AAUP President Urges Faculty to Join Battle Against Unwarranted Cuts

by E Wayne Ross on June 9, 2011

The Chronicle: AAUP President Urges Faculty to Join Battle Against Unwarranted Cuts

Washington
The president of the American Association of University Professors painted a bleak picture of higher education in his remarks that opened the association’s annual meeting here on Wednesday.

“The last eight to 10 months has been like nothing that I’ve ever experienced before,” said Cary Nelson, the association’s president, who has been a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since 1970.

In a speech that highlighted recent attacks on collective-bargaining rights, academic freedom, and tenure, Mr. Nelson chastised faculty members who refuse to acknowledge that the nation’s higher-education system is broken. He said his own predictions over the years about the shifting higher-education landscape turned out not to be bleak enough.