On most days at his small summer cottage here, Roger W. Bowen drags his kayak over the rocks, slips into a cove, and paddles out into the open Atlantic Ocean. On a recent trip he is talkative and inquisitive. With every couple of strokes he bounces to a new subject: the evidence of ancient volcanoes that can still be seen in the rocks along the shore, the harsh economics of lobstering, the migratory habits of local birds, the strength of a liberal-arts education.
All of this he manages to pull off without sounding pedantic. He simply seems fascinated by the world, and still, after two decades of coming here, enthralled by this spot on the Maine coast.
After a career in higher education as a professor and college administrator, Mr. Bowen is about to take the reins of the American Association of University Professors, the nation’s foremost faculty group. In some ways he and the group make an odd couple. Out in his kayak, floating over the swells, Mr. Bowen is an energetic 57-year-old. Nimbleness, on the other hand, has never been the trademark of the AAUP. The group’s statements still form the foundation of any discussion of academic freedom, and it remains the primary institutional voice of the country’s faculty members. But its membership is down sharply from a generation ago, and other groups, including the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, often grab more headlines when defending professors. While supporters see it as venerable and judicious, others call it ponderous and lethargic, a group that moves too slowly for a high-speed age.
Mr. Bowen’s appointment as general secretary, the AAUP’s top staff position, was announced in November, but he doesn’t officially take over until July 1. He will be introduced at the association’s annual meeting this week, in Washington, a gathering that will focus less on the new guy and more on honoring a decade of service by Mary Burgan, the departing general secretary.
Mr. Bowen has spent the past month here at his Maine camp, clearing fallen trees, chopping firewood, and kayaking with his wife, Barbara. It’s his final respite before starting his new job, but idleness isn’t part of his relaxation. In the woods near his cottage, he points to his latest “little art project": He has taken the metal rim from an old wheel, filled the center with small white stones, and placed larger gray stones in a spiral pattern inside, creating what he calls a meditation spot.
It took him just an afternoon of work but hasn’t gotten much use yet. “I meditate,” he says, “but very quickly.”
Protecting Principles
When Roger Bowen was an undergraduate in the 1960s at Wabash College, the AAUP had 66,000 members. As he prepares to take over the national office, the association’s rolls have fallen to 44,000. That decline has occurred even while the number of professors in the United States, fueled by an explosion in part-timers, has doubled, to more than 1.1 million.
Officials of the association speculate that the increase in the use of adjuncts has contributed to the decline in membership. Ms. Burgan adds that the group’s membership has remained steady in recent years, an achievement when other organizations have seen a continued decline in their numbers.
Getting back some of those lost members is one of Mr. Bowen’s first goals. “Thousands upon thousands of faculty members are not supporting an organization that is supporting them,” he says.
He draws a comparison to the American Civil Liberties Union. He has been a member of the ACLU for years not because of some package of services that he gets from the group, he says, but because he believes in the principles that it stands for and wants to support them. He’d like professors to see the AAUP more like thatout there protecting fundamental principles. At the same time, he emphasizes that the AAUP has never asked whether a professor is a dues-paying member before helping him or her in an academic-freedom case.
The AAUP’s membership dues vary according to a number of factors. Full-time professors pay $140 per year in national dues. Part-time professors pay a quarter as much, $35.
Those part-timers are an enormous issue, and one that is growing in importance. Mr. Bowen calls the “adjunctification” of the faculty one of the top two or three problems facing all of higher education. With half of the faculty now made up of part-timers, academe is moving toward a piecework system similar to that of farm laborers, he says. He recently met a part-timer in New York who teaches at eight institutions, juggling as many as 16 courses for a not-so-whopping total income of $45,000 a year.
That looks a lot different than the ideal academic job, says Mr. Bowen, noting the tenured position he had at Maine’s Colby College, in the political-science department. AAUP is always beating the drum for tenured jobs, even while they seem to be slipping away. As a compromise, some institutions are moving to use more full-time professors who are not on the tenure track. So is the association in favor of part-timers’ getting those types of jobs? Sure, Mr. Bowen says, getting better pay and benefits is a good start. “But we always say in the next breath that our primary purpose is to guarantee academic freedom -- and that is inextricably linked to tenure.”
The ‘Sex President’
Paddling over the waves as he talks about the merits of a small-college education, Mr. Bowen doesn’t look much like “a national poster boy for the utter collapse of standards in American academia.” That’s what the New York Post once called him.
After teaching at Colby and then serving as vice president at Hollins College, Mr. Bowen became president of the State University of New York at New Paltz in 1996. It was there, the following year, that a “sex conference” was held that will forever be tied to his name.
