BY MATTHEW BOEDY

In the past few days, as president of the Georgia conference of the AAUP, I have received two interesting comments from faculty in my state. 

The first was a plea to organize, rally, and protest more “to build collective strength.”

The second was a plea to reform the AAUP because in the mind of this faculty member the AAUP has betrayed its mission by politicizing the academy: “The AAUP is not part of the solution to academia’s current woes—it is part of the problem.” [This second comment seems akin to the one described and addressed well by John K. WIlson in a post last week.]

These are not isolated comments, though it is hard to judge how representative they are of Georgia’s 11,000 public higher education faculty and thousands more private school colleagues. 

As the readers of this blog know, there are many versions of the AAUP in many minds. You can’t please all or mold an organization to all nor can you choose idiosyncratic paths. And yet this organization rightly and powerfully claims to represent all faculty. At the same time, there are more than a few who either don’t want that representation or think it is bad for higher education.

I think we have to address both comments. 

In a state like mine, deeply “red” but also an across-the-aisle supporter of higher education for decades, I have struggled to respond to both views.

I have struggled because I don’t see these two comments as opposites. 

The opposite of a call for more collective action is indifference, individual stability set above group power, and of course silence. These are bad actions for us all. 

The opposite to the “problem, not solution” claim would be it seems to retreat from whatever betrayal they see as the problem. And to this faculty member, it seems the betrayal is the politicization. 

In response, one can begin by noting very clearly that the nosedive of public opinion of higher education is not limited to one party.

One also can note that, contrary to right-wing myths, faculty across all disciplines have differing views not just on their institution, but their profession. And like many professionals, their voting patterns do not always align with the goals, status, and ideals of their profession. In other words, like many people, faculty choose candidates because of other reasons besides their employment.

This is why the idea to hire more “Republican” professors as a reform to rebalance higher education is deeply unserious. (Just as it would be absurd to hire more “Democrats.”) One can vote Republican and also be a good professor. One can be a good professor and vote Democrat. If we give in to the trend that party identification is part of a faculty profile we will lose. 

While I don’t agree with the claim that AAUP has politicized higher education, I think what the second comment is getting at is the grief over the death of the “independence” ethos of higher education. This in turn has slowly but surely strangled the power of AAUP professional standards built on that ethos—academic freedom and shared governance. 

I don’t have to remind you, but I think it’s important to say that faculty have less and less important roles in changes on campus. And areas we have been historically in charge of aka curriculum face ongoing erasure. In speech in the classroom and outside, faculty face not only government and institutional negative responses but also the always looming online onslaught. 

This death of independence is not merely because one party claims falsely we are not accountable. It’s that the oversight itself has changed. Goalposts moved and all that. And so then how the AAUP represents all faculty has changed. 

This is the message I hope would resonate with the faculty member concerned with politicization. That person clearly doesn’t want politics involved in their job. That is certainly one implied definition of academic freedom. 

But that era of independence worked because both parties supported higher education. That era is over. 

That doesn’t mean partisanship is the answer. It does mean using the avenues of politics—policy and public opinion—to strengthen academic freedom. 

The message I hope would resonate with the “organize more” colleague is that there is a temptation to win the battle but lose the war. 

Losing the war of course means losing wide swaths of the public even while being victorious in court or legislatures. 

It’s clear from the “politicization is a betrayal” crowd that while they may support the AAUP defense of professional standards, they associate its new ethos as a labor organization as a negative, particularly not in sync with the aforementioned independence ethos. This is to them politicalization. 

One can recognize this shift in the motto used last week by rally-goers across the nation in response to cuts to federal grants and research at universities: hands off our jobs. While one might read this as a call to higher education’s independence, it’s more of a call by a group who labor in those jobs. 

I appreciate and applaud the AAUP lawsuits and the victory this past week against Trump’s executive orders. But clearly there are faculty and large swaths of the public that don’t trust higher education (and whose elected lawmakers want to dismantle it). And if they know the AAUP at all, they see it as “the opposition.” [Hence my choice of the image with this post.]

Yet we have to find ways to reach as many of these people possible with the message that higher education is good for us all, that its labor is good for us all. 

So how do we labor in this new era to convince the public and all faculty of that message? It’s an important question we all need to answer. 

Maybe this might help as a starting point. I  had our university’s marketing head visit my class the other day. He rolled out for them the school’s new emphasis, moving from a military school frame to one of a diverse student body. He said that in the past the school offered one picture of the school and asked students not in the picture to imagine how they fit into it. Now the school is offering many pictures and helping students recognize their place. 

These few hundred words certainly don’t reach a full answer. Maybe those who attend the Summer Institute at Morehouse in Atlanta can offer some answers. I hope many of you can join me there. 

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.