Across America these days we live in an era of university corporatization that flavors Ohio University's faculty union dialogue. Corporatization at OU did not begin with President McDavis, although he appears to like its taste. President Glidden explicitly embraced the corporate model in his first years at OU. President Ping, in persuading the 1978 Faculty Senate to give up democratic voting dean removal rights, gave the corporate model a healthy boost.
I chose to come to OU in 1967, Alden's last years - in part because I liked the academic freedom and speech freedom smell of this place.
This, my commentary, brings some new ideas and facts to the OU faculty union discourse, and asks an important question. But first:
In my graduate student days at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, I became wonderfully infected by the following 36 Sifting and Winnowing words of academic freedom - via my alma mater's [Latin - nourishing mother's] intellectual umbilical cord.
Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere
we believe that the great State University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.
These 36 words arose out of a 1894 University of Wisconsin Board of Trustees meeting in support of economics professor Richard Ely's exploration of controversial ideas with his students - one of which was the right of ordinary persons to form unions so as to bring some balance to the corporate robber-baron era of that day.
You might ask, what does the above have to do with OU's faculty union discussion? Well - the protagonists at OU are the American Association of University Professors [AAUP] local chapter, and the Committee for an Independent Faculty [CIF]. These groups offer significantly different models for academic governance.
AAUP's model is based on their 1915 founding principle of protecting academic freedom and its intimately related constitutional first amendment right-to-speak. As university corporatization grows across America, the AAUP has found it necessary to build a collective bargaining tool on its solid academic freedom foundation.
CIF's model is basically the corporate model with little room for free-speech ideals. CIF's model goes back to Frederick W. Taylor's Scientific Management days and ideas. Taylor is known as the father of Industrial Engineering. For a creative Russian engineer's dystopian extrapolation of Taylor's world, see Yevgeny Zamyatin's 1920 novel WE - a novel that preceded Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984 by several years. In CIF's model, if your views significantly differ from those of the boss - it can mean goodbye for you.
Therefore, I ask OU's faculty to reflect on which brand of academic governance they might prefer - the AAUP's democratic freedom model, or the CIF's top-down corporate model. To assist in this process, allow me to share some interesting CIF demographic facts and figures to be stirred into this decision-making soup.
Out of 39 CIF advocates, 10 are engineers, and 10 are business school persons. Thus 51 percent of the CIF come from parts of the campus with a seeming aversion to the AAUP's academic freedom model. Let me explain my use of the word aversion.
The American Society for Engineering Education [ASEE] - an institution that encompasses all engineering colleges across the USA - declines to join over 200 other American professional organizations in supporting the AAUP's 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure. I have unsuccessfully been seeking since 1980 to get ASEE to join up. My sad conclusion is that generally we engineers seem to have a problem with these academic freedom and free speech principles.
Some research, with the help of AAUP's Mr. Shaw, suggests that business schools also seem unwilling to support the AAUP's 1940 Principles. In a word search of the document, Eligibility Procedures and Standards for Business Accreditation of The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business [AACSB] - I cannot find the words academic freedom.
Which model, the CIF's or the AAUP's, might be the better model for academic governance at OU so as best to enable OU faculty and students to enjoy the wonderful existential pleasures of learning?
Chuck Overby is an engineering professor emeritus of Ohio University. 4
Opinion
Letter to the Editor
