The AAUP: A Moral Autopsy

Abstract

Among the first things I did upon becoming a professor in 1959 was to join the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). To do so almost seemed like a religious obligation, a step any serious academic would eagerly and proudly take. The AAUP was then the largest and most influential academic association in the United States, an organization whose founding principles had become the bedrock upon which academic freedom and the security of tenure had been raised. Thirty-five years later I resigned. It had become clear to me that the AAUP had become part of the problems then roiling the academic world, problems that have continued and intensified to this day. The AAUP was established in 1915, in a world radically different from ours, especially in the much smaller size, number, and cultural importance of colleges and universities. It was organized, in part, as a reaction to a long series of sensational academic firings at the beginning of the twentieth century. The story I most vividly remember, and that long seemed to me most emblematic of the organization’s origin and mission, involved Mrs. Leland Stanford’s dismissal of economist Edward A. Ross, whose views were too radical for her taste. On the Stanford faculty at that time was a man destined to become a distinguished American philosopher, Arthur Lovejoy, also a founder of the discipline known as The History of Ideas. Incensed to learn that professors served at the whim of their employers and could be summarily fired, he indignantly resigned—only to be subsequently denied Acad. Quest. (2009) 22:340–350 DOI 10.1007/s12129-009-9117-7