A report from CUCFA President Constance Penley from the National AAUP Convention:

I attended the “historic” National AAUP convention on June 16-18 in Arlington, VA, as the CUCFA delegate, which meant that I had a vote on the proposed alliance between the AAUP and the AFT (AFL-CIO) and six open AAUP Council seats.

“AAUP Concludes Historic 2022 Conference and Biennial Meeting” (AAUP)

“AAUP Delegates Approve Partnership With AFT” (IHE)

By an overwhelming vote of nearly 90% in favor, the new partnership aims to boost faculty clout in legislative affairs and academia’s future by combining the strengths of each organization. The AAUP, which has both advocacy and collective bargaining chapters, currently has about 44,000 members. AFT is the nation’s second-largest education union. The new agreement brings the number of AFT and AAUP faculty members to about 300,000, resulting in the largest faculty alliance in the US.

Both AAUP’s Irene Mulvey and AFT’s Randi Weingarten repeatedly emphasized that each organization will retain its own infrastructure, budget, mission, and policies while complementing each other in beefing up state and national collective organizing and legislative lobbying. See FAQs on AAUP/AFT Affiliation.

The alliance emerged from the urgent need to counter the existential attacks on higher education, including austerity budgeting, eliminating tenure, and restricting what we can teach in our classrooms. It builds on the AFT’s and AAUP’s previously announced New Deal for Higher education, which was inspired by Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education (see SBFA co-president Eileen Boris, one of the SFNDHE founders for more on that organization). Its proposed legislative agenda seeks reinvestment in higher education at the state and federal levels, tying that investment to living wages and benefits for all university workers, including adjunct professors and campus support staff, supporting academic freedom around teaching inequality and U.S. history, relieving student debt, and increasing college access.

I also worked with a HELU (Higher Education Labor United)-inspired team that filled four of six open AAUP Council seats with progressive candidates who advocated for wall-to-wall and coast-to-coast organizing across all sectors of academic workers and the communities in which they live.

All of these issues match CUCFA’s historical and current concerns as they have been recently amplified through organizing with the #Cancel Student Debt and Reclaim (the Master Plan for California Higher Education) coalitions, the statewide UC Union Coalition (UCUC), and the nationwide HELU efforts at higher ed reform through labor rights for all.

Other notable conference events included a panel of higher education reporters; presentations on the AAUP’s racial equity initiative and recent AAUP research on academic freedom, tenure, and governance; discussions on issues in remote teaching, demystifying academic freedom and defending tenure, and on organizing across ranks to support faculty on contingent appointments; discussions for advocacy and collective bargaining chapters; and a training session on government relations.

Here are highlights of two of the most compelling panels for our purposes:

Opening Plenary: Higher Ed in the Crosshairs:
A panel of higher education reporters discusses the culture wars, trending issues in academia, and how they cover these stories at the local and national level.
Presenters: Ashleigh Fields (Howard University Hilltop), Colleen Flaherty (Inside Higher Ed), Joe Killian (NC Policy Watch), and Molly Minta (Mississippi Today). Moderated by Hank Reichman

– The importance of ground-up reporting, especially in an era of declining newsrooms: student newspapers are driving the national conversation

– The persuasiveness of connecting all issues to student learning conditions (e.g., academic freedom, tenure) and to problems the public cares about

– Working with reporters to push them to go beyond the Ivies and well-known HBCUs, including coverage of community colleges

– Useful strategies for academics working with reporters:

— Use Signal or WhatsApp to communicate with reporters, not your university email

— Add asterisks (*) to any search term you want to be blocked

— When you contact reporters, do not just send something; say why it matters

— Send good news, too, when you have it

— Do not hesitate to follow up with busy reporters

— Include your phone number on your CV and any communications to reporters so they can easily call you back

— You can always talk to a reporter on background; be clear with them about what is and is not for attribution; your on-background comments can help a reporter when they match up with on-background comments from others; these comments may never make it into print but can help explain and shape the story for the reporter and thus the reader.

— Reporters aren’t advocates, but they can help you

Current Issues in Remote Teaching:
The AAUP Committee on Teaching, Research, & Publication hosted a listening session to get feedback and concerns about online education and remote teaching ahead of an anticipated revision of AAUP policies. (Based on your experience teaching online, what issues should a new statement (or statements) regarding online education address? Post your ideas here.)
Facilitators: Jonathan Rees (Colorado State University-Pueblo) and Henry Reichman (California State University-East Bay)

– Faculty-led, transparent decision-making about online learning, its best practices, modalities, and platforms is needed. Teaching is the domain of the faculty; we are the experts—essential to respect academic freedom and shared governance.

– We may want to refuse the distinction between online and in-person because that is often used against us. Good classroom teaching is good classroom teaching, and sound criteria for evaluating teaching are sound, no matter the modality. Best practices for teaching should not distinguish between “remote” v “regular”; best practices are best practices.

– If we call some classes “virtual,” international students who must take in-person classes only can be hurt.

– We have always had different modalities for teaching, for example, lecture classes versus seminars.

– Our next generation of classes may be in virtual reality–what are the implications?

– How about rules or best practices for all online universities?

– How to ensure that universities do not contract with learning platforms that do not guarantee privacy, data security, or academic freedom. [See, for example, CUCFA’s objections to UC’s wholesale adoption during the pandemic of unaccountable private tech platforms such as Zoom and ProctorU.]

What do these increased collaborations mean for CUCFA? An unprecedented chance to strengthen the ability of faculty—tenured, tenure track, full-time non-tenure track, part-time, graduate students and researchers–and all academic workers to fight back against the attacks on knowledge and science, assaults on academic freedom, and political interference with teaching students and engaging in scholarship. This New Deal for Higher Education corrects and transcends the racial, gender, and citizenship limits of the New Deal to advance a just and democratic higher education for all of us.

Constance Penley,
she/her/hers
Professor, Department of Film and Media Studies
Founding Director and Past Co-Director, Carsey-Wolf Center
President, Council of UC Faculty Associations
Academic Advisory Board Emeritus UC National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement