No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom

Cultural Front

by Cary Nelson

The modern university is sustained by academic freedom; it guarantees higher education's independence, its quality, and its success in educating students. The need to uphold those values would seem obvious. Yet the university is presently under siege from all corners; workers are being exploited with paltry salaries for full-time work, politics and profit rather than intellectual freedom govern decision-making, and professors are being monitored for the topics they teach. No University Is an Island offers a comprehensive account of the social, political, and cultural forces undermining academic freedom. At once witty and devastating, it confronts these threats with exceptional frankness, then offers a prescription for higher education's renewal. In an insider's account of how the primary organization for faculty members nationwide has fought the culture wars, Cary Nelson, the current President of the American Association of University Professors, unveils struggles over governance and unionization and the increasing corporatization of higher education. Peppered throughout with previously unreported, and sometimes incendiary, higher education anecdotes, Nelson is at his flame-throwing best. The book calls on higher education's advocates of both the Left and the Right to temper conviction with tolerance and focus on higher education's real injustices. Nelson demands we stop denying teachers, student workers, and other employees a living wage and basic rights. He urges unions to take up the larger cause of justice. And he challenges his own and other academic organizations to embrace greater democracy. With broad and crucial implications for the future, No University Is an Island will be the benchmark against which we measure the current definitive struggle for academic freedom.

Genres: Nonfiction

300 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 2, 2010

Reviews

[Kevin Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting counterpoint to Stanley Fish's Save the World on Your Own Time . Nelson is a lot drier than Fish, but then Fish is trying to stir things up and Nelson is the president of the AAUP.

[Rachel Cheeseman · Rating 3 out of 5]

A quick read with interesting and articulate, although at times belabored, proposals for higher education reform. Topically, however, it is so specific I doubt it would have much appeal to those outside the Ivory Tower.

[Alejandro Teruel · Rating 3 out of 5]

According to Wikipedia, Carey Nelson, an American Professor of English, was second vice-president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) between 2000 and 2006 and its president between 2006 and 2012.

Having spent my university career in Venezuela, I have next to no knowledge of the AAUP and faculty union issues and politics in the US. Thus it is not surprising that I found the book to be somewhat rambling and repetitious, and that I felt it assumes prior knowledge of a number of polemical cases (Norman Finkenstein, Ward Churchill, governance and administrative decisions in Louisiana universities in the wake of Katrina) which I lack. In spite of this, I found interesting and cogent perspectives and arguments, which I would have liked him to develop in more depth. It was also interesting to note that whereas Nelson's viewpoint as a self-proclaimed (liberal) radical may strike the American reader as coming from the political left, in Venezuelan terms his liberalism would be considered more right wing than left wing!

In general, Nelson bases his arguments on academic freedom on the 1940 and 1970 interpretations of the 1915 AAUP Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure. According to the Wikipedia entry on AAUP:

The statement is straightforward, based on three principles of academic freedom. Briefly summarized, the first principle states that teachers are entitled to "full freedom in research and in publication of the results" [...] The second principle of academic freedom is that teachers should have the same freedom in the classroom. The third asserts that college and university professors are citizens and should be free to speak and write as citizens "free from institutional censorship."

Nelson considers that these principles are under attack and have suffered substantial erosion as universities increasingly see themselves as business corporations and misguidedly focus on education as synonymous to professional training and faculty and student careerism, and limit research to applied product-oriented commercially funded research. He includes a surprising number of US cases which exemplify his allegations. This university-as-business viewpoint tempt university administration to reduce or eliminate tenure in favor of what Nelson terms “contingent faculty” -which include graduate students hired to teach- that can be grossly underpaid, have little or no academic freedom, and can be fired at will. Again he presents several horror stories and warns that tenured positions may well be on the verge of extinction, as contingent faculty is both cheaper and easier to handle. Chapter 2, (How a campus loses its way), explicitly describes sixteen threats to academic freedom:

1. Instrumentalization, the notion that higher education is primordially about job training;
2. Excessive reliance on contingency faculty;
3. Authoritarian administration;
4. Abuses of the national security state;
5. Administration restrictions on the use of communication technology;
6. Unwarranted research oversight;
7. Neoliberal assaults on academic disciplines, particularly those in social sciences and the humanities. This also includes the use of “political correctness” to emasculate academic debate;
8. Managerial ideology;
9. Circumvention of shared governance;
10. Globalization -Nelson presents a particularly chilling picture of possible university globalization;
11. Opposition to human rights;
12. Inadequate grievance procedures;
13. Religious intolerance;
14. Political intolerance;
15. Legal threats by federal and state courts;
16. Claims of institutional hardships based on the US financial crisis to override long-standing agreements on tenure or contractual conditions;

With some adjustments, such as substituting “ideological” for “liberal assaults on academic disciplines” and “grossly inadequate government funding to eliminate any vestige of university autonomy” for “claims of institutional institutional hardships based on the US financial crisis” , most of these threats unfortunately apply to many Venezuelan universities. Nelson provides many anecdotal stories about his involvement in some of the more flagrant attacks on academic freedom and shared governance and argues passionately for unionization not only of tenured and tenure track faculty but also of all contingent faculty, including hired graduate students. This may or may not be a solution in the US; in Venezuela, Orlando Albornoz, the extremely critical sociologist and researcher on universities in Venezuela has argued that excessive faculty union power in governance and grievance procedures in autonomous universities led to mediocre and fragile institutional results both in higher education and research. Tragically, under Chávez and his successor, even the little that was being achieved was swept away, as university salaries and budgets plunged precipitiously, faculty left the country in droves, student protesters were arrested and populist measures were enacted to allow massive increases in student matriculation by eliminating entrance exams, creating huge new state universities, and relentlessly attacking university autonomy to the point of having the Ministry for University Education develop an opaque and unauditable system for assigning all students to state-funded universities.

