Iowa Academe
Fall 1997

The Dodo and the Professor, Amy Elder
Fall meeting to focus on plight of part-timers
From the president, Warren Zemke
"My AAUP dues dollars at work": Report on the 83rd Annual Meeting of the AAUP, Kathryn Henry
ISU senate considers due process changes
PROGRAM, Fall Meeting of the Iowa Conference AAUP
Check out the new, improved Iowa AAUP Web site

The Dodo and the Professor
by Amy Elder

Elder is a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Cincinnati. The following has been adapted from an address she gave at the University of Cincinnati last October.

The gray whale
The rhino
the spotted owl
the snail darter
the tenured professor

What do these species have in common? It's obvious.

Let me focus on the endangered species to which I belong. Almost every time academics pick up a newspaper these days; every time we are handed down a decision from our respective boards of regents; every time we hear the latest proposed changes in our working conditions from our administrators, we should recognize that the difference between us and the snail darter may be more in swimming ability than in prospects of survival.

Academe, the Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors, last year devoted two complete issues to this subject (July-August 1996 and September-October 1996), with articles such as "Professors, the Media, and the Balance of Power in Higher Education," "It Came From Hollywood: Popular Culture Casts Professors in a Negative Light," and my favorite, "The (Academic) Job System and the Economy, Stupid; or, Should a Friend Let a Friend Get a Ph.D.?"

As many have noted—in Academe , The Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere—the references used in the media to characterize intellectuals in this country in recent years are most often derogatory, pejorative, even insulting.

Columnist Adele Ferguson, for instance, writing in the Ellensburg, Washington, Daily Record, October 13, 1995, complains about college professors' perceived laziness; economist Thomas Sowell, in the Knoxville News Sentinel for February 17, 1996, entitles his column "Faculty, a Stumbling Block in Universities."

I can remember my frustration watching Leslie Stahl interview faculty at the University of Arizona for Sixty Minutes a while back, implying with every question and commentary that full professors, not only at Arizona but everywhere, were uninterested in teaching, spent little or no time with undergraduates, and lived the privileged, wasteful life of the nobility in another time and place. Off with their heads! seemed the only solution.

There can be no doubt that in this time of brutal, corporate downsizing, taxpayer revolt, and economic insecurity among the middle class, the university professor has been made the poster child for a perceived, out-of-control institution of higher education in this country—wasteful at best, corrupt at its worst.

That the general public seems to have accepted the media portrait of the professoriate is frustrating but understandable, given the widespread misrepresentation of our profession.

Of greater concern to me, however, are the attacks on faculty by people who should know better—our own boards of regents and university administrators—attacks disguised as concern for bettering the learning of our students but, in reality, cynical moves to consolidate the control of higher education in the hands of business people and politicians by eliminating academic freedom and tenure—in plain terms, by finding ways to violate long-standing working conditions and get rid of full-time workers by replacing them with part-time.

We all know about the most notorious, recent case of an internal attack on faculty and students, that of the University of Minnesota, where the Minnesota Board of Regents proposed the imposition of a revised tenure code, providing for

•the firing of faculty in case of program changes, with one year's notice of termination and no faculty participation in the decision;

•reductions in faculty base pay on the assurance by an administrator that the reasons are "compelling";

•a post-tenure review that is primarily punitive, permitting annual 10% salary reductions;

•assertion of a dean's ability to suspend a faculty member without pay in certain circumstances, while a proceeding to dismiss is underway;

•proposal of pay cuts, which may be permanent, and are not limited in amount; and, to me the most dangerous of all,

•punishment of faculty members who do not "maintain . . . a proper attitude of industry and cooperation with others within and without the University community" (Paula Rabinowitz, Thomas Walsh, University Faculty Alliance, University of Minnesota).

But Minnesota, we might like to believe, is Minnesota. It's awfully cold up there anyway, and those folks might just be suffering from temporary frostbite of their capacity for fairness, something like freezer burn of good judgment. Surely, nothing like that dictatorial situation could ever happen in the sunny climes of Ohio.

Well, let's look at the situation closer to home. As you know, our own Ohio Board of Regents (OBR) has jumped with both feet into the icy waters of alleged cost-cutting and real down-sizing with their plan, which some call, "Ph.D.-forestation" (English Notes 1), to drastically cut back the state's graduate programs, primarily those in the humanities. The very language of the OBR's Committee on State Investment, the group that actually swung the ax, reveals their privileging of business interests over educational realities. This group determined to its satisfaction that Ohio was "over-invested" in doctoral education and needed to streamline its "investment portfolio" (English Notes 4).

