BY CAROLYN BETENSKY

In 2020, the AAUP began the process of designing a Racial Equity Initiative that would transform the organization at every level. President Irene Mulvey appointed Dr. Glinda Rawls, Associate Professor of Counselor Education at Western Michigan University and At-Large Council Member, to lead the AAUP on this journey.

At the AAUP Biennial Conference, Dr. Rawls presented an overview of her four years as chair of the initiative. The fundamental goal of the Racial Equity Initiative, she explained, has been to make AAUP a more racially just organization. To achieve this goal, AAUP staff and members of the National Council underwent extensive training that cultivated a deep awareness of systemic racism. In the long term, this training will allow the organization to examine and transform its own internal practices and assist chapters in creating meaningful change.

By 2022, the training had been completed. Dr. Rawls convened three racial equity implementation teams to carry the initiative forward: one group focused on external-facing work, a second studied internal-facing work, and a third was tasked with assessing the AAUP’s culture and climate.

Dr. Rawls acknowledged that, at times, the Racial Equity Initiative met with real challenges. Change is difficult, and an organization as complex as the AAUP was bound to face barriers in implementing it. Surveys revealed that those who participated in the training and subsequent group work experienced a broad range of emotions over the course of the four years. Nevertheless, participants have come together as a larger group, and the initiative continues to make important gains. Accomplishments include:

• Changes made in the Redbook
• Committee A conducts investigations and reports from a racial equity lens
• Diverse membership of Racial Equity Initiative Committee
• Member survey on racial equity yielding over 1800 responses
• Special Committee Report on UNC in 2022: first time an investigation specifically identifies issues of systemic racism and institutional inequity
• Contract between AAUP and US-AAUP includes negotiation for racial equity
• Creation of webinars and workshops for chapters on bargaining for racial equity
• Programming at the Biennial Conference and Summer Institute on racial equity
• Increase in staff diversity during the pandemic
• Department of Organizing Services outreach to HBCU/HBIs
• Articles focusing on racial equity in Academe, including consideration of W.E.B. Dubois and the history of racism in the AAUP
• Podcasts highlighting issues relating to racial equity (including one episode devoted to the Racial Equity Initiative)

Having completed her term on the National Council, Dr. Rawls has stepped down from her position at the helm of the Racial Equity Initiative. At the AAUP Biennial Conference earlier this month, President Mulvey read a resolution honoring Dr. Rawls for her extraordinary service.

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I spoke with Dr. Rawls after the conference about her experience leading the initiative and her hopes for the AAUP. She credits her WMU colleague (and former Council member) Dr. Lisa Minnick for mentoring her and encouraging her to get involved in leadership at the local and national levels. Dr. Minnick urged Rawls to attend the Summer Institute and helped to fund her participation.

Faculty of color tend to be underrepresented in leadership roles, Rawls explained, partly because unions have not historically centered issues relating to racial equity and discrimination. If unions want to increase the representation of faculty of color in leadership positions, they will need to make antidiscrimination policies part of their collective bargaining agreements. Discriminatory policies and practices create hostile working conditions for faculty of color; unions must address discrimination explicitly in their contracts to protect all faculty.

Racial equity conditions are academic freedom workplace conditions. The wave of legislation banning the teaching of materials advocating diversity, equity, and inclusion serves as a potent illustration of their interrelatedness. Since the teaching and scholarship of many faculty of color and GLBTQ faculty are concerned precisely with the kinds of “divisive concepts” such legislation seeks to bury, these faculty members are affected disproportionately. Most of the course content Dr. Rawls teaches, she points out, would be banned in Florida or Texas. Antidiscrimination is a central tenet in the American Counseling Association’s code of ethics.

Racial equity means rejecting some historical misconceptions about academic freedom. When academic freedom is understood to consist more in a faculty member’s right to use the “N word” than in another faculty member’s right to teach and write in their field, Dr. Rawls suggests, the defenders of academic freedom have a problem. The question the AAUP needs to keep asking is, “Who are we defending, and why?”

I asked Dr. Rawls how her experience as a therapist and educator of counselors shaped her leadership of the Racial Equity Initiative. Therapists, she said, are trained to help individuals explore change processes within themselves. They provide support, encouragement, and opportunities for reflection. The same principles, she explains, can apply to larger change processes. It is important to be patient, to go slowly, and to continue moving forward. The tools of the therapist were especially helpful, she adds, in those moments at which participants seemed to have reached an impasse. Therapists are trained to listen differently and to project ideas back to their speakers in useful ways.

Dr. Rawls emphasizes that the goal of achieving racial equity cannot wait until other problems are resolved. While she wishes there had been more time to do the work, Dr. Rawls leaves her AAUP position very proud of what this initiative has accomplished and hopeful about its future.

Contributing editor Carolyn Betensky is professor of English at the University of Rhode Island, a former AAUP Council member, and a cofounder and executive committee member of Tenure for the Common Good.