Washington
Gary Rhoades will be the first scholar of higher education to head the office of the nation’s largest faculty association. The American Association of University Professors is expected to announce today that he will take over as its general secretary in January.
Mr. Rhoades has spent his entire 22-year career at the University of Arizona studying issues that affect the professoriate. He directs Arizona’s Center for the Study of Higher Education. Leaders of the AAUP hope his expertise will bring a depth of knowledge to the group and put him in a good position to help guide it through its centennial year, in 2015.
“I’m convinced we’ve found one of the best possible people in the country,” says Cary Nelson, the AAUP’s president and a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Gary is an intellectual with a real in-depth knowledge about higher education.”
During his career at Arizona, Mr. Rhoades has analyzed faculty-union contracts, studied changes in the academic work force, and written about the effects of “academic capitalism,” a theory that says universities care more about making money than about educating students.
The last three general secretaries of the AAUP had no scholarly background in higher education: One was a political scientist, another was an English professor, and another was a scholar of Japan who had been a college president.
Mr. Rhoades will take over at the AAUP from Ernst Benjamin, who was general secretary for a decade starting in 1984 and returned again in December 2006 as the association faced mounting financial and management problems. It has lost about half its members over the last generation and has run a $300,000 budget deficit in each of the last two years. Naming Mr. Benjamin was a stopgap move designed to put the group on an even keel before it hired the next general secretary. But while the association recently approved a restructuring plan and added 3,000 new members—giving it a total of 47,238 by the time of its annual meeting last June—its future is still uncertain.
“The association needs dramatic reform right now,” says William G. Tierney, director of the Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis at the University of Southern California. He nominated Mr. Rhoades for the job of general secretary last year. A search committee of the AAUP interviewed four finalists before settling on Mr. Rhoades.
“Gary is a positive change agent” says Mr. Tierney. “The question is: Will the association allow him to help it move forward?”
Looking Forward
In an interview here, Mr. Rhoades wouldn’t talk much about the AAUP’s troubles. He prefers to focus on what he’d like to accomplish. He wants to bolster the association’s membership by reaching out to adjuncts, graduate students, and postdoctoral students. He says the group can appeal to them by offering workshops on negotiating the academic job market and a road map on what it takes to succeed in each rank of the professoriate.
“We could work with graduate schools to become a player in providing professional-development opportunities that young faculty are hungry for,” Mr. Rhoades said. “All graduate students are wondering: What does it mean to be a faculty member?”
Mr. Rhoades also wants to sign up more flagship public universities to the AAUP’s Collective Bargaining Congress, which is now made up primarily of regional state institutions. “I think there’s an opportunity, as public higher education experiences a lot of pressure, to organize them,” he says. He is talking about campuses in states like Illinois, Minnesota, Ohio, and Oregon that have taken big hits in public money for higher education and might be interested in collective bargaining.
The AAUP is expecting to sign an agreement soon that will allow it to jointly organize new faculty-union chapters with the American Federation of Teachers, a move that will give the faculty association more resources. Until now, the AAUP has considered the AFT one of its chief competitors in the union arena.
As general secretary, Mr. Rhoades also wants the association to team up with scholars and other organizations to do research on labor-force issues in higher education, including the increasing numbers of part-time faculty members who are not on the tenure track. In the last dozen years, Mr. Rhoades himself has netted more than $1-million in research money from the National Science Foundation and he is a prolific scholar.
Cellphones and Critiques
Mr. Rhoades’ scholarly work has made him a bit of a critic of higher education. His 2004 book with Sheila Slaughter, a professor of higher education at the University of Georgia, is called Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education (The Johns Hopkins University Press). It analyzes a trend toward academic entrepreneurialism that, the writers say, has led universities to focus less on educating students and more on developing and marketing research products and educational services that they can sell.
Mr. Rhoades has been a member of the AAUP his whole academic career. Although Arizona does not have a faculty union, he is familiar with issues unionized faculty members face as he has analyzed faculty work contracts for the National Education Association for 15 years.
Giving up the title of professor is going to be difficult, he acknowledges. While he will take a year’s leave from Arizona, his AAUP contract makes him general secretary for a three-year term. He doesn’t expect Arizona to extend his leave for that long.
“My whole identity is as a professor,” he remarks. “Before my father-in-law died, he’d greet me with, ‘Professor.’ Thinking about giving that up is hard.”
Getting used to life outside the Ivory Tower will be an adjustment for Mr. Rhoades as well. With his heavy, white cotton shirt open at the collar to display a silver necklace, he looks more as if he belongs in the West than in Washington. He is also accustomed to the pace of campus life, which for him has included a 30-minute swim in Arizona’s outdoor pool each afternoon. He also typically spends more than a month each summer at his family’s cottage in Maine, a jaunt that he will have to curtail because the AAUP position is a year-round job.
Something else Mr. Rhoades sheepishly acknowledges must change is the fact that he doesn’t have a cellphone. This summer he borrowed his daughter’s while she was traveling out of the country.
Mr. Rhoades’s colleagues call him a nice guy with a wry sense of humor who is generous in spending his time as a mentor to young professors and graduate students. He has 50 doctoral-student advisees at Arizona, which is more than any other professor at his center. Most of the graduate students will have to start working with other professors, but Mr. Rhoades will hang onto a few who are close to completing their dissertations.
When Mr. Rhoades begins his new job here in January, it will be at the AAUP’s brand new headquarters. The association is ending its decade-long stay in an increasingly dilapidated building with fraying carpet and chipped furniture where the windows used to fall out when they were opened until the building’s owner sealed them shut. The foyer of the new downtown office will be painted red with big white AAUP letters.
Many hope Mr. Rhoades’s term as general secretary will mark a new beginning not just for him, but for the association.
