University Times

A drowsy — but not quite comatose — organization of Pitt faculty is awakening and looking for new members in response to what it believes are national and local threats to higher education.

The Pitt chapter of the American Association of University Professors (Pitt AAUP) has existed since the 1930s, but mostly in name only for the past decade. But a group of faculty wants to change that.

The national AAUP is a 47,000-member nonprofit educational organization that promotes academic freedom by supporting tenure, academic due process and standards of quality in higher education.

Recently elected president of Pitt AAUP Beverly Gaddy, associate professor of political science at the Greensburg campus, is trying to revive the Pitt AAUP chapter, which is independent of the University.

While a few AAUP chapters represent their members in collective bargaining, Gaddy stressed that the current Pitt AAUP stance is not to lobby for faculty unionization.

“That’s not our purpose. We’re an advisory group, here to support our faculty and to counter what we see as the erosion of the faculty role in shared governance, and the erosion of tenure status. We would like to look at how Pitt’s policies and statements compare to the AAUP principles, and ultimately to see the national AAUP recommendations incorporated into the Faculty Handbook, which currently are not,” Gaddy said.

“We have been dormant for a while and now we’re looking to be a voice again. It’s critical for us as faculty to speak out about these important issues,” she said. “Pitt needs a group to advocate for its faculty, and for policies that affect faculty. We’d like to be part of a University that shares the goals of the AAUP.”

Specifically, those goals include:

• Promoting and protecting higher education and its contribution to the common good, and advancing the standing and welfare of the profession and the faculty of the University;

• Protecting academic freedom and tenure and defending members of the faculty against institutional discrimination, as defined by the AAUP statements “On Academic Freedom and Tenure,” “On Discrimination” and “On Professors and Political Activity”;

• Preserving and strengthening the role of the faculty in the University’s system of shared governance, and

• Promoting the values, principles and standards of AAUP, as articulated in the AAUP “Policy Documents and Reports” (known as the Red Book), which is regarded as an authoritative source of sound academic practices.

With a new president, an amended constitution and a new online presence that includes a web site as well as a Facebook page, the Pitt AAUP chapter has the juices flowing again, said chapter past president and current secretary-treasurer Philip Wion, an emeritus professor of English who has been a member since 1967.

Wion noted the new web site (http://pittaaup.org/) has continued a long Pitt AAUP tradition of publicizing national faculty salary comparison data from the AAUP’s journal Academe. In addition, the site contains links to Pitt-specific information, such as salary data broken down by school/unit, the Faculty Handbook, the Benefits office, the University Senate and its tenure and academic freedom committee and Pitt’s appeals, grievance and salary increase policies and procedures, as well as outside links to Academe, the national AAUP and the Pennsylvania AAUP chapter, the federal IPEDS (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System) Data Center, Pennsylvania Snyder Reports and the Joint State Government Commission of the General Assembly.

As background for new members, Wion has posted on the web site a brief history of Pitt AAUP, which notes that the chapter dates back to the 1935, when, following the dismissal of a history professor, the national AAUP placed Pitt on its list of censured institutions. That was the push the University apparently needed to adopt academic freedom and tenure practices then acceptable to AAUP.

Wion said when he joined the Pitt AAUP in the 1960s the chapter quietly was giving advice to individuals on tenure and academic freedom issues, but otherwise keeping a low profile.

Since then, Wion said, the Pitt chapter has gone through periods of both low and high activity, with a large dose of the latter in the 1970s when faculties all over the country began unionizing. Collective bargaining in that era was seen as a means not only of achieving economic goals but also of protecting academic freedom and securing a larger role in academic governance, and the national AAUP in 1973 endorsed such bargaining, he explained.

A divided Pitt faculty and a strongly anti-union administration struggled through two major efforts to unionize, one in the 1970s and another in the early 1990s, efforts ultimately that failed, Wion noted.

But times have changed, Gaddy said, and today the aim is to increase chapter membership. Adding new members, she said, would widen the chapter’s viewpoints and introduce additional academic issues and concerns, as well as increase the chapter’s clout.

“There is strength in numbers,” she said, “and I encourage faculty who care about quality education; who desire that standards for sound academic practice and shared governance be upheld and more widely accepted by the academic community, and who are concerned with the erosion of the faculty voice in University governance, threats to academic freedom and tenure and the plight of contingent faculty, to join the AAUP, the one organization that has stood for academic excellence and our profession since 1915.”

The Pitt chapter does have modest membership dues, Wion said. All faculty, including part-time faculty, are eligible to join. Becoming a member of the Pitt AAUP automatically includes membership in the national AAUP and the Pennsylvania chapter, a subscription to Academe and discount rates for The Chronicle of Higher Education, insurance programs and other financial incentives that are detailed at www.aaup.org/AAUP/involved/benes/, he noted.

For more information, contact Gaddy at bag13@pitt.edu or Wion at pwion@pitt.edu, or use the online form at www.pittaaup.org/join_our_chapter.htm.

—Peter Hart