Ellington

Staff and students aren’t the only parties at the UW concerned about how the reeling economy might affect their future employment prospects; professors are addressing the concerns as well.

That’s why the theme of this year’s Washington State Conference of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) was “Defending Academic Freedom in a Time of Crisis.” The annual meeting was held Friday at the Mount Baker Community Club in south Seattle.

The aim of the conference was to openly discuss job security for professors during a period of economic insecurity, specifically regarding adjunct faculty and looming budget cuts that could go as high as $600 million over two years.

“With the budget in Olympia they may have to lay off [between 600 and 800] people,” said Keith Hoeller, state chair of the AAUP Adjunct Faculty Committee. “My guess is [that adjunct professors] is where they would start, because they have no contractual obligation to them except ... during the term they’re hired.”

Adjunct faculty are part-time lecturers not on the tenure track. They have the shortest contracts with the UW of all faculty, ranging from a single quarter to one year. They cannot be fired during the time they are contracted to the university, but after that period they can be let go in the sense that their contract does not get renewed. Tenured professors, on the other hand, can only be fired for cause.

The day started with a keynote address by Ohio State University professor Frank Donoghue, taken from his soon-to-be published paper titled, “Is Academic Freedom Still Defensible?”

“No,” Donoghue said, answering the question posed by the title of his address. The commonly held view, he said, is that “[professors] are not that important. Therefore, academic freedom is not that important.”

Donoghue is the author of The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, in which he states that as schools and students alike become gradually more concerned with making money, liberal arts and humanities will disappear from colleges and, with them, tenured professors.

“There are fewer and fewer positions where job security is really a guarantee, and they’re disappearing,” Donoghue said. “That’s what I think is most important.”

Donoghue’s book argues that as tenured professors disappear, their positions will eventually be replaced by adjunct professors and graduate students, who will likely have less academic freedom.

“[The university] will fire an adjunct professor even if [they] didn’t say anything they don’t like,” said Raya Fidel, a tenured UW information science professor. “It’s unfortunate that professors without tenure don’t have [academic freedom], because the university can fire them whenever they want. So, they have to keep themselves quiet not to upset the university administration.”

One of the major conclusions reached in the day’s discussions was that adjunct professors’ main hope for having and maintaining academic freedom, or even for becoming tenured professors, was the creation of their own union.

For now, adjunct professors are members of the same union that represents tenured professors.

“We cannot go on having the tenured faculty represent us,” Hoeller said. “Basic democracy requires that you represent yourselves. If the adjuncts were to form their own separate union, then they would have a strong voice and a strong chance.”

Most everyone present at the event voiced a belief that the creation of an adjunct union is possible, but Rick Gautschi, a lecturer in the Foster School of Business, said it would be difficult.

“Most adjunct faculty don’t even know who other adjunct faculty are,” Gautschi said during a panel on employment security. “There’s no real forum for this to work.”

Hoeller is slightly more optimistic.

“It will be hard,” Hoeller said. “It can be done.”

Reach contributing writer Morgan Gard at development@dailyuw.com.