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and Online Renewal Missouri Academe and moaaup listserve Conference Officers and Executive Committee |
Missouri Conference
American
Association of University Professors
Missouri
Academe
February, 2003 Conference Spring
Meeting Set for Lincoln University,
April 5 AAUP
LeadershipTraining Institute Recent AAUP Activity
throughout the State It’s Not a “Part-Time” Issue
Anymore…. Missouri AAUP
Electronic “Newsletters” Fourth Annual
AAUP/MAFS Lobby Day, Feb. 3, 2004 From the Keyboard, by David Gruber, editor Conference Spring Meeting Set forLincoln University, April 5 Topic for the meeting:
“The Crisis in Public Higher Education in Missouri.” -Meeting to be
held in the Scruggs Center Ballroom (Student Union) -Prof. Beulah
Woodfin (University of New Mexico) of the AAUP ASC Executive Committee to
Speak. This
year’s meeting will focus on the obvious: threats to access for students and
challenges to the quality teaching and research critical to educating the
next generation of citizens and ensuring the prospects for higher education’s
contribution to the civic welfare and economic development. The commitment of
public funding is the immediate crisis; colleagues in the private
institutions are also surely feeling the impact of economic hard times. As citizens all faculty face the
responsibility to sustain the educational infrastructure. The
situation is fluid and the meeting program is evolving as well. Watch the conference web site and your
email for Missouri Academe E-Newsletters. For quick summaries of
current conditions see http://hometown.aol.com/moaaup/moresp.doc and
http://hometown.aol.com/moaaup/natresp.doc. For
conference election information see the conference web site. To nominate, contact Linda Pitellka, outgoing
president. AAUP LeadershipTraining Institute
New York City, March 29-30 -Chapter
needs a jump start? -Your
activist techniques a little rusty? Contact
Linda Pitelka for possible travel cost assistance. Recent AAUP Activity throughout the State The challenges
are daunting. There are, however,
reasons for optimism in that Missouri faculty are working more assertively
for the profession and the academy with the support of AAUP resources. The Association couldn’t operate without
members and concrete, financial resources; bucking the national trend in
non-collective bargaining sites, Missouri AAUP membership is stable and
increasing slightly, but not without work. In the past year we’ve had campus visits
from national staff and faculty leaders at Central Missouri State University,
the University of Missouri-Kansas City, Southwest Missouri State University,
St. Louis University, Harris-Stowe State College, and Lincoln University,
with gains in membership and activism at each. Well established chapters are stronger, and even better news is
that Harris-Stowe is forming its chapter and Lincoln has a new chapter that
had grown quickly and already taken up the work of addressing concerns about
terms of appointments and submitting a supplement to the University’s North
Central Accreditation report, in the wake of a recent vote of no confidence
in the President there. The Truman
State University chapter held meetings on campus governance; subsequently a
faculty committee is considering changes in the composition of Faculty
Senate. The Westminster College
chapter is providing a leadership in the campus’s efforts to deal responsibly
with budget challenges and cuts in positions. AAUP at the UMKC continues to lead efforts to ensure that
long-term planning, resource allocations, and decisions on leadership have
the benefit of the fullest faculty input.
(For their impressive website and newsletter, reporting on the
“Blueprint” process, and governance concerns in the School of Biological
Sciences, see http://iml.umkc.edu/aaup/ )
The UMKC chapter is now the largest in the conference. Faculty throughout the University of
Missouri System worked hard to effect revisions in Board of Curators policy
that were enacted with little faculty review and participation last spring in
anticipation of budget woes and that most observers read as seriously
undermining tenure. Faculty at CMSU
are conducting a card campaign to pursue collective bargaining. (Those of you with campus access to the
archives of the Kansas City Star may wish to search “collective
bargaining” for a 12/4/02 article; the Star also carried articles
about the governance goings on at UMKC.) In addition to conference president Linda
Pitelka and national council member David Gruber, Missouri was represented at
the Annual Meeting by Ed Gogol of UMKC, supported by a Konnheim award from
the national association, and by Marshall King of Maryville University,
supported by a Hopper Travel Award, which is of course named after long-time
Missouri AAUP activist John Hopper.
