UUP and its affiliates: AFT Higher Education Issues Conference Higher ed under fire; unions fighting back

Public higher education is in a crisis across the country, as states grapple with declining revenues and campus administrators and trustees assail tenure and the art of teaching.

Yet the leadership of AFT’s higher education arm sounded a note of strength and determination at the group’s annual national conference in April in Atlanta, as unionists pledged to not only fight additional cutbacks but to restore recent cuts.

“We’re talking about power, and power has to do with collective action,” said UUP President William Scheuerman, who chairs the AFT Higher Education Program and Policy Council. “Deficits have started in some states already, and they’re going to be record-breaking. These are tough times, but AFT is taking action to help the areas that have been hardest hit.”

Among the areas AFT is focusing on nationally: the protection of tenure in the face of increasing numbers of part-time, non-tenure-track faculty; protection of smaller class sizes and adequate numbers of faculty; and the restoration of funds that have been cut from budgets for public higher education.

Toward that end, UUP joined other public education unions from New York for a May 3 march in Albany that drew tens of thousands of teachers, unionists, parents and students — all sending a resounding message to New York lawmakers that Gov. George Pataki’s proposed cuts to public education will not be tolerated.

Of those cuts, $183.5 million would affect SUNY, threatening reductions of faculty and classes, increases in class size and the very real possibility that students would have to wait even longer for required courses to be offered.

“If we don’t take a proactive stance, we’re going to be gone, and the life of the mind that we love so much is going to be gone too,” Scheuerman told an enthusiastic crowd of 250 higher education unionists from around the country at last month’s conference.

Scheuerman urged his listeners to expand AFT’s organization, to work together at the state level, to build coalitions with like-minded organizations and, above all, to protect the working conditions of faculty and staff. “Our priorities are really about building power at all three levels that we operate on: local, national and state,” he said.

That effort won’t be easy, cautioned Scheuerman, an AFT vice president.

“We have a lot of work in front of us,” he said. “I venture to say we are fighting for our lives.”

Of special concern at the conference was the devalued role of the tenured professor — the faculty member who combines a love of teaching with a passion for research, and is adequately compensated for both roles.

More and more often, AFT leaders are seeing professors divided into two groups: those who teach and those who do research, with the educators relegated to a lesser status. Vast numbers of part-time faculty are hired solely to teach with no hope of ever gaining tenure or recognition for their research.

At the same time, colleges and universities are cashing in on research conducted on their campuses, using high-profile faculty names to draw corporate sponsors. The result: Faculty members risk losing academic freedom, while the art of interacting with students in the classroom becomes a secondary concern.

The conference’s Irwin Polishook lecturer, Gary Rhoades, assailed the trend toward a faculty divided into teachers and researchers.

“It is time to reassert control, not just over our teaching, not just over our research, but over our academy,” said Rhoades, director of the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Arizona. “This is about colleges and universities marketing and selling the intellectual property of our universities. The corporate model in universities has made academics into managed professionals.”

Scheuerman, in calling on AFT unionists to develop stronger locals and greater numbers of them, once again invoked the ideal of higher education.

“This is where we should go beyond convention and get lost in the world of creation,” he said. “Higher education should not be a marketplace. The market viewpoint doesn’t see higher education as a public service.”

— Darryl McGrath