Abstract
Larry G. Gerber, professor emeritus of history at Auburn University, former chair of the American Association of University Professors’ Committee on College and University Governance, and former national vice president of the AAUP, has written a very useful book. Spanning centuries (from the importance of faculty power in Europe before the first American colleges existed to some of the contemporary crises at American colleges and universities), Gerber recounts the checkered history of faculty governance and its partner, academic freedom. However, he reviews neither current debates about the increasing numbers of part-time and non-tenure track instructors nor the continuing disputes between faculty who embrace a model of professors as professionals versus those who feel they would benefit from unionization.
Gerber notes that faculty at the earliest American institutions of higher education did not have a role in governance. Nor did they enjoy the protection of academic freedom. By and large, colleges and universities were founded by religious groups and businessmen who hired inexperienced teachers without undergraduate degrees, let alone advanced degrees. (The exception is the University of Virginia. Its founder, Thomas Jefferson, sought to hire experienced scholars who could claim they were qualified to select texts for their classes. This right died shortly after Jefferson.) These first institutions were identified as private even though they received public monies, much as federal and state programs continue to aid many so-called private and even for-profit universities, often through grants and loans to students. Most of these institutions were small (the average college had fewer than 100 students), had few faculty, and sought to instill character rather than specialized knowledge in their students.
Notions of faculty governance and academic freedom did not emerge until the 1870s, when esteemed professors working at what we now call elite institutions claimed to be professionals who deserved these rights. Some made their discontent clear. For instance, in 1881 the faculty at Dartmouth College revolted against presidential authority. Some professors bemoaned the corporatization of higher education, as did Thorstein Veblen, who was writing The Higher Learning in America in the first decade of the twentieth century. Others complained about the small salaries that trustees generally granted professors, even as they dissed them for accepting so little pay.
Enter the American Association of University Professors. Founded after 18 professors at Johns Hopkins invited esteemed colleagues from other select institutions to an organizing conference, the AAUP was to be a professional organization rather than a union. Designed to serve the interests of elite white men, the AAUP claimed that professors’ qualifications entitled them to evaluate job applicants as well as their peers’ continued employment. The AAUP was also to argue that professors should elect the heads of their departments and have a say in both educational policies and the selection of such upper-level administrators as presidents and provosts.
However, in some respects the AAUP was elitist and politically middle of the road. Until the late 1940s, it did not concern itself with community colleges. During the McCarthy period, it did not prevent professorial participation in red-baiting. (On some campuses, faculty senates helped to expel politically suspect professors from their campuses.) The AAUP first considered issues associated with part-time employment in the 1970s, when the percentage of adjuncts increased but was still low by today’s standards. Although it had favored contractual relations between professors and their employers, it avoided practices that smacked of unionism until the 1960s when the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association sought to organize faculty. Like some unions, it did not have an adequate response to the economic crises that beset the City University of New York and the State University of New York when, in the 1970s, newly appointed groups led by Wall Street figures introduced neoliberal policies to save New York from bankruptcy. By then, Gerber suggests, spurred by the professionalism of their faculties, American universities had become the envy of the world. Although the AAUP did not wield power over academic freedom and shared governance, the number of universities entering contracts with faculty increased.
Writing with more passion, Gerber notes that the ever-increasing corporatization of higher education has undermined that professionalism, limited academic freedom, and thus undercut the quality of American colleges and universities. For issues of academic freedom, Gerber cites (and recommends) historian Ellen Schrecker’s work. For arguments about contemporary corporatization, he invokes such contemporary critics as Louis Menand. To underscore the right of faculty to design the curriculum, which is being challenged today, Gerber quotes Robert Bellah’s dictum that “the teacher, not the students, . . . knows what the student needs to learn” (p. 166).
Besides such sources as histories of universities and of higher education, the correspondence of professors, administrators, and trustees and articles from the AAUP’s journal Academe, Gerber makes particularly good use of surveys that the AAUP mounted in 1924, 1939, and 1953. He also recognizes the limitations of these data. College by college, the surveys note the presence or absence of specific faculty-governance practices, such as having a voice in the selection of deans and even in the development of the budget. These data are presented in appendices.
I think it’s unfair to wish that a historian handled generalizations the way sociologists do. Nonetheless, I would have valued more socio-historical context. For instance, although Gerber discusses the founding of the AAUP in terms of the increasing professionalization of the professoriate, he eschews the sort of valuable generalizations that Christopher Jencks and David Riesman offered in The Academic Revolution (1968), where they argued that academic professionalization helped to forge a common culture among members of the emerging managerial class. I would like to know the societal implications of contemporary developments. Is higher education today merely engaged in the reproduction of social class?
Despite these criticisms, The Rise and Decline of Faculty Governance is a very useful book. Historian Larry G. Gerber conveyed information that I had not known and that I will invoke at my own institution.