BY MATTHEW BOEDY

This month the Georgia conference of the AAUP released results of a statewide survey of faculty opinions on changes to tenure and the AAUP censure of the University System of Georgia. 

I’ll get to the results later. But I wanted to describe how and why we as an advocacy conference set out on this massive undertaking. I think the narrative and the obstacles we encountered are instructive for all advocacy chapters and conferences that can’t rely on collective bargaining membership and organizing efforts. 

I will start by saying that what led me as Georgia conference president to start this process was the idea that we in a nonunion state need to think of ourselves as unions do and collect information on issues and report to faculty members like unions. 

We also wanted to keep the pressure on our university system, which is the only statewide system on the AAUP’s list of censured administrations other than the State University of New York system. 

Second, I knew that as a small conference we needed to find a way to speak to faculty statewide. We don’t have that in my system. There is an advisory group of faculty senate leaders, to which I as conference president belong, and we have a listserv. But the listserv involves a middleman to get to faculty, and some of the people in middleman roles don’t have faculty-wide email privileges while others don’t like the AAUP—believe it or not. 

So, I created an email database of all instructional staff in my state. I used online faculty directories and our state’s open-records law to amass 11,000 email addresses. Only one university charged me for their list, and we paid for it out of state conference funds. 

I anticipate two reactions to this from Academe Blog readers: (1) you never had such a list? and (2) who would ever create such a list with all the spam blockers, policies against mass emails, and the long-time extreme dislike for email among faculty?

To avoid spam blockers, I set up a verified Google account with a domain name for our conference and used that to send emails to the 11,000 faculty. But two institutions completely blocked emails from our account. 

I also didn’t send any emails from any account to faculty at my own university lest I be labeled as using university equipment to spam or violate our mass-email policy. I posted a link to the survey on our faculty discussion board where many people could see it. 

I know many of my emails were sent straight to quarantine, some to a “junk” folder of some type, and some got through. I don’t know the exact ratio. I got plenty of out-of-office automatic replies and undeliverable notices, and a few people filled out the “take me off your list” form I created to meet legal requirements. 

Despite those obstacles, I deem the effort a success. 

With help from our conference members spreading the word of our survey, we got almost 1,000 responses from a pool of 11,000 people. And we got responses from all twenty-six institutions in the system. 

We got some media coverage. And I shared results with that aforementioned system group while sending results through another email to all 11,000 faculty. 

And those results? They show a wide negative impact on the reputation of our university system and faculty retention and recruitment. A majority of faculty respondents say if the gutting of tenure remains, they will be looking for new jobs, and some say they already are (see data for question 9 below).

Second, more than two-thirds of faculty respondents say they are telling people from other states not to move to Georgia for a job in the system (see data for question 10 below). Third, about 30 percent of survey respondents said they knew of direct effects from the gutting of tenure on faculty searches. While a majority of respondents said any impact was too early to know, the AAUP expects impacts to grow over the next few hiring cycles.

Counting an email campaign highlighting a video explainer I made of the changes to tenure and the resulting censure, we will have sent out three emails to statewide faculty this semester. 

I’m not describing a new communication method. Or some new idea to organize. Some of you may already have such a list and use it. 

So why didn’t we? I think the historic hallmark of AAUP organizing in advocacy states has been the individual effort. One faculty member talking to another. And if you have members in many departments and at many institutions doing that, membership can grow. 

But there is a limit to that kind of effort, especially during a pandemic. And especially now when so many of us are just burned out and setting different priorities. Some of us have given priority to chapter building and some have chosen other interests. We have had new chapters start recently and some die off. 

Also, there have been changes in our shared governance processes. We are now a diverse system led by a system administration using its power to direct from above. System policies are the new norm. And micromanaging from a board is the path ahead. Individual cases of violations of academic freedom and administrative overreach have  become largely unknown to us as a state conference. The conference needed a statewide reach even if we didn’t have members on each campus. And we wanted to pressure the system’s board of regents to reverse course on tenure. 

We as a conference also needed to step up our game. We have a long history in this state of the AAUP advocating for faculty and creating changes in shared governance. But we also now are a bit player in so many battles we need to be in. 

That aforementioned statewide faculty group was started by the AAUP conference. Which is how I come to sit as an ex officio member. And that group is retooling its makeup to better tell the story of faculty statewide and not rely on the system administration for advocacy. We are doing that from an AAUP perspective. 

And having everyone’s email is the first step. 

Matthew Boedy is associate professor of rhetoric and composition at the University of North Georgia and president of the Georgia state AAUP conference.