BY MATTHEW BOEDY
I was asked by our state’s largest newspaper here in Georgia to write a column offering some priorities for higher education as lawmakers return in January for our annual legislative session. You can likely guess my priorities. Bigger budgets, better salary, and stopping culture war attacks on higher education.
But those priorities are of course not shared across all legislators. As we all know, some want to cut diversity funding and kill tenure.
The heroic efforts of state conference leaders in Texas showed us all what can be done in response to such legislative attacks. You can read about those efforts here.
Could my state conference have done that? Could yours? How might you plan now for such an attack? Texas offers some good strategies. I want to add to those by offering advice on how to approach faculty who may be on the fence about such organizing.
As I told my colleagues in South Carolina last month, no one is coming to save us. We have to do this ourselves. This is me thinking out loud on how.
First, the biggest audience is lawmakers. But from my experience lawmakers don’t see a need for faculty advocacy outside the lobbying they get from campus and system administrations. In other words, as a state conference president, I have to convince lawmakers that what they hear from me is needed and different from the army of higher education legislative liaisons across the state. That is often hard to do. And it takes time.
It may be preaching to the choir of the readers of this blog to say that whether it is a university or system administration in your state, the lobbying for higher education can’t be limited to one party. But do you have an answer for a faculty member who takes the opposite approach? That they don’t have the time or energy to do that work? This is often a question I get, whether implicitly or explicitly.
My answer slightly reframes the question to get at what I think is the main theme: the fear of ineffectiveness. I know many faculty in our state don’t have a history of self-advocacy. They don’t know how to tell their own story. Many might have balked at the idea of public facing scholarship, let alone public advocacy.
This is why I think our faculty’s best rhetorical move is personal impact. Whether collectively or individually, we have to meet the moment of this current culture war that is eating away at academic freedom with the promise of higher education as seen in our classrooms.
We need more allies in statehouses and the only way to get allies is to convince lawmakers that we share goals. Lawmakers may love their local school but not know any faculty who work there. And that vacuum is filled with nationalized attacks on professors.
We need to change that dynamic by showing how we as faculty are impacting the state in good ways. That means speaking the language of economic development, but in an educational frame. For example, for faculty that means promoting the individual impact of our graduates. Collect those stories and share them with lawmakers. Collect them for the lesser known, smaller programs.
The other audience for faculty is state higher education overseers. We call them regents in Georgia. It was fascinating to me to hear when attending the board of regents meeting at my school, University of North Georgia, this year that many of the regents didn’t know much about it. We have been around for more than 150 years, are one of six senior military colleges in the nation, and of course enroll about 18,000 students on five campuses. And what did these regents hear from the administration? Personal impact stories from students.
Outside collective bargaining, the only sustainable way to impact the members of such overseer boards is to get a permanent faculty seat on the boards. Other states like Florida have such representation. Though as my colleagues in that state will surely note, it is only one vote. And often a dissenting vote. But such a campaign by a state conference might engage more faculty and promote AAUP membership.
Finally, as much as I have banged the drum of institutional and state government advocacy in my time as president, the best and most impactful advocacy move has always been more AAUP members. The more we grow, the more we as a group will have political capital. And the only way to get that is recruitment. That may be individual acts or part of a larger organized approach. Texas leaders focused on “AAUP enthusiasts”—those who were curious about the Association but not yet members. Targeting specific groups across campus is a great idea.
In the end, we all have to do this work.
Contributing editor Matthew Boedy is the Georgia AAUP president and professor at the University of North Georgia. He is on Twitter or X @matthewboedy.
