By Jennifer Howard

Washington

The American Association of University Professors is back on track after the financial and organizational derailments it endured over the past three years. That was the message the group's leadership reiterated throughout the business portion of the association's 95th annual meeting this month.

The overall meeting was attended by about 230 people, slightly fewer than last year's meeting, which attracted about 245 attendees, according to the group. An additional 140 people attended a concurrent AAUP meeting on academic freedom and globalization (see article below).

At the business meeting, the association placed four institutions on its censure list for academic-freedom violations and removed another from the list. But at plenary sessions, the discussion repeatedly returned to the group's push to reorient itself, financially and organizationally.

"All across the organization, we're functioning much more effectively than we were before," said Cary Nelson, the AAUP's president and a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "I think we're doing a good job for you."

Howard J. Bunsis, the group's secretary-treasurer and a professor of accounting at Eastern Michigan University, hit the back-on-track theme in his report on the group's finances. "We've turned the corner," Mr. Bunsis said. Although the AAUP's investments took a major hit because of the recession, he reported, the group had a positive cash flow last year after several years' worth of faulty accounting and budgets in the red.

He credited a campaign of streamlining and cost-watching for the change. Over all, the mood at the meeting was one of relief that the worst —total financial implosion, for instance —had not come to pass. "We had a tough period there," said Craig R. Vasey, a professor of philosophy at the University of Mary Washington who was recently elected to the AAUP's national Council. "We're in a lot better shape than we were three years ago."

Effort to Extend Reach

As the leadership acknowledged, though, many problems have not been solved yet. For instance, the AAUP still urgently needs to swell its ranks, in both its collective-bargaining units, which work on labor issues at specific campuses, and its advocacy chapters, which concentrate on academic-freedom issues.

Collectively, "we represent about 4 percent of the faculty nationally," said Gary Rhoades, the general secretary, at the meeting. Taking a glass-half-full attitude, he pointed out that "that's a tremendous opportunity to expand our membership."

One audience member pointed out that "people will not pay for something if they don't see the benefits they're going to get."

That brought up another theme heard throughout the day: The AAUP needs to do a better job demonstrating its value to members and potential members. "There's not enough presence in this association of what constitutes a major part of the academic work force," Mr. Rhoades said in an afternoon "brownies with the general secretary" session. He was responding to a commenter who wanted the AAUP to pay more attention to community colleges.

One questioner pointed out that on his campus, a lot of tenure-track faculty members "refuse to consider" the plight of contingent colleagues who don't have much say in what happens. "For too many tenure-track faculty, contingent faculty are like Ralph Ellison's 'invisible man' —they don't exist," Mr. Rhoades responded.

Inevitably, the question of tenure came up. "The problem isn't tenure and job security; it's that we've turned it into a status-seeking device," Mr. Rhoades said. "It's not just evil administrators who are doing that. We're doing that to ourselves." The profession needs to get past its focus on "internal divisions" and embrace the notion that everyone's in it together. "If you lose any sense of common purpose," he said, "it undermines your ability to accomplish anything."

Deciding What's Due

In a conversation with The Chronicle, Mr. Nelson, the AAUP's president, said that dues reform was the most important item on the agenda this year. A dues "restructuring" study is under way. "We simply have to have more-reasonable dues for faculty members at the lower end of the salary scale," he said. Although membership has increased slightly, from about 44,000 to about 47,000, "we're also hemorrhaging retiring faculty members." It has been hard to convince younger professors that AAUP membership will be worth the price tag, which varies depending on salary level and other factors.

Mr. Nelson also made a connection between the advocacy and labor parts of the AAUP enterprise, pointing out that you cannot have academic freedom if you are not able to find an academic job. "We were founded in a sense as a labor organization in 1915," he said. "In the midst of the recession, that message seems to be coming back more dramatically."

4 Institutions Censured

In what Mr. Nelson called "the most emotionally profound part of the meeting," members took up recommendations from the AAUP's Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. Based on the committee's findings, the membership voted to censure four institutions.

Stillman College was censured for its dismissal of a longtime, tenured assistant professor because he allegedly violated a faculty-handbook ban on "malicious gossip or public verbal abuse" when he challenged the college's president on a contract matter. Cedarville University, in Ohio, was censured for its firing of a professor in the department of biblical education without demonstrating cause in a hearing before his peers.

Two of the censure votes centered on cases that involved contingent or non-tenure-track professors. North Idaho College was put on the censure list for dismissing "a highly regarded adjunct instructor of English" with one day's notice and no explanation or hearing. Nicholls State University was rebuked for not reappointing a full-time mathematics instructor who had assigned failing grades to many of her algebra students. Ernst Benjamin, acting as chairman of Commitee A in the absence of the regular chairman, called the case "much more notable than it might look on the surface" because it concerns fundamental academic and professional standards.

Olivet Nazarene University, in Illinois, was considered for censure because of reports that it had bowed to pressure from religious conservatives who wanted a faculty member removed from teaching general biology; his book on faith and evolution was also banned from courses there. The university's president has "rescinded his directives against the faculty member and his book" in response to the recommendations of a faculty committee, so the AAUP took no action in that case.

The meeting voted to remove the University of New Haven from the censure list; after a full-time, non-tenure-track lecturer was dismissed in her eighth year there, the university adopted a policy that would provide such faculty members "after seven years of service with the protections against involuntary nonretention that accrue with faculty tenure." One member of the audience speculated that this outcome might be a "powerful" precedent in advancing the rights of non-tenure-track faculty members.

Tulane University, which was censured in 2007 for faculty dismissals it made in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, has almost satisfied the requirements for being taken off the censure list, Mr. Benjamin reported. He asked for the association's Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure to be authorized to lift censure "at such time as we are satisfied."

An AAUP member from Tulane argued in favor of that motion, telling the gathering that "you have no idea what it took" to get the Tulane administration to the negotiating table. "This is a huge win for the AAUP," she said, adding that it would be a big mistake to let the censure drag on until the next annual meeting. Members voted to grant Committee A the authority to act when it judged the time was right.