State conference and national monies have been put to good use in
support of travel for AAUP training: SMSU, UMKC, Westminster, CMSU, Webster,
Lincoln sent colleagues to the Summer Institute and other ASC training
venues; Howard Miller from Lincoln also attended the Governance Conference in
Atlanta. AAUPers in Missouri are
increasingly not only committed to the right principles but also situated
with the techniques and growing chapters to make a difference. Another prospect for optimism is the University
of Missouri System’s new President, Elson S. Floyd, who comes to our state
highly regarded by the AAUP collective bargaining chapter at Western Michigan
University. One of Dr. Floyd’s last
acts at WMU was to support a new collective bargaining agreement that moved
many full-time, non-tenure track faculty from contingent status to
eligibility for tenure. This effort
to stabilize the profession runs counter to the troubling trend of reducing
the proportion of tenure eligible appointments; let us hope that Dr. Floyd
will continue this leadership in securing the profession in his new position
here in Missouri. It’s Not a “Part-Time” Issue Anymore…. From Assessing
the Silent Revolution: How Changing Demographics Are Reshaping the Academic
Profession, by Martin J. Finkelstein and Jack H. Schuster, AAHE Bulletin,
October 2001, http://www.aahe.org/bulletin/silentrevolution.htm "Perhaps the sharpest
difference between the contemporary faculty and their predecessors a
generation ago is seen in the kinds of academic appointments they hold....The
escalation of full-time, “off-track” appointments is all the more striking
when viewed in historical perspective because such appointments were almost
unknown in 1969 — amounting to a miniscule 3.3 percent. While the number and
proportion of such “non-regular” full-time appointments grew throughout the
1970s and 1980s, the phenomenon has mushroomed in the 1990s. Indeed, as
Figure 2 shows, the majority of all full-time faculty appointments made in
the 1990s — new hires in 1993, 1995, and 1997 — were off the tenure track. In
other words, non-tenureable term appointments — essentially nonexistent three
decades ago — have become the norm, the modal type of faculty appointment.
Faculty members are being redeployed at an amazing rate — and regular
academic appointments are rapidly becoming less common." "But consider that at this juncture it is
apparent that no more than one in four recent faculty hires holds a regular,
traditional appointment. (Very roughly, close to half of faculty members are
part-time and, among the full-timers, half are being hired into term
appointments.)" National AAUP Website: www.aaup.org The meat and potatoes of the Association’s work is speaking for academic freedom and tracking our economic and professional working conditions. In these times that are both
economically and politically stressful, the AAUP website is increasingly a
first stop on responding to the events of the day and working for the future
of the profession, as the Association turns from policy statements to policy
work. The AAUP webpage contains updates and professorial responses to the news of the day; the “informational outlines” on the “legal” link are excellent topical points of entry to our policies. Missouri AAUP Electronic “Newsletters” Half of the Missouri Conference AAUP membership has email addresses on file with the national Association. Those of you who do know that we have on a very infrequent basis sent out “electronic” newsletters via email. At the risk of cluttering your email, this has two advantages. First is a considerable savings of time in layout, printing, assembly, and most of all postage; these savings allow the conference to support travel to AAUP meetings and training workshops and to invest in chapter mini-grants. The second benefit is the potential for nimble effectiveness; email and the conference web page can send timely reminders of meetings or for a same day “call your legislators” lobbying work. Use the www.aaup.org website to ensure the national office has your current email address. FOURTH Annual AAUP/MAFS Lobby Day, Feb. 3, 2004 Watch your email and the conference web site for
information for next year’s opportunity to convince our legislators of the
importance of higher education to the state.
