The Future of Academic Freedom by Henry Reichman

The Future of Academic Freedom by Henry Reichman

Author:Henry Reichman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press


Chapter Nine

Can Unions Defend Academic Freedom?

Almost from its inception, the American Association of University Professors has been frequently referred to as a union.1 The New York Times, for example, titled a scathingly hostile editorial greeting the association’s formation “The Professors’ Union.” Although the association’s first president, John Dewey, was a proud member of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the AAUP’s founders went to great lengths to reject the union label. At the third annual meeting in 1917, President Frank Thilly argued that the AAUP’s growth could be attributed to convincing faculty members that the group would refrain from union tactics. One member’s letter, published in the AAUP Bulletin, seemed to validate that view, declaring it “unfortunate that we should have become identified in the public mind with a movement whose immediate concern is with the fortunes of the professors. It goes all right in a jocular way to be spoken of as a labor union, but an impression of this kind could do great damage to us if it becomes more than a joke. I fear that it has already reached that stage.”2 As Walter Metzger has written, “There was a deep aversion among academic men to entering into an organization whose purpose smacked of trade unionism.” Writing in the early 1920s, Upton Sinclair was more brutal: “The first aim of the Association has apparently been to distinguish itself from labor unions,” he wrote, “whereas the fact is that it is nothing but a labor union, an organization of intellectual proletarians, who have nothing but their brain-power to sell.” If it was such a union, however, it was not, as Metzger noted, “ ‘one big union for all,’ but a union of the aristocrats of academic labor.”3

The AAUP’s early leaders saw their organization less as a defender of its members or even of the interests of the professoriate as a whole and more as a custodian of “higher education’s contribution to the common good,” a goal that remains an important element of the association’s mission to this day.4 However, as Hans-Joerg Tiede has demonstrated, the AAUP’s initial focus on the defense of academic freedom was “set by events rather than by design and not without dissent.” The “broader goal was to further the professionalization of the professoriate.”5

Actually, in pursuit of professional ends the AAUP was from the start not wholly reluctant to address the “bread and butter” issues of salary, pensions, and working conditions that regularly concern trade unions. The 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure acknowledged that one of the “ends to be accomplished” by means of tenure was “to render the profession more attractive to men of high ability and strong personality by insuring the dignity, the independence, and the reasonable security of tenure.”6 More practically, one of the association’s earliest efforts involved negotiations with the Carnegie Foundation over the fate of the foundation’s pension fund for teachers at select colleges and universities, which led eventually to the formation of what became the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association.



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