National attention is on the U.S. presidential campaign, but for higher education another election is looming.

Members of the country’s largest faculty group — the American Association of University Professors — will cast ballots in March to determine the organization’s president for the next two years. The race pits Cary Nelson, an English professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who has held the top AAUP job since 2006, against a challenger, Tom Guild.

Mr. Guild is a professor emeritus at the University of Central Oklahoma and a visiting professor of legal studies at Oklahoma City University. He ran against Mr. Nelson in 2004 and lost.

The contenders will face each other in a one-hour debate on February 23 at the University of Central Oklahoma.

Both candidates have created campaign Web sites. On his site, Mr. Guild notes that the AAUP censures only a handful of institutions each year that are found to have violated professors’ academic freedom, yet he says many more institutions are guilty. “We need additional mechanisms to make violators of our principles of academic freedom and tenure pay a price for doing so,” he writes.

He also wants the organization to shore up its membership among full-time faculty members. Overall membership in the AAUP has dropped drastically over the last generation.

Mr. Nelson’s Web site lists 17 of his accomplishments as president, including a new membership campaign and stepped-up communication by e-mail between members and the national office. He also quotes supporters who call him “fearless” and say he has worked “intelligently” and “tirelessly” on behalf of the AAUP.

Whoever is elected will begin serving at the close of the organization’s national meeting, in June. —Robin Wilson