And, lest we think that such a short-sighted overemphasis on dollars at the expense of education is only temporary, on September 28, the Cincinnati Enquirer ran a brief report, decorated with Governor Voinovich's picture, announcing that he had filled three vacancies on the Ohio Board of Regents.

Did he fill these vacancies with educators, that is, with appointees who understand the need for more than two or three locations in the state where our students can pursue graduate work in their chosen fields? who realize the hypocrisy of bragging about having Research I universities when it is clear that colleges of arts and sciences are being scaled back to eventually offer only service courses for the professional schools? Did the Governor choose educators for those empty slots on the Ohio Board of Regents?

It will come as no surprise to this readership that he filled the vacancies with someone who is "chairman and chief executive officer of the Miller-Valentine Group"; someone who is "chairman and chief executive officer of the Scott Fetzer Co." and someone who is a "partner with the Reese, Pyle, Drake & Meyer law firm in Newark" (B2). As the song says, "The times, they are a-changin’."

the dodo
the passenger pigeon
the woolly mammoth
Tyrannosaurus Rex . . .

All extinct now, due to overwhelming changes in their environments.

And the professor?

The article I found most pertinent in my recent reading on this subject was one in Academe aptly entitled "The Self-Inflicted Irrelevance of American Academics" (July-August 1996, pp. 18-24).

While attacks from without and within our institutions are coming relentlessly these days, the most debilitating injury, in my opinion, is inflicted by our own refusal to perceive what is going on and to mobilize against these destructive forces. I agree with author Loïc Wacquant, who asserts, "Caught off-guard by the increasingly brutal intrusion of the profit motive into the cultural sphere, obsessed with their internal divisions and squabbles, . . . cut off from society to an extent such that they no longer even realize their extreme degree of isolation, never have American intellectuals seemed so impotent as today" (22). Part of our problem is what strikes me as an adolescent, injured self-righteousness that we have retreated into for a communal, but useless, wound-licking.

We groan under our breath and commiserate with each other because we all know that nationally, the higher-education faculty workload increased from 44 hours a week to 52 between 1977 and 1988, as reported by the Washington-Based State Higher Educational Executive Officers (English Notes 1); but we are still only groaning and commiserating, while, despite that statistic, two years ago, the Ohio Board of Regents pressured state universities in Ohio to increase faculty workload by 10%.

We sit in sparsely-attended department and college meetings and lament the hiring of more and more part-time faculty who are being paid low wages and offered few or no benefits for almost full-time work; but we are unable to effectively express to the public our understanding of the debilitating consequences of this practice and others, such as the freezing of full-time hires, even to replace retiring faculty who may have been vital to successful programs.

We fret about very real threats to our job security when university administrations ignore the long-standing promotion and tenure standards established by our departments and colleges and apply new, previously unannounced requirements, thereby endangering our hard-working junior faculty, the future hope of higher education in this country. But, at the same time, we resist any attempt at post-tenure review, thus giving support to the public suspicion that we protect "dead wood," rather than participate in a scrutiny that, I am confident, would prove in 99 cases out of 100 that the politically-inspired attack on tenure is just plain wrong.

We even fail to explain to the public the educational values of tenure. As Michael Bérubé observes in "Public Perceptions of Universities and Faculty," "if tenure is wrongly understood not as a protection of academic freedom but as insulation from accountability, as a blanket guarantee of job security regardless of job performance, then its days are numbered, and the teaching profession will be subject to even more brutal conditions wherein only the wealthiest universities will bother to hire full-time faculty" (Academe, July-August, 1996, p. 15).

If it were ever unnecessary to communicate to the world at large the historical and present imperative of retaining an environment for research and learning where one cannot be fired because of unpopular opinions, those days are gone. If there were ever a time when our significance to society and the continued improvement of the life of all of our citizens was obvious and did not need to be pointed out, those days are gone. If ever we could have counted on being valued for our intellectual endeavors alone and not being required as citizens to take up the fight for justice in every area with our colleagues in other unions, those days are gone.

To change incorrect public perceptions of us and to use our expertise and experience to help shape the current debate, we must abandon our own false self-image that we are above the common fray, that we need not "dirty" ourselves with politics and the media.

