What is the difference between a professional association and a labor union? In their recent Chronicle Review essay, “A Moral Stain on the Profession,” Daniel Bessner and Michael Brenes strongly imply that the American Historical Association, currently the former, should adopt some of the functions and tactics of the latter, to ensure the very future of the discipline. The AHA, in their estimation, should “rally historians against an unjust labor system,” “transform itself into an advocate of contingent labor,” and join such peer organizations as the Modern Language Association in fostering “solidarity” among their memberships, perhaps even encouraging a “collective strike.” “Can anyone imagine how universities would respond if members of all these associations threatened to strike?” they wonder. “If we wish to reverse the decline of the academic job market, we must make use of our labor power.”
To clear up likely misperceptions among Chronicle readers: The AHA officially supports the right of workers to organize, but the AHA can’t organize workers itself. That would be illegal. The AHA is a nonprofit corporation constituted under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. It can’t, by statute, endorse political candidates, lobby legislators, negotiate contracts, or call strikes. Unions can do those things, of course; they’re also nonprofit entities, but they are 501(c)(5)s. More to the point, the AHA can’t change its filing status without changing its mission. And that would not benefit historians.
Why? Because unions and professional associations exist for different reasons. Unions exist to protect workers — all workers — within an organizing sector. Associations, on the other hand, do not have formal standing in institutions to do the same. They can set ethical standards, for example, or formulate best practices for professional processes, such as hiring and tenuring. Unions, in turn, can draw on those standards in grievance procedures to protect individual members. But the principle of solidarity means that it’s in the interest of unions to make exceptions to the standards if and when they conflict with that principle. That’s why unions shouldn’t be setting disciplinary standards — and why professional associations shouldn’t be organizing workers.
Association standards, furthermore, have no enforcement mechanism. They represent a professional consensus about what’s right and wrong, not a contract backed by force of law. The AHA and other scholarly societies like it do have a “bully pulpit” of sorts, but they can’t make anyone do anything, such as “mandate” videoconference interviews in place of expensive trips to conferences. Is the answer, as Bessner and Brenes say, an AHA-published “shame list” of institutions, search committees, and tenured faculty members who violate professional standards? The strictures of the law again come to mind — particularly those dealing with libel — but more important, when the AHA promulgates professional standards, it does not seek to apply them locally itself: They are there to serve the discipline as a whole, and they may be invoked locally, by local actors, as the situation warrants.
Because standards can’t be enforced in the way Bessner and Brenes would seem to prefer, the AHA membership doesn’t have collective clout in the same form that a union’s rank and file do, including job actions like strikes. If the AHA and its peer organizations were legally able to call a strike, moreover, it would be viewed by the unions that are trying to organize the professoriate as counterproductive. In addition to shop-floor organizing, politics are essential here. Even if they aren’t unionized, academic workers benefit from academic unions because the unions can, in fact, endorse candidates who pledge to mitigate the disaster inflicted on academe over the past several decades through the defunding of higher education and other neoliberal measures. The AHA, again, cannot.
This brings us to one of the larger points of “Moral Stain": the idea that professional associations like the AHA could have intervened in the crisis of the humanities long ago by somehow protecting a type of contract — for this is what a tenure-track job is. Given the larger historical context, and the fact that the AHA is not now and can never function as a union without withdrawing from its responsibilities to the discipline, hurting the labor movement in the process, it should be clear that blaming the AHA for the decline of tenure-stream employment is misplaced. The humanities are in crisis. But the forces that have made this so are large scale and long term — much vaster than what a professional association can undertake in means consistent with its mission and permissible by law.
Finally, the travesty of the essay is its sheer ahistoricality. I’m at a loss to think that Bessner and Brenes, as historians, glibly believe that shifts of the magnitude they describe are the result of “decisions” that are “fully in our power to reverse,” especially since structural problems like adjunctification have been sedimenting for decades. Absent revolution (and, in some cases, despite revolution, as historians know), structures do not change visibly, quickly, obviously, or in response to a localized set of agents. They change as the result of an accretion of motivations, maneuvers, and contingencies — in slow motion, if you will. Change for the better can happen, and I hope it does, but not through supposition, not through denunciation, and not through willful ignorance of facts.
Support your union. Support your professional association. We need them both. And we need them to be different.
Allison Miller is editor of Perspectives on History, a publication of the American Historical Association. This essay is not an official statement from the AHA.
