BY MONICA OWENS

In support of the launch of our national Education Not Privatization campaign this week we interviewed David Hughes, vice president of the AAUP-AFT chapter at Rutgers University to learn more about how the Rutgers chapter successfully organized to defend academic freedom and exercised oversight of online offerings in the Rutgers-Pearson eCollege contract. This discussion is the first in what we hope will be a fruitful series of talks with AAUP chapters about organizing around privatization in online higher education.

Hughes talked with us about the issues at stake, the tactics, and the results of Rutgers’ organizing efforts and offered guidance to chapters doing their own anti-privatization work in online education. What follows is a brief synopsis of our chat, which you can view at the link below.

The core issue at stake in the Rutgers-Pearson contract was academic freedom. The terms of use agreement required by Pearson contained an obscenity clause prohibiting material vaguely defined as pornographic or obscene. The chapter objected to this clause, arguing that such restrictions to course curriculum undermine academic freedom, especially for faculty in disciplines like art history, literature, or sociology, whose curriculum may include material that some consider obscene, or discuss notions of the obscene. As a result, the chapter organized faculty to create a public record of their objection to this agreement by launching a resolution campaign starting with the College of Arts and Sciences and then moving on to working with other units. Before proposing the resolution, the chapter circulated a petition in advance to help educate and build faculty support and build a strong foundation for the resolution on campus.

For chapters currently facing similar online education contracts, David Hughes offered this advice for chapters hoping to educate, organize, and take action with their colleagues.

I would advise chapters confronted with a private online LMS to take the following steps:

1. Use leaks or a sunshine law (Open Public Records Act or equivalent public institutions) to obtain the contract between your university and that corporation;

2.  Read the contract in order to understand the scope of its ambition: online campus, managed programs, or just a few courses;

3.  Check the “terms of use” for the corporation (which can be Googled very easily) for constraints on academic freedom and intellectual property;

4.  Use leaks or the sunshine law to unravel your administration’s decision-making process vis-à-vis this LMS;

5. Present all the information to the faculty as violations of academic freedom, intellectual property rights, governance, and possibly more;

6. Organize people to oppose the corporation and the contract through votes in faculty-driven governance structures that rule on curriculum;

7. Circulate resolutions and petitions calling for a boycott of the corporation for the reasons above;

8. Throughout, explain how the deal with this corporation indicates a corporate, hierarchical, centralized management style on the part of your administration;

9. Win the first battle in that larger war!

For more information on the Rutgers campaign and how your chapter can help shape offerings and rein in privatization at your institution, see the AAUP’s Education Not Privatization toolkit.