Even though Nelson mentions with admiration some of the work done by the Canadian Association of University Teachers, most of his book seems to me to be excessively inward focused on the US and in particular on the AAUP. There is no mention, for example of the 1997 UNESCO Recommendation Concerning the Status of Higher Education Teaching Personnel, in which chapter VI (Rights and freedoms of higher-education teaching personnel) states:

26. Higher-education teaching personnel, like all other groups and individuals, should enjoy those internationally recognized civil, political, social and cultural rights applicable to all citizens. Therefore, all higher-education teaching personnel should enjoy freedom of thought, conscience, religion, expression, assembly and association as well as the right to liberty and security of the person and liberty of movement. They should not be hindered or impeded in exercising their civil rights as citizens, including the right to contribute to social change through freely expressing their opinion of state policies and of policies affecting higher education.

and, even more to the point:

27. [...]Higher-education teaching personnel are entitled to the maintaining of academic freedom, that is to say, the right, without constriction by prescribed doctrine, to freedom of teaching and discussion, freedom in carrying out research and disseminating and publishing the results thereof, freedom to express freely their opinion about the institution or system in which they work, freedom from institutional censorship and freedom to participate in professional or representative academic bodies. All higher-education teaching personnel should have the right to fulfill their functions without discrimination of any kind and without fear of repression by the state or any other source. [...]

28. Higher-education teaching personnel have the right to teach without any interference, subject to accepted professional principles including professional responsibility and intellectual rigor with regard to standards and methods of teaching. Higher-education teaching personnel should not be forced to instruct against their own best knowledge and conscience or be forced to use curricula and methods contrary to national and international human rights standards. Higher-education teaching personnel should play a significant role in determining the curriculum.

29. Higher-education teaching personnel have a right to carry out research work without any interference, or any suppression, in accordance with their professional responsibility and subject to nationally and internationally recognized professional principles of intellectual rigor, scientific inquiry and research ethics. [...]

As regards shared governance, the Recommendation indicates in section B (Self-governance and collegiality):

31. Higher-education teaching personnel should have the right and opportunity, without discrimination of any kind, according to their abilities, to take part in the governing bodies and to criticize the functioning of higher education institutions, including their own, while respecting the right of other sections of the academic community to participate, and they should also have the right to elect a majority of representatives to academic bodies within the higher education institution.

32. The principles of collegiality include academic freedom, shared responsibility, the policy of participation of all concerned in internal decision-making structures and practices, and the development of consultative mechanisms. Collegial decision-making should encompass decisions regarding the administration and determination of policies of higher education, curricula, research, extension work, the allocation of resources and other related activities, in order to improve academic excellence and quality for the benefit of society at large.

It is also worth reading section VII on Duties and responsibilities of higher-education teaching personnel. The complete Recommendation can be found at http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-UR....


In chapter 7 (On weakened ground: The AAUP, pedagogy, and the struggle over academic freedom), chapter 8 (No campus is an island: Reflections on the AAUP Presidency) and chapter 9 (Evolution or devolution: The future of the AAUP's Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure), Nelson takes a hard, critical and very personal view of the AAUP, its structure, finances and membership problems.

In his concluding chapter, Nelson neatly sums up his main points:

No University is an Island sought to be unsparing in its account of the challenges that higher education faces -from the disempowering of hundreds of thousands of contingent faculty to the proliferation of crass commercial relationships that sabotage research research independence, from efforts to police or chill classroom speech to external campaigns seeking to influence tenure decisions, from increasing indulgence in administrative fiat, to political assaults by conservative organizations, from unbridled faculty careerism to unionization that has been stripped of its social agenda.

Higher-education is still seen as a key tool for social progress, and tackling issues such as academic freedom, shared governance, student opportunities, the quality of higher education and adequate university funding remain crucial to higher education's role in building a better future for all. This book does not contribute to all these issues, unfortunately it does get sidetracked into ad hominem attacks and belated and incendiary rejoinders to Nelson's erstwhile opponents and rivals, and sometimes loses sight of the forest, but its moral compass, that is its interpretation of AAUP principles in the current climate of higher-education planning and execution, is certainly worth considering seriously and in depth.

[Jim O'Loughlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A serious analysis that is forward thinking without trying to be cheery. Fascinating final chapters on the inside workings of AAUP. Essential reading for anyone that has worked to transform organizations from within.

[Bob Mabbitt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pretty much a must-read for all those pondering "the future of higher education."