AAUP Chapters Revive as Professors See Threats to Academic Freedom

U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

In 2016, Jay Smith’s department chair delivered the bad news.

A course on the history of college sports, taught by Smith, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, would not be scheduled for the following fall. It was an unusual decision, and he sensed payback for his persistent criticism of how the administration had handled a notorious academic-fraud scandal. (Last year a faculty panel found that administrators had improperly interfered with the course, a conclusion that administrators rejected in May.)

Smith went public with his suspicions, and the course was restored. But one aspect of the episode stuck with him: An officer of the state conference of the American Association of University Professors had come to his aid.

And he thought: Why not bring back our campus chapter?

Chapel Hill is the latest campus to dust off old bylaws and resurrect a chapter of the AAUP, the longtime advocacy group for academic freedom. Groups at Dartmouth College and Syracuse University have revived their chapters within the past year or so. Professors at Cornell University are in talks to do the same, according to Risa L. Lieberwitz, a labor-law professor there and general counsel to the national AAUP.

Organizers reviving the chapters say academic freedom is under attack as college “corporatization,” state politics, and an overreliance on adjunct labor threaten to stifle the faculty’s voice.

In the early 20th century, the AAUP’s campus groups were instrumental in building now-commonplace policies on academic freedom and tenure. But many of the chapters petered out or went defunct, sometimes for decades.

Now a growing number of campuses have formed or revived advocacy chapters since 2016 — including more than 30 this year, says Christopher Simeone, director of organizing at AAUP’s national office.

For newly motivated academics, that has meant finding creative ways to get potential members to join the cause. After a failed attempt to resuscitate Chapel Hill’s chapter last year, Smith and a group of colleagues decided that they needed more hype.

They held an Academic Freedom Day, a conference in early November that Smith estimates drew 50 to 100 academics per session. At the end, they put out a call to help rebuild the chapter.

Now, after submitting official bylaws, all he and his partners are waiting on is formal approval from the national organization.

Fighting Their Own Battles

Sometimes it takes a spate of campus controversies before faculty members rally to a cause. In recent years at Chapel Hill, organizers say, there have been plenty of controversies to choose from: the academic-athletic scandal, the Board of Governors’ hamstringing of poverty and civil-rights centers at the law school, the battle over Silent Sam, and, for Smith, the alleged interference with his history course.

A campus AAUP chapter could have strengthened an otherwise “sclerotic” faculty voice throughout those controversies, says Smith. “We sort of had to rely on our administrative leadership to fight the battles for us. And administrators have their own imperatives that they need to obey.”

The history professor is a longtime critic of the administration but says the chapter need not be purely oppositional. “We absolutely do want to revitalize shared governance on our campus,” he says, “but that doesn’t mean we have to have an antagonistic relationship with our administrators.”

A university spokeswoman directed The Chronicle to the administration’s past statements, including the chancellor’s condemnation of restrictions on the law school and solicitation of feedback regarding Silent Sam, as well as the university’s position on Smith’s history course.

At Dartmouth, two “academic-freedom violations” motivated faculty members to rally together, says Annelise Orleck, a history professor and co-president of its revived chapter: an incoming dean of the faculty’s stepping down after a viral controversy over his past support for an academic boycott of Israeli institutions, and the college’s disavowal of comments made by the antifascism scholar Mark Bray.

“The administration supports the faculty in its revival of the Dartmouth AAUP chapter,” Diana Lawrence, a Dartmouth spokeswoman, wrote in an email. She declined to expand on the college’s past comments regarding N. Bruce Duthu, the formerly appointed dean, and Bray.

The Dartmouth chapter, which Orleck estimates has grown to about 60 members, formed working groups to devise guidelines and recommendations for the most-pressing issues — tenure and promotion, and policies toward adjuncts, academic freedom, and sexual misconduct. Then members met with faculty-governance committees and administrators.

“We made a lot of progress in the first year, and now we’re going back to some basic organizing and knocking on doors,” Orleck says. “Really starting to try to educate more of the faculty.”

Chapel Hill’s chapter is taking a similar path. “People are delighted that there will be this new venue for faculty discussion about vital academic values,” Smith says.

He and fellow organizers, including the chapter’s incoming president, Michael Palm, an associate professor of media and technology studies, met on Wednesday at the Carolina Coffee Shop, a Chapel Hill landmark, to plan tactics for the next semester.

The group plans to spread the word among department chairs and to hold monthly meetings for members come January. It hopes to join a “week of action for higher education” across the university system in February.

Chapel Hill’s last chapter of the AAUP had been essentially dormant since 2010, holding few meetings through 2016, when its past president, Mark W. Driscoll, says he stepped down because of “fierce faculty apathy.”

Once they get formal approval from the national AAUP, Smith and his colleagues will see if they can avoid a similar fate. The underlying trends troubling faculty members are unlikely to vanish anytime soon — nor are the faculty groups mobilizing nationwide against them.

Follow Steven Johnson on Twitter at @stetyjohn, or email him at steve.johnson@chronicle.com.