Destructive trends are eroding the institutions in which we work, said speakers at the AFT's annual higher education issues conference, held in Chicago, April 12-14. These trends include the privatization of public services, the growth of the contingent workforce, the circumvention of shared governance and, in general, the attempt to offer education "on the cheap," as AFT vice president William Scheuerman put it in his opening remarks.

The conference sessions on the theme, "Getting Results: Strengthening Our Union and Advancing the Academy," gave the nearly 300 participants a chance to reflect on ways to respond and do battle.  "Either we stand up and fight, or we lay down and let them run us over," said AFT secretary-treasurer Ed McElroy.

"This is a difficult time to be a public employee," said Columbia University professor Elliott D. Sclar, the conference's distinguished Irwin Polishook Lecturer. He is the author of The Economics of Privatization: You Don't Always Get What You Pay For. "We live in an era when public work is presumed to be incompetent, unless it is proved otherwise," he said. He then outlined arguments the audience could use as weapons to buck the errant conventional wisdom of "private means good, public means bad."

The conference's well-attended workshops also provided ideas for organizing part-time/adjunct faculty and graduate employees; responding to assaults on academic freedom, post 9/11; shoring up shared governance; and protecting intellectual property. In several sessions, the concerns of part-time faculty were paramount, including an extended discussion of a draft of "Standards of Good Practice in the Employment of Part-Time/Adjunct Faculty," a report that the higher education program and policy council intends to release this summer. [Barbara McKenna / AFT On Campus]

April 19, 2002