AAUP Summer Institute
Over the weekend PSU-AAUP Director Phil Lesch and I attended the AAUP Summer Institute in Minneapolis.
For someone relatively new to active volunteer work with our chapter, it was a very enlightening experience. There were something like 200 participants at the Summer Institute, a record, and also 140 first-timers, also a record. The member and affiliate chapters range from very small, teaching-only schools to larger Ph.D-granting schools. (PSU has one of the larger memberships.)
Some of the universities represented by AAUP have only tenured professors or only a small number of fixed-term faculty (the classifications and names of these differ). My sense is that our ratio of tenure to fixed-term is weighted more to fixed term than other schools--Howard Bunsis, the AAUP treasurer, mentioned that at his university, Eastern Michigan, 70% of the faculty are tenure-line. Our contingent of academic professionals also seems novel to many I spoke to.
The institute is structured around four intensive three-hour sessions with lively titles like "Impasse Resolution" and "Faculty Leadership in Tough Financial Times." As you can imagine, the content got fairly detailed fairly quickly, so I'll skip the specifics. I left feeling energized and excited about the future. It was nice to see others who are in similar (or worse--sometimes far, far worse) situations and get a broader perspective.
For someone relatively new to active volunteer work with our chapter, it was a very enlightening experience. There were something like 200 participants at the Summer Institute, a record, and also 140 first-timers, also a record. The member and affiliate chapters range from very small, teaching-only schools to larger Ph.D-granting schools. (PSU has one of the larger memberships.)
Some of the universities represented by AAUP have only tenured professors or only a small number of fixed-term faculty (the classifications and names of these differ). My sense is that our ratio of tenure to fixed-term is weighted more to fixed term than other schools--Howard Bunsis, the AAUP treasurer, mentioned that at his university, Eastern Michigan, 70% of the faculty are tenure-line. Our contingent of academic professionals also seems novel to many I spoke to.
The institute is structured around four intensive three-hour sessions with lively titles like "Impasse Resolution" and "Faculty Leadership in Tough Financial Times." As you can imagine, the content got fairly detailed fairly quickly, so I'll skip the specifics. I left feeling energized and excited about the future. It was nice to see others who are in similar (or worse--sometimes far, far worse) situations and get a broader perspective.
Labels: union news
posted by Jeff Alworth at
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