It is a telling sign to me of how much ground we have to make up in our self-re-evaluation and understanding of how to use our common strength that on this campus, out of 1,926 members of the bargaining unit, only 694 are active and support their union by paying dues. While some of us may still be able to cut private deals with administrators to support our research, the trends I've previously noted indicate that, for faculty as a whole, well-published or not, tenured or not, excellent teachers or not, those days are gone.

As reporter Jon Marcus notes, "Like it or not, higher education is, more than ever, a consumer product. If the faculty doesn't think so, the admissions office certainly does" (Academe , July-August, 1996, 31).

Rather than hand over our personal fates and that of American higher education to the corporations, lawyers, politicians, and reporters who determine so much of our disturbing contemporary life, academics must join together at times other than times of crisis; we must pay for what we receive; we must be willing to hold ourselves to high standards; we must invite public scrutiny of what we do; we must share our intellectual interests at community forums, respond to unjustified attacks by public statements, support pro-education candidates for public office. We must take back the definition of who we are and what we do. The ivory tower? Those days are gone.

The difference between the dodo and the professor? It remains to be seen.
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Fall meeting to focus on plight of part-timers

Karen G. Thompson, the chair of AAUP’s national Committee G on Part-Time and Non-Tenure-Track Appointments, will offer the keynote address at the fall meeting of the Iowa Conference, to be held October 11 at Drake University in Des Moines.

Thompson, a linguist, teaches writing part time in the English department of Rutgers University. She is president of the part-time chapter of the AAUP at Rutgers and has spoken and published extensively on the topic of part-time faculty. Thompson has served on Committee G since 1990 and has chaired the committee since 1994.

The conference meeting will also feature a panel response to Thompson’s address. Besides Thompson, panelists will include Vicki Edelnant, a Wartburg College faculty member with extensive part-time experience both at Wartburg and UNI; Henry Milam, president of the Drake chapter of the AAUP; and Ron Troyer, dean of the college of arts and sciences at Drake.

Registration, which is free, begins at 9:15 a.m. in the Olmsted Center.
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From the president
by Warren Zemke

The recent nationwide increase in numbers of part-time faculty could be taken as an ominous or exciting signal. Part-time faculty seem to be very useful to many institutions. But, traditionally, part-time service was related to temporary or unexpected instructional needs of the institution. Now we seem to have two kinds of part-timers: regular part-time faculty and temporary part-time faculty.

There is a long list of controversial questions concerning the current use of part-time faculty. Because of flat-rate per-course salaries and reduced fringe benefits for part-time faculty, can it be said that part-time faculty are being exploited? How can we full-time faculty members be so oblivious to part-time faculty colleagues and their problems? When do part-timers prove so lucrative and useful to an institution that the institution makes a concerted effort to convert certain full-time positions into part-time positions? Is the increasing use of part-timers a subtle attack on the institution of tenure itself?

Some of the answers, and many more questions, will be provided at the October 11 meeting on the Drake University campus. Professor Karen Thompson starts us out with her keynote address (see front page). The panel discussion that will follow permits the sharing of a variety of perspectives, including those from the audience. The fall meeting provides the opportunity; take advantage of it!

Another opportunity for some is the national AAUP-sponsored conference on "Academic Freedom at Religiously Affiliated Institutions," to be held in Chicago on October 24-26, 1997. The conference starts Friday evening with the keynote address of University of Chicago Professor Martin Marty (religious history), runs all day Saturday, and finishes on Sunday with a noon brunch. Several other scheduled speakers are Dr. Eugenie Scott, Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education, Provost Rebecca Chopp of Emory University (theology) and Prof. Matthew W. Finken of the University of Illinois (law). For registration information call 1-800-424-2973 (extension 3020) or visit the AAUP Web page, <http://www.igc .apc.org/aaup/>. If you have other questions that I might be able to answer, call me at 319-352-8367 or e-mail me at <zemke@wartburg. edu>.

Finally, I need to note the sterling performance of our Iowa Academe editor, Greg Scholtz (see story in this issue). In addition to being the editor of the Iowa Conference newsletter, Greg is president of the Wartburg College chapter of the AAUP, chair of Iowa Conference Committee A, and member of the national Committee T on College and University Governance. What makes his editorial accomplishments even more impressive is that he does an award-winning job! On behalf of all the Iowa Conference, thank you, Greg!
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"My AAUP dues dollars at work": Report on the 83rd Annual Meeting of the AAUP
by Kathryn Henry

Professor Henry was Iowa AAUP’s delegate to the annual meeting, held June 11-15, in Berkeley, California, She is an associate professor of Russian at the University of Iowa.