Officially it was known as “Revolting Behavior: The Challenges of Women’s Sexual Freedom,” and was sponsored by the women’s-studies program at New Paltz. The conference had 21 workshops, on topics such as AIDS education and teen sexuality. But two of the workshops got all of the attention afterward: one on sex toys and one on sadomasochism, called “Safe, Sane and Consensual S&M: An Alternate Way of Loving.”
New York’s governor, George Pataki, called the conference “horrendously inappropriate.” Candace de Russy, a trustee of the state-university system, demanded Mr. Bowen’s resignation. And while a SUNY panel later found no wrongdoing on Mr. Bowen’s part, the chancellor, John Ryan, did criticize him for “errors in judgment.”
The affair colored the rest of his career at New Paltz. It probably cost him other jobs as well. He was a leading candidate for the presidency at Northern Arizona University in 2001 before a newspaper story revealed him to be, as he puts it now, the “sex president.” And despite his success in raising graduation rates and increasing financial contributions, he remained the lowest-paid president at SUNY’s 13 liberal-arts colleges.
But the incident and his handling of it provided an ideal credential for a future leader of the AAUP. The association honored Mr. Bowen in 1998 with its Meiklejohn Award, in defense of academic freedom, for refusing to bow to pressure to cancel the conference.
The controversy “does not characterize Roger except that he handled it with a great deal of dignity and strength,” says Arnold B. Gardner, a former SUNY trustee who was a supporter of Mr. Bowen during the incident. “It’s a mistake for people to think of that as the main feature of his academic life.”
Friends and former colleagues describe Mr. Bowen as dynamic, energetic, and a “stupendous” teacher. They marvel at his ability to keep teaching and publishing in his field, Japanese politics, even after moving into administration. Hollins’s former president, Jane Margaret O’Brien, calls him a “premier worker” and “always an advocate for the underdog.”
Even so, Mr. Bowen can’t seem to shake the “sex conference” association. It means, he says, that he is demonized by some and lionized by others. “Defending the principle of academic freedom anywhere is the right thing,” says the political scientist, who left New Paltz in 2001 for a brief stint as director of the Milwaukee Public Museum. “You can’t compromise on first principles. Even though some of it is distasteful to some, including myself, that’s less important than having a free and open debate.”
FIREfight
The AAUP is known for defending academic freedom, but some critics say it is more devoted to principles than to the people those principles are meant to protect.
Eugene Sarver is one professor who believes that the association has let him down. A former professor of finance at Pace University and a one-time president of the AAUP chapter there, he got so fed up when the association declined to help him get his faculty job back that he sued it in small-claims court for $3,000, a bid to get back the dues he had paid over the years.
The AAUP succeeded in getting the suit dismissed -- Mr. Bowen calls it frivolous and points out that each year the association gets requests from more than 1,000 professors for legal help -- but Mr. Sarver plans to keep fighting. The AAUP “doesn’t care about professors,” he says. “It only cares about principles. ... But the principles are embedded in the individuals.”
Mr. Sarver, who maintains that he was unfairly coerced into signing a deal with Pace in which he gave up his job in the wake of sexual-harassment charges, also says the AAUP is too slow: “They take forever to deal with a situation. And they seem to be sympathetic to the administration, which is the enemy.”
Treating administrators with respect should be seen as an asset, says Mr. Bowen. However, he understands some of the criticism about being slow, and he hopes to see the AAUP move more quickly to defend professors. But he is adamant that the group won’t give up its deliberative nature.
“Part of the culture is never to rush to judgment, to be scrupulously fair to all parties,” he says. “If you’re fair to everybody, then justice moves slowly. That’s why our reputation is so good. We’re known for our integrity and our fair-mindedness.”
When AAUP takes up a professor’s case, a committee is created to perform an investigation and write a report that eventually is brought to the full membership, which then votes on whether to censure the administration. That process can easily take more than a year, and often by that point the professor at the center of the storm has moved on.
In contrast, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a nonprofit group founded in 1998, is more likely to fire off a letter to the university president, make a public stink, and get a wave of news coverage.
When Linda McCarriston, a creative-writing professor at the University of Alaska at Anchorage, was embroiled in a free-speech case three years ago, she got help from FIRE, not the AAUP. Both groups, she says, are working toward the same goals, but “one is a SWAT team and the other is like the CIA.”
Alan Charles Kors, a University of Pennsylvania history professor who is chairman and a founder of FIRE, is sharply critical of the AAUP. He says it moves at a “glacial pace” and has not stood up for students’ academic-freedom rights, as he thinks it should. In the past two decades, he says, the association has lost sight of its primary mission. “I think the AAUP is increasingly first and foremost a union, defending not, as it ought to, the freedom of the academy, but the union rights of its members,” he says.