Training and planning, Monday evening, 2/2; visit to the Capitol
Tuesday. Also consult
http://www.mafs.org. Put 2/3/04 on
your calendar! Chapter Development Program As important as the policy, research,
and legislative work of the association is, a vital campus chapter with
growing membership is just as essential, particularly in these awful budget
times. An active chapter may respond
to the individual faculty needs and promote good practice, but more
importantly speaks for academic freedom, shared governance, and the
conditions necessary for our professional work. An AAUP presence insists that higher education for the public
good is a civic necessity as well as a public trust. The profession needs more than your
commitment to principle, even more than your own membership and local
activism: the association needs your citizenship and your participation in
increasing membership. As hard as our
professional staff works, no one can enact our autonomy for us: if we are
serious about shared governance, we must be a membership organization,
particularly as so many pressures operate to deprofessionalize our work. Fortunately, the Association emphasizes
training in chapter effectiveness and membership recruitment. State and national funds are
available to assist with expenses in attending the Summer Institute, as well
as for such thematic conferences as the governance conference or the
conference on academic freedom in religiously affiliated institutions. Contact Linda Pitelka, for
information. For more general assistance in
chapter and membership development recruitment—campus/chapter organizing
visits, membership materials, liaison with the national organizing
staff--contact David Gruber, Missouri Conference Membership Chair. Conference Officers
For full contact information, see the Conference Web
Page: http://hometown.aol.com/moaaup/ Linda
Pitelka, President, Maryville University 530 Union Blvd,
Apt 406, Saint Louis, MO 63108 314-454-1489,
pitelka@swbell.net John Harms,
Vice-Pres., Southwest Missouri State U. 417-836-5676, jbh221f@smsu.edu John Slosar,
Sec.-Treasurer, St.
Louis University 314-977-2750,
slosarja@slu.edu Executive
Committee Keith
Hardeman ,Westminster College 573-592-5263,
hardemk@jaynet.wcmo.edu Margaret
Gilleo, Maryville University 314-529-9201,
ext. 3027, trees@primary.net Stuart
McAninch, University of Missouri-Kansas City 816-235-2446,
mcaninchs@umkc.edu Jan McMahon
, Webster University 314-968-6970,
mcmahojw@webster.edu W. A.
Simpson, University of Missouri-Columbia 573-814-6000,
SimpsonA@health.missouri.edu David
Gruber, Past-President, Truman State U. From the Keyboard, by David Gruber, editorSo, I was wrong the last time I
wrote this column: Spring, 2002 was a fat time compared to the current fiscal
and political landscape. Defensive
hand wringing over post-tenure review or some other “reform” movement that
identifies us as under-worked, under-achieving, and over-protected seems
almost quaint now. Choose your
battleground. The wake of September
11 and the pending war brought predictable accusations that we are all
unpatriotic lefties, but perhaps our professional commitment to the
university as a public trust should lead us to be less worried about
“personal” attacks and just as attentive to efforts to restrict the academic
exchange of ideas, criticism, and research advances. Nor is this tendency limited to the
political or military: as public investment in the operational infrastructure
of higher education decreases and we
become more dependent on tuition and external funding, it becomes
increasingly difficult to sustain the independent judgment that safeguards
the public good, rather than merely serving private goods, or even converting
public goods to private uses. Such
concerns seem particularly salient in the biological /medical/health care
plexus; I’d be embarrassed about being able to say nothing more about that if
I thought any human could understand that realm. We need to be attentive to deep transformations in the university and in
the profession. We’ve long been aware
of the extensive use and frequent abuse of our colleagues who hold part-time
appointments; now we learn that the nineties brought a sharp increase in the
proportion of full-time appointments that are non-tenure track. Faculty are increasingly contingently
attached rather than firmly seated in their institutions. Not only might the profession become less
attractive to the students who would be our successors when they see many of
their instructors working for fast-food wages, but it also seems reasonable
to ask whether all these factors will make us much more transient free agents
and much less interested in our commitments to the academy, far beyond a
reasonable self-interest in having a decent lifestyle. Of course it could be that
these musings are pessimistic hyperbole, nursed by imaginative nostalgia and
wintertime solar deprivation. However
it does seem unavoidable there are two tasks to which we who have taken up the
care and leadership of the profession by our AAUP membership and activism
must turn. First we must sponsor
what might have seemed unnecessary: we must provoke our colleagues to discuss
and renew what it means to be a profession working for the public good that
perhaps includes balancing our economic and professional stability with our
attentiveness to social welfare. We
no longer have the luxury of worrying just about percentage points in our
raises or the fine points of the tenure regulations. Second we must figure out new venues for
our citizenship on behalf of the public trust that is higher education. The current funding woes on both our
public and private campuses suggests that the polity takes for granted the
institutional infrastructure that is essential for educating citizens. We have work to do. |
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