Joint AFT/NEA conference focuses on building alliances

MORE THAN 700 higher education members of the AFT and the National Education Association converged on the nation's capital March 28-30 to participate in a joint conference focused on the theme of "Building Alliances for Higher Education and the Public Good."

This was the third joint meeting of the unions, noted AFT vice president Sandra Schroeder, who is president of AFT Washington and chair of the AFT Higher Education program and policy council. She counted off the many hot-button issues the conference would be touching upon: academic staffing patterns, academic freedom, workload and love of teaching, collective bargaining, political action, tenure and dismissal procedures, accountability, lobbying, diversity and more.

The stakes are high

AFT president Edward J. McElroy summarized what unions are facing in the present political climate. After years of building power through collective bargaining and organizing, now we are witnessing an erosion of our gains. We see funding cuts, unacceptable staffing compromises, rising tuitions and reduced access to college for the poor and middle class, and standardization of higher education.

The answer to that erosion: "We have to defeat George Bush and anyone who looks like him in the next election," said McElroy. Whomever the Democratic candidate is, he added, "we have to work our tails off" to get that person elected.

Education is central to recovery

Keynote speaker John Podesta, former White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton and founder of the Center for American Progress, described a vision of a revitalized economy with education as its central pillar.

"The United States has relied on rising educational attainment to sustain growth," he said. Current policies are putting educational gains under threat. Other cultures and economies are moving ahead, while the U.S. workforce is becoming less educated compared with our global peers. "Economic competitiveness should be a driver of our higher education policy," Podesta asserted. "Education has to be a core element of the next president's economic policy, not just a social policy."

Podesta especially urged higher education activists to situate themselves within the big picture. Help legislators get the connection between every level of education and American competitiveness, and "continue to be a voice for those left behind."

No retreat on civil rights

Against the backdrop of the 40th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, acclaimed Harvard legal theorist Charles Ogletree discussed another anniversary, that of the Bakke Supreme Court decision, which reversed affirmative action policy across the nation.

In a passionate speech, Ogletree, this year's Polishook lecturer (named after the former head of the AFT higher education program and policy council), described the civil rights gains that punctuated his childhood in the 1950s and '60s. "Until 1954, there were no civil rights in America," he said. "It took the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act to achieve what had been withheld for 300 years."

Yet a decade after Dr. King's assassination, all those gains were reversed by the Bakke decision, which eliminated affirmative action at the University of California as a means of diversifying the student population.

Today, said Ogletree, there are lessons we must take from Bakke. "We are not there yet," in national efforts to eliminate racism and discrimination, and we must have honest and frank conversations about that. Also, while we've made "fantastic progress, schools today are more segregated than they were in 1954," and teachers lack the tools they need to see that students succeed.

Promoting diversity—gender, racial and for people with disabilities—in faculty and staff hiring was a topic that came up repeatedly in sessions over the weekend. In one workshop, contributors to a special AFT American Academic journal devoted to the topic presented their research. Derryn Moten, co-president of the Alabama State University Faculty-Staff Alliance/AFT and Lezli Baskerville, president of the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education, noted that historically black colleges and universities have among the most diverse faculties in the nation. Catherine Hill, director of research for the American Association of University Women, showed how the secrecy that often surrounds tenure decisions serves to hurt women who are inexplicably denied tenure and promotion opportunities. "When it comes to faculty diversity," concluded Moten, "benign neglect is never benign, it is merely neglect."

Perennial staffing issues

Both the AFT and the NEA have made addressing the inequities of the contingent academic workforce a major priority, and many sessions were devoted to the topic.

We didn't get into this situation overnight, AFT vice president Barbara Bowen pointed out in describing the Faculty and College Excellence campaign that the AFT has been advancing for the past year. Bowen is president of the Professional Staff Congress/AFT, which represents full- and part-time faculty and staff at the City University of New York. But getting back on track will take a "huge, conceptual fiscal change," she said.

Staffing patterns have shifted over the years to the point where the majority of courses in postsecondary institutions are taught by professionals who are part-time/adjunct, nontenure track employees or graduate employees. The underresourcing of this huge academic workforce and the implications it holds for students poses an academic staffing crisis for the nation.

"We exist in a climate of scarcity, and many of us have accommodated ourselves to it," Bowen acknowledged. Yet faced with a complicated economic situation, AFT higher ed leaders have come up with a state legislative approach that attempts to both protect part-time/adjunct faculty and rebuild full-time faculty lines.

Getting a grip on accountability

Washington has heard a rising drumbeat of calls for more accountability in higher education. Yet many are resisting proposals for oversimplified measures of institutional success based on graduation rates. For example, some higher education associations have designed instruments to assess student performance and provide feedback to institutions so as to improve outcomes.

Said Debra Humphreys, vice president for communications and public affairs at the Association of American Colleges and Universities, "We believe we need more evidence about how our students are doing in achieving learning outcomes." But, she added, "we need to anchor our assessments into the core work of the curriculum—what faculty deem is important." Humphreys spoke at a presentation entitled, "Defending Effective Accountability and Assessment Practices."

But Sherman Dorn, an associate professor of psychology and social foundations at the University of South Florida, warned that once institutions willingly allow a voluntary standardized test onto premises, it's a short leap to having the test imposed on everyone and the curriculum becoming standardized as well.

Something for everyone

In addition, the conference offered more than 50 workshops, cybersessions (on technology-related subjects) and professional development sessions on topics such as political and labor organizing, healthcare and retirement negotiating trends, distance education techniques, managing the disruptive student, and academic freedom.
Other conference highlights included:

• Three noted bloggers, P.Z. Smith, Barbara Fister and Aaron Barlow continuing a discussion begun online on the topic of Why I Teach.
• Collective bargaining trends and successes for full-time, nontenure-track faculty presented by Gary Rhoades, director of the University of Arizona Center for the Study of Higher Education, and Kirsten Herold, chief negotiator for the Lecturers' Employee Organization/AFT at the University of Michigan.
• Congressional staffers discussing the Higher Education Act with American Council on Education lobbyist Becky Timmons.