Jane Buck, president of the AAUP and a retired professor at Delaware State University, says that it does defend freedom throughout academe, and that the real difference between FIRE and the AAUP is that “we are in this struggle for the long haul.”
The shorthand is that FIRE is a conservative group, on the right side of the political landscape, and the AAUP is a liberal group, solidly on the left. The differences are, of course, more complicated than that. Mr. Bowen maintains that the AAUP’s primary mission is to stand against attacks on academic freedom regardless of politics.
Mr. Kors says his group has defended many people on the left, including Richard Berthold, a history professor at the University of New Mexico who was disciplined for joking about the attack on the Pentagon on the morning of September 11, 2001. “We were there,” Mr. Kors says. “Where are they when people on the other side of spectrum are in trouble?”
Mr. Bowen says he plans to talk with Mr. Kors about whether the two groups have some common interests and can work together in the future -- an idea that Mr. Kors calls “encouraging.”
Regardless of who gets more attention from the news media, the AAUP does have a primary role. When FIRE argues about attacks on academic freedom, it often points to the AAUP’s statements. “We’re the foundation,” Mr. Bowen says. “We’re the bedrock. We wouldn’t want to give up that position.”
Despite his criticism of the AAUP, Mr. Kors agrees that its guidelines on academic freedom “still form the conscience of the academy, and we should be profoundly grateful for that.” But, he quips, “I wish they would reread them from time to time.”
Ready to Go
Mr. Bowen, who has already met with most of the AAUP’s staff members, is ready to take office with a list of new ideas. In addition to increasing the membership and continuing to fight against the exploitation of part-time faculty members, he wants to monitor what he sees as the politicization of higher education and the threats to academic freedom since the September 11 attacks. He wants the AAUP to broaden its mission to include academic groups throughout the world. Aligning itself with international groups would help mobilize members in the United States, he says. And he would ask American colleges not to have formal relationships with foreign institutions that do not support academic freedom.
The AAUP is perhaps best known for its list of censured administrations, those that it accuses of failing to protect academic freedom and tenure. Censure serves as a kind of blacklist, letting professors know that those colleges do not support AAUP principles and encouraging them to not take jobs there.
But Mr. Bowen would like to see censure carry even more weight by getting accreditors to agree that no college should be reaccredited if it is on the censure list. He also wants the association to create an endowed fund to help professors carry on their cases in court.
Finally, Mr. Bowen says, the AAUP should attack what many professors and administrators consider the bane of higher education: the U.S. News & World Report’s influential college rankings. “Within the academy there are so many complaints about the U.S. News rankings,” he says. “They’re not looking at the whole picture. And the rankings lend themselves to the corporatization of higher education.” (The magazine’s editors have defended the rankings, saying they contain useful information.)
Mr. Bowen’s solution: a survey and ranking done by the AAUP itself. Is yet another ranking really the answer? The AAUP’s would be different, he says, because it would rely solely on the opinions of professors. “Who better to make a judgment than the faculty?”
He started on the path to being a professor as an undergraduate, scrapping his parents’ plans for him to be a doctor. They were shocked that his first teaching job, at Colby, paid less than $14,000 a year. But, his wife says now, they appreciated his passion.
As Mr. Bowen talks about his position at the AAUP, which will pay more than 10 times as much as that first one, he is hiking around in Acadia National Park and bubbling over with excitement. Jumping around puddles and onto rocks on his way up to Schoodic Head, he is intent on showing a visitor the view of Bar Harbor. He is excited by the hike, by the view, by the challenge of a new job. Looking out across the water, he says, “Isn’t this great?”
ROGER W. BOWEN
Education: B.A. in political science and East Asian studies from Wabash College, 1969; M.A. in Japanese studies from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, 1970; Ph.D. in political science from the University of British Columbia, 1976
Career: Professor of government at Colby College, 1978-91; Vice president for academic affairs at Hollins College, 1992-6; President of the State University of New York at New Paltz, 1996-2001; Director of the Milwaukee Public Museum, 2001-2
Scholarly works and awards: Author of several books, including Japan’s Dysfunctional Democracy (M.E. Sharpe, 2003); Awarded the 1998 Meiklejohn Award from the American Association of University Professors for his defense of academic freedom in supporting the “Revolting Behavior” conference at New Paltz
Family: He and his wife, Barbara, have been married for 36 years. They have two daughters.
SOURCE: Chronicle reporting
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 50, Issue 40, Page A8