"You’re from Iowa, right? Congratulations!" strangers kept saying to me.

As the Iowa representative at the AAUP Annual Meeting in June, I had accepted the plaque presented to the Iowa Conference when the outstanding newsletter award was announced at the first plenary session of the Assembly of State Conferences.

Any fears I had had about attending a large conference at which I knew no one were immediately erased.

I did, however, wish for two things: first, that the Greg Scholtz and others who work with him had been at the meeting instead of me; and, second, that I had brought a bundle of newsletters to distribute to those who wanted to see it.

I hereby pass on all the congratulations I received in California to those who work on the award-winning newsletter, and I want to thank them for helping me meet people at the conference.

The Claremont Hotel on the outskirts of Berkeley, California, provided a splendid setting for this large, friendly gathering of AAUP members and staff.

Conference sessions ranged from roundtable breakfasts to small panel discussions to the large meetings of the Assembly of State Conferences and the even larger plenary sessions. Panel discussions focused on topics such as "Intellectual Property in a Technological Age" and "Defending Tenure."

Prepared presentations by panel members were followed by comments and discussion from the audience, offering the opportunity for different perspectives and different institutional settings to be discussed.

Most impressive was the speed with which the AAUP staff made information available about the new tax bill and its impact on education. The House committee consideration of the tax bill had occurred more quickly and with less public discussion than anyone had expected. Indeed, the bill had been rushed through committee while we were all in California.

Despite the surprise speed and the distance, AAUP staff were able to prepare and circulate an outline of the (then-proposed) tax bill’s impact on education and a letter urging Congressmen and Senators to allow for more public debate on the issues involved.

In addition, a TIAA-CREF representative was invited to address the plenary session briefly about the bill’s potential impact on TIAA-CREF. These staff activities afforded a view of my AAUP dues dollars at work.

Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien of the University of California-Berkeley delivered the keynote address at the plenary session.

Addressing the ever-important issue of financing higher education, he focused on the balance between private and public funding that both private and public institutions rely on today. Undergirding and permeating his comments about finances was a commitment to education, learning, knowledge, and research—that life of the mind that attracted us to the academy and that we seek to share with our students. How good to be reminded of the fundamental reason we must work together to promote professional standards in higher education.
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ISU senate considers due process changes

An ad hoc committee of the ISU faculty senate has recommended AAUP-style policy amendments to ensure due process for faculty members sanctioned for misconduct.

According to an article in the September 10 issue of the Ames Daily Tribune, the committee’s work was initiated in response to the ISU administration’s suspension of education professor Michael Simonson without a hearing after a student accused him of sexual harassment. A district court judge later ordered Simonson reinstated (see "Judge lambastes ISU administration for mishandling sex harassment case" in the Summer 1997 issue of Iowa Academe).

In a related development, Jordan Kurland, AAUP associate general secretary, has notified the ISU chapter that ISU’s impending appeal of the Simonson ruling "makes the case a matter of key concern" to AAUP.

PROGRAM
Fall Meeting of the Iowa Conference AAUP
October 11, 1997
Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa

9:15 Registration (free of charge) in Olmsted Center (coffee and pastries)

10:00 Keynote Address: "Faculty at the Crossroads: Making the Part- Time Problem a Full-Time Focus."
Karen G. Thompson, Chair, AAUP Committee G

11:00 Panel Discussion on Part-Time Faculty
Panelists: Vicki Edelnant, Henry Milam (moderator),Karen Thompson, and Ron Troyer

12:00 Lunch Break and Committee Meetings

1:30 Business Meeting

•President's Report

•Treasurer's Report

•Elections

•Committee Reports

2:30 Chapter Reports

3:00 Adjournment

Check out the new, improved Iowa AAUP Web site

One of the best of the many AAUP Web sites is the homepage shared by the Iowa State University chapter and the Iowa Conference. Designed and maintained by ISU philosophy professor Heimir Geirsson, this site contains a number of links to other sites of faculty interest as well as to postings related to academic freedom and tenure issues. Set your Web browser to http://www.public.iastate.edu/~aaup/.
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