A Professorial Professoriate: Unionization, Bureaucratization, and the AAUP

Philo A. Hutcheson. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000. 298 pp., $23.95

ERNST BENJAMIN

PHILO HUTCHESON HAS WRITTEN A history of the AAUP from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s to explore "the tension between professionalism and bureaucratic demands" in higher education. He prefaces his study with an acknowledgment of his debt to the University of Chicago where he, and I, "learned that no answer is better than the question and no question is good enough."

His question regarding how the AAUP has managed the tension between professionalism and institutional demands results in a sometimes useful and detailed description of the AAUP's work on faculty compensation, shared governance, academic unionism, and academic freedom. Unfortunately, Hutcheson's theoretical confusion impairs his formulation of a fascinating question. This confusion, combined with his incomplete and poorly organized historical presentation, results in an inadequate answer.

His historical narrative begins with a review of the AAUP's disappointing response to McCarthyism. Although Hutcheson fails to mention the AAUP's principled objection to the dismissal of faculty members for their beliefs or affiliations absent evidence of specific unprofessional conduct, he contributes to a better understanding of the AAUP's failure to publish a single report of an investigation between the summer of 1949 and 1956. On the one hand, he documents the understaffing that AAUP general secretary Ralph Himstead presented as a rationale for his inaction. On the other, he cites an observation by Bentley Glass, who wrote the AAUP's retrospective 1956 report, Academic Freedom and National Security, that Himstead was "timorous" regarding McCarthy and had insisted to the AAUP Council that the Association would "disintegrate" if it opposed anticommunism. Hutcheson also emphasizes the fact that the Association's inaction reflected the acceptance of Himstead's position by key Association leaders.

He describes the membership's rebellion against this "oligarchy" that resulted not only in the renewal of Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure but also in a sweeping reinvigoration of other Association activities. He then traces this reinvigoration across a wide range of AAUP committees. Of particular interest are his discussions of the committees currently known as the Committees on the Economic Status of the Profession, on Representation of Economic and Professional Interests, and on College and University Government.

The Committee on the Economic Status of the Profession had for many years prepared salary surveys based on a small selection of institutions, but in 1958 it began to expand the range and, more important, the scope of the survey to include a system of grading institutions and setting salary goals. Also during this period, the Committee on College and University Govemment, then called the Committee on Faculty-Administration Relationships, began the negotiations with the American Council on Education that culminated in the 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities. The committee also undertook surveys aimed at grading campus governance and began investigations of substantial departures from AAUP standards for governance. Hutcheson includes interesting detail, but his overly chronological approach often breaks the topical threads. Moreover, because he relies heavily on AAUP Council minutes that end in the early 1970s, he fails to complete the story; for example, when and why did salary goal setting and governance grading cease?

The central historical narrative, which describes the development of what was then called the Committee on the Representation of the Economic and Professional Interests of the Faculty and the AAUP's adoption of collective bargaining, suffers from the same lack of completion. Hutcheson describes how early AAUP discussions about collective bargaining, led by law professor Clyde Summers, accepted collective representation but objected to the concept of exclusive representation. He fails to note that Summers subsequently followed a similar logic in preparing an amicus brief that the AAUP submitted to the Supreme Court in the 1984 case Minnesota State Board for Community Colleges v. Leon W. Knight-a brief that reopened the division between AAUP traditionalists and collective bargaining advocates.

Hutcheson uses the faculty dismissals and subsequent strike at Saint John's University in New York in 1965-66 to illustrate what he calls the "[A]ssociation['s] limitations in the face of administrative intransigence" that helped inspire the AAUP to enter into collective bargaining. He describes the AAUP's legal expenditures and support, the initial AAUP efforts to influence the accreditation process, the Committee A investigation (but not the censure), and the general secretary's decision to investigate conditions of governance (but not the published report).

But he omits the AAUP's subsequent successes: its direct role in negotiating a collective bargaining agreement at Saint John's incorporating AAUP standards, the successful resolution of the faculty cases as a precondition for censure removal, and the salutary effect of these actions on other Catholic colleges and universities. These successes occurred by 1971-72, within the core time frame of the book; Hutcheson thus mischaracterizes a fine example of a successful joining of the AAUP's traditional and collective bargaining approaches in support of professional standards.

Hutcheson describes well the events and the arguments leading to the AAUP's endorsement in 1972 of collective bargaining for those faculty desiring it. He documents the Association's responses to unauthorized bargaining initiatives by local chapters, the increasing competition for membership as the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association began to organize higher education faculty, and the new upsurge in member activism, especially through the AAUP's state conferences. He shows how the faculty strike at Catholic University in support of Charles Curran, whose academic freedom was threatened by the church's objections to his writings on Catholic doctrine and sexual morality, helped overcome professional antipathy to strikes.

He also presents the major arguments for and against collective bargaining advanced by Association leaders and staff. He emphasizes the moderating roles of general secretary Bertram Davis and president Ralph Brown (who served previously as chair of the Committee on College and University Government and subsequently as chair of the Committee on Representation of Economic and Professional Interests). He also describes the pivotal role of William Van Alstyne, who initially opposed bargaining, then ran for president of the AAUP against two probargaining candidates, won, and through his subsequent support for bargaining contributed substantially to integrating bargaining and traditional AAUP activities. What Hutcheson apparently does not know is that key collective bargaining leaders supported Van Alstyne's election to help ensure the AAUP's continued commitment to principles that had led faculty to choose it rather than another bargaining agent.

The book grew out of a dissertation culminating in 1971, and Hutcheson has added an account of events from 1972 to 1976 and an overview into the 1990s. But the book does not describe complex political processes-such as the repeated defeat of collective bargaining candidates for the presidency of the AAUP and the appointment of a collective bargaining leader as general secretary-through which the Association sustained a sometimes uneasy balance between collective bargaining and traditional methods of representation, such as the defense of academic freedom and support of faculty governance. Moreover, his formulation of a supposed opposition between professional and bureaucratic values in his introduction is so inadequate that his concluding chapter, which focuses on changes in higher education rather than on the AAUP, adopts a more useful distinction between professional and managerial values.

This change illustrates Hutcheson's inadequate understanding of both the academic profession and the academic association. Through much of the book, Hutcheson erroneously maintains that the AAUP's founders saw themselves as professionals rather than as employees. Actually, the AAUP's founders saw-and the AAUP has always seen-faculty as "officers of their institutions" rather than as "mere" employees. AAUP policies recognize that faculty as professionals are employed in bureaucratic organizations (hence "officers"), and seek to protect professional autonomy through the construction of bureaucratic rules and procedures defining appointments, tenure, and academic governance. Moreover, the distinguishing characteristic of managerialism is in fact the search for entrepreneurial "flexibility" through a systematic deconstruction of established institutional rules, including AAUPrecommended standards. Bargaining to reinforce orderly personnel procedures and long-standing AAUP policies was not, as Hutcheson suggests, a triumph of bureaucracy over professionalism, but an extension of the AAUP's efforts to safeguard professional autonomy and academic governance against entrepreneurial managerialism within an established bureaucratic framework.

Despite its annoying misconceptions and episodic history, readers of this review will probably find the book of interest. It is the first published work that focuses primarily on the AAUP in this significant period and there is delight, as well as devilment, in its details. Quotations such as the following from Ralph Brown in 1968 capture much that analysis does not: "I would say the old right is blasting us, the new left is flaying us, and the antiintellectual center is sitting on us. Let us attack."

Ernst Benjamin served as the AAUP's general secretary from 1984 to 1994 and is currently the AAUP's director of research.

Copyright American Association of University Professors Nov/Dec 2000
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