for the final
schedule: http://iml.umkc.edu/aaup/
Fourth
Annual MO AAUP/Missouri Association of Faculty Senates Lobby Day: Feb. 3, 2004
Legislators respond: what is important to them is
what is important enough for citizens to make a case for. We professors need to be familiar and
responsible faces, not just “those people who work nine hours per week.
Join MO AAUP and MAFS in Jefferson City and walk the halls. Training and planning, Monday evening, 2/2;
visit to the Capitol, Tuesday, 2/3.
Watch the MO AAUP website and the MAFS web site
(http://www.mafs.org) for more details.
Higher
Education Funding Symposium at Southwest Missouri State University
Plans are preliminary but the SMSU chapter of AAUP
is working with the University’s administration and members of the governing
board to present a symposium on the condition and prospects for higher
education in Missouri.
The symposium will go beyond ivory tower analysis:
its ambitions are to make a difference by organizing faculty, staff,
students, and parents to do the legwork of convincing Missouri’s decision makers that our future
depends on high quality, affordable higher education.
Chapter
Development Program
“Why we don’t need a growing chapter” myths.
“We can organize in time to respond to an academic
freedom, governance, or fiscal crisis.”
To begin organizing
to respond to an imminent fight is to have lost the battle. Besides, the character of the profession is
won or lost more often in the quiet decisions about tenure track positions or
priorities than in the prominent battles.
“Our practices are consistent with AAUP policies; we
took care of that years ago.” Do
you have a “stop the tenure clock” policy for younger colleagues? Are your salaries impressive? Is someone tracking the proportion of
non-tenure track appointments on your campus?
“Old Joe talks to the Dean whenever someone has a
problem.” Let’s hope Old Joe doesn’t get hit by a
truck.
“You can’t make a difference around here.” Would
you accept that from your students?
Your campus needs a vocal, ongoing presence to speak
for the health of the profession and to ensure that higher education remains
focused on the common good: your campus needs a chapter, with a growing
membership to show that faculty concerns are important.
State and national AAUP funds are available for
training in the nuts and bolts of keeping your chapter vital. Colleagues are available to help analyze
your campus climate and suggest practical, do-able projects. Consider attending an AAUP weekend
leadership workshop
or the Summer Institute.
Sometimes the toughest thing about revitalizing the
chapter is setting the first meeting and then the regular meeting dates: the
tasks that need doing are usually obvious.
Contact David Gruber, Missouri Conference Membership Chair. (contact info at right)
From
the Keyboard, by David Gruber, editor
Well, this coming spring there’s no excuse that you
don’t have an AAUP or AAUP-related meeting to attend! I wish more of the details were finalized
as to dates and the like, so that this newsletter didn’t have so much
emphasis on “coming attractions,” but it is impressive the extent to
which AAUP and its allies of all sorts are taking our case public. We Missourian faculty are doing what our
colleagues across the country are doing in collective bargaining and in more
traditional venues: we are taking up the civic work that is necessary to
insist that the profession be an attractive and sustainable form of life,
that higher education is a common good that must be defended and developed
and to raise the questions of disinvestment in the public purpose and of
transfer of shared, public resources to potentially private ends. It is good for us to meet each other and
understand the broader trends, but the work is not only national and
state-wide: there is plenty to be vigilant about on our home campuses, in the
daily minutiae of decisions and priorities.
On a closely related topic, let me claim an editor’s
prerogative. AAUP’s
Council has just approved a comprehensive new policy statement on “Contingent
Appointments and the Academic Profession,” which affirms the need for the
integrity of our professional work and offers guidance for what will be a
gradual, hard-earned process by which all faculty have the opportunity to
undertake a reintegration of all the aspects of our faculty work in all
appointments, with an appropriate structuring of appointments and appropriate
compensation. The policy statement calls
for faculty in contingent appointments to have appropriate measures of due
process, to receive the care in hiring and evaluation/review to which they
are entitled as our professional colleagues, and then the assurance of
continued employment that is grounded in the performance demonstrated in that
evaluation. We can no longer pretend
that the “part-time phenomenon” is the occasional professional teaching a
specialized course or the retiree teaching as a hobby. Contingent appointments, particularly the
explosion of full-time, non-tenure track appointments, are far too large a
proportion of all faculty appointments to be dismissed or ignored with
embarrassment. One of the best things
about the new policy statement is that it doesn’t merely scold administrators
and legislatures for their past decisions: it calls on faculty to work
with administrations to stabilize the profession and develop concrete
mechanisms to incorporate our colleagues into the full life of the academy
and protect their academic freedom. As
adamant as we must be about the tenure system, we have a basic responsibility
not only to these colleagues but to the public purpose of higher education:
to be silent is to become irrelevant.
It has been a quite an honor for me to work on this policy: I hope you
will read it and put it to work on your campus.
Has
your membership lapsed?!
Don’t panic if you’ve already sent in your renewal; it could simply
be that the national office hasn’t yet processed your payment.
However, if you have let your membership slip, please consider
renewing: the Missouri Conference decided to invest in a stamp
to convince you to invest in the
profession and its viability in the future.
AAUP is the voice for the profession itself, in public venues at the
state and national level, in insisting on good practices on our campuses, and
in setting the forum to discuss the
issues that challenge us.
You can take satisfaction in knowing that AAUP is training faculty
leaders and developing effective chapters—and in knowing there’s someone in
Washington to answer the phone call of the faculty member who needs
help. Please renew, as your share of
defending the profession.
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