The American Association of University Professors is expected to usher in big changes in its leadership and overall direction at its annual conference, which begins here this week. Its incoming president, Rudy H. Fichtenbaum, a professor of economics at Wright State University, was elected as part of a winning slate of candidates for seven top leadership posts who pledged to overhaul how the organization does business.
In recent interviews with The Chronicle, Mr. Fichtenbaum said he intends to make good on his campaign promise to rethink how the organization operates so it will more effectively advocate on behalf of all academic workers. In keeping with his background as an economics professor and a prominent advocate on behalf of faculty unions in his home state of Ohio, he said he plans to focus on improving the AAUP’s financial health, expanding its membership among not just professors but also adjunct instructors and graduate students, and trying to strengthen the organization’s ties to other labor unions and to education advocacy organizations.
The members of his slate in the AAUP elections this spring “all recognize that there are some real concerns about the direction that the AAUP is headed, and we need to really change course,” Mr. Fichtenbaum said. Above all, the slate, which called itself “AAUP Organizing for Change,” argued that the group needs to be focused on organizing new collective-bargaining chapters, based on its belief that establishing them represents the single best way to increase the organization’s membership and protect its members’ workplace rights.
Some of those who opposed Mr. Fichtenbaum’s candidacy had expressed concern that he would sidetrack the AAUP from its historic mission as a professional organization that champions academic principles and standards, and turn it into an organization focused mainly on labor rights much like other unions, such as the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association. Among the several past leaders of the organization who endorsed his opponent in the race, Irene T. Mulvey, a mathematics professor at Fairfield University, was Mary Burgan, a former general secretary of the AAUP. She issued a statement arguing that the AAUP “is only as strong as its appeal to a broad spectrum of faculty,” including those who work at small private liberal-arts colleges and lack collective bargaining rights.
Supporters of Mr. Fichtenbaum, however, argued that they see him as capable of broadly championing the rights of academics—including faculty members on campuses without unions—while also being an effective labor organizer.
“I really think Rudy is just the ideal leader for the AAUP and, by extension, all of us in higher education, in these really perilous times,” said Elizabeth Hoffman, a lecturer in English at California State University at Long Beach and a former member of the AAUP’s national council and executive committee.
Ms. Hoffman praised Mr. Fichtenbaum as “a person of idea and action” who has exhibited “a real desire to organize faculty and students” and has proven his ability to inspire people to join advocacy efforts. Most notably, Mr. Fichtenbaum played a central role in last year’s successful campaign for an Ohio ballot measure that repealed a state law precluding many faculty members at public colleges from being involved in collective bargaining.
Strength Through Growth
Mr. Fichtenbaum said the new officers who ran as part of his slate are “just as committed to maintaining the fight for academic freedom and shared governance, and establishing standards for our profession” as the AAUP’s previous leaders. But, he said, he and the other slate members see efforts to increase the AAUP’s membership as essential if the group is to continue such advocacy efforts.
“If your membership is declining, and a lot of your revenue comes from your membership, your ability to support that kind of activity becomes increasingly more difficult,” he said.
Mr. Fichtenbaum said he and his fellow slate members are also fully committed to organizing, and providing services to, local advocacy chapters without collective-bargaining rights. “Organizing is organizing, as far as I am concerned,” he said.
The reality, however, is that the formation of new collective-bargaining units appears to be the most efficient way of increasing the membership of the AAUP, which has had difficulty in recent years recruiting and retaining members who do not belong to unions and join on their own. About two-thirds of the group’s members belong to collective-bargaining units.
Mr. Fichtenbaum said the changing nature of the academic work force requires the AAUP to look well beyond recruiting professors who are tenured or on the tenure track and to find ways to organize the adjunct instructors and graduate students who provide a growing share of instruction at colleges. “Doing that is a pretty expensive proposition,” he said. “We need to figure out ways of working with other groups to help try to accomplish that.”
He pointed to the group’s efforts to organize unions jointly affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers as a model for potential partnerships with other labor unions and advocacy groups to try to organize new unions on campuses in a cost-effective manner.
“I don’t think we are limited to only doing joint organizing with the AFT, although we are committed to continuing our work with them,” he said.
Building strong local chapters that can rally behind faculty members, he said, also represents a way to increase the organization’s strength on the campus level without demanding more of the national office’s thinly stretched staff.
A House Divided
Mr. Fichtenbaum’s rise to the AAUP presidency comes at a time when the group has made some significant strides in improving its finances and reversing a long-term decline in its membership, only to see some of its progress threatened by internal disputes.
The group has been operating in the black, having three years ago reversed a financial slide. Its union-organizing efforts also recently have met with success at research institutions, a segment of higher education where organizing faculty members has proven difficult in the past. Its membership, which declined from 90,000 in 1971 to less than 44,000 as of 2007, has rebound to about 48,000.
In the past three years, faculty members at Bowling Green State University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Connecticut Health Center, and the University of Oregon have voted to form collective-bargaining units.
But the election of Mr. Fichtenbaum and the rest of his slate was the product of recent infighting within the group centered around last year’s ouster of its general secretary, Gary Rhoades, who was well-regarded as a field organizer but frequently clashed with the AAUP’s president, Cary Nelson. Mr. Nelson, who could not seek re-election because of term limits, will be stepping down at the end of this week’s conference.
Mr. Rhoades’s departure, and the power struggles within the organization that precipitated it, so angered many AAUP members that the group’s Collective Bargaining Congress, an umbrella organization for unionized local affiliates, overwhelmingly passed a resolution condemning how Mr. Rhoades was treated and protesting that Mr. Nelson and the AAUP’s executive committee were usurping the powers of its national leadership council. The Delegate Assembly of the United University Professions, a union that represents faculty members and other academic employees of the State University of New York System, cited concern about Mr. Rhoades’s departure, as well as a litany of other complaints about the AAUP’s national office, in voting in February to end its AAUP affiliation.
Mr. Fichtenbaum, who has been a member of the AAUP’s executive committee and national council and was the Collective Bargaining Congress’s treasurer during the controversy surrounding the ouster of Mr. Rhoades, had argued on behalf of the congress’s resolution protesting AAUP leadership decisions.
The “AAUP Organizing for Change” slate formed in response to the controversy and broader concerns about the organization’s direction that it raised. Its platform included pledges to have the AAUP’s leadership make decisions in a more-transparent manner, to improve the national office’s ability to serve the AAUP’s local chapters, and to restructure the organization’s governance to shrink the president’s powers and expand the nation’s council’s role.
In the wake of the departure of Mr. Rhoades, Mr. Nelson had suggested that the AAUP’s top administrative position—the title of which he has pushed to change from “general secretary” to “executive director"—might be too big a job for one person and perhaps should be split into different positions. Mr. Fichtenbaum said, however, that he does not see such a change as necessary, although he plans to keep the challenges that past general secretaries have confronted in mind in hiring someone for that position.
For his part, Mr. Rhoades, who supported Mr. Fichtenbaum’s candidacy for president, described the argument that the top administrative job is too big for one person as “a bogus claim.”
“If it is too big for one person, they would have replaced me with more than one person,” Mr. Rhoades said. Instead, he noted, the position has remained vacant since he left.
