BY MATTHEW BOEDY

My former classmate Phil Christman wrote a long essay at Plough about the future of higher education, the humanities, and his particular context as a lecturer at the University of Michigan. If you haven’t read it, I wanted to bring it to your attention because it’s great. 

I wanted to highlight the end of Phil’s essay where those who don’t want to save the humanities should get what he calls “labor militancy,” which includes striking. 

“That, not ‘new efficiencies,’” is what will save mass higher education, if anything does. . . . Practically speaking, that is how you make the Case for the Humanities in a way that preserves their presence on college campuses. The people in my profession will grasp this before it’s too late, or they won’t.”

Phil knows of which he speaks. He wrote this about the essay on his Substack: “At about the time it posted, I was at a rally to stop the regents from cutting all the DEI staff positions and whatnot, something some regents are still denying their intention to do (to some people) while other regents go on Fox News and pretty much announce it.”

At Michigan in 2023 unionized graduate students used strikes to get better pay and benefits. And a one-day strike of UM Health workers was averted this fall when the union and school came to an agreement. 

For those unaware, my friend Phil and his Michigan colleagues have tools in the toolbox we in Georgia and across the South simply do not have. 

Phil and I both graduated from the University of South Carolina in a state like Georgia that doesn’t have collective bargaining for public sector workers. And we are years if not decades from that. Other barriers exist as well. 

That doesn’t mean we don’t aim to organize. We just use different means. 

For much of the last twenty years, the Georgia AAUP has not been a militant labor organization but one who used AAUP professional standards to influence faculty life on campus. Those standards by themselves have never had the legal power of a union contract. But they have been put into policy across our state. 

Like any policy, they can be changed. In 2021 the board that controls my university system gutted its tenure policy by removing academic due process rights the AAUP says has been the professional standard for decades. 

We as a conference had just organized a protest for the renewal of a pandemic mask mandate (for which we did not gain victory). We also put up a fight against the new tenure policy, leaning into the censure of our national organization. That led to an edit from the board a year later. But from there the system administration and board have ignored our pleas for more change. 

I also agree with Phil that without faculty organizing higher education as we know it—with humanities as a vibrant, needed element—will end soon enough. 

As Phil says, there are many who support higher education and many people who support the humanities, and they shouldn’t get the militant end of the labor stick. They should get a spectrum of arguments about soft skills to shared values like higher education is a public good. 

That is where professional standards come in. 

Tenure and academic freedom have been bedrock professional standards for faculty for decades. Those are under attack. 

But for those of us in the South, we can’t merely go militant. 

For one, the public is not with us. While Georgia-specific surveys show the public thinks well of our university system, national polls show a stark and deep decline in public opinion for higher education since 2015. 

In short, many love their alma mater or their favorite football team. But as for professors and curriculum and student loan forgiveness and diversity and much more, it’s not good. 

The best leverage we have is if the public believes in our profession. 

We have to convince the public that the protection we ask for—tenure and academic freedom—is worth it. So we have to convince them our professional values are their values.  

Education as a way to more than what you have. 

Education as a conscience to society. 

And professors as practitioners of these. Researchers, pedagogues, and supporters of students. To paraphrase Phil, our profession will grasp this before it’s too late, or they won’t.

Contributing editor Matthew Boedy is the president of the Georgia conference of the AAUP and works at the University of North Georgia. He can be reached through email or his Twitter account @matthewboedy.