Now Available: Fall 2021 Issue of AAUP's Academe

 

The fall 2021 issue of Academe surveys the present state of academic governance. It includes a new report on findings of the 2021 AAUP Shared Governance Survey, firsthand accounts of governance struggles on campuses around the country, and a pair of articles that confront the threat posed by attacks on critical race theory.

Follow the links in the table of contents below to read the issue.

Most interesting for me was  The 2021 AAUP Shared Governance Survey: Findings on Demographics of Senate Chairs and Governance Structures By Hans-Joerg Tiede.

The 2021 AAUP Shared Governance Survey, the first such national survey in two decades, covered a wide range of topics related to academic gover­nance. I reported on responses to survey questions about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on governance and the relative authority of the faculty in various areas of academic decision-making in an online data snapshot titled “Survey Data on the Impact of the Pandemic on Shared Governance” and in the report Findings on Faculty Roles by Decision-Making Areas, respectively. This report focuses on responses to questions about the composition of senates and similar faculty governance bodies, faculty-board communication, and the conduct of presidential searches as well as questions about the demographic composition and professional character­istics of faculty governance leaders. I present the results by institutional control (public or private nonprofit); by Carnegie classification (distinguishing broadly between doctoral, master’s, and bachelor’s institutions); by institutional size, with institutions categorized as “small” (fewer than two thousand students), “medium” (between two thousand and five thousand students), or “large” (more than five thousand students); and by the collective bargaining status of tenured and tenure-track faculty members (at institutions with a tenure system) or full-time faculty members (at institutions without a tenure system). When possible, I also compare findings with results from previous national surveys on shared governance conducted or sponsored by the AAUP.

Now Available Bulletin of the AAUP (Summer 2021)--COVID and the University (and all is not Well)

 

The AAUP's annual Bulletin collects in one place the reports, policy statements, and official AAUP business materials of an academic year—in this case, 2020–21. Most of these documents have already been published on the AAUP website or in Academe, and the parenthetical dates after their titles refer to date of original publication. The Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors is published annually as the summer issue of Academe (or as the July–August issue prior to 2019). This table of contents links to PDFs of that print version. These PDFs will stand as the historical record for 2020–21 and will not be changed. (AAUP Bulletin Announcement)

 It comes as no surprise that the AAUP focuses its reporting this year on the most important event of this generation--COVID19. Thsi issue of Academe does an excellent job of memorializing the perspectives ad analysis of that crisis on the academy.  It also suggests the great tragedy of the faculty voice in crisis.  That tragedy is centered on the irresistible urge to assume a reactionary posture--and the discourse of a "return"--in the face of transformed conditions that will make the possibility of any such return effectively impossible.  It will be left to others, perhaps, to forge forward.  But this reporting provides a glimpse of the way in which that forward might lead backwards in the context of a industry capable of such a return.  That this is not so and that other approaches may well have to be developed may be read between the lines.

COVID-19 has fast forwarded trends that have effectively sidelined traditional faculty governance and shared governance principles.  Shared governance has been reduced effectively to a technocratic exercise.  At its best it has reduced faculty governance structures to an odd form of focus group, or worse, has absorbed  the faculty into the administrative apparatus at a low administrative level. In the process faculties have refused to embrace or neglected any effort to transform themselves into stronger instruments of accountability.  Part of that, of course, is a function of the great transformation of this century--the effective elimination of tenure except as a vestigial condition.  Faculty dependent on the renewal of contracts are hardly in a position to effectively "lean in" without substantial risk. And the technological revolution will reshape teaching and student engagement--and here it is the administration rather than faculty that are driving change.  In the meantime faculty obsession with transforming their function from research to the exercise of a role as public intellectuals--a process abetted by an administration obsessed, in turn, with short term (and quite manipulative) impact measures, has altered the value of faculty as sources of the production of knowledge.  They have become a political instrument, or on the other side, the blue collar producers of "facts" that can be consumed by the policy caste. Still there is much to lear from the orthodox narrative of the effects of COVID-19 on faculty.  Links to the articles follow.

Now Available Vol 107(2) of the AAUP's Academe Magazine and its Vision for an Academic "New Deal"

 

 

Spring 2021 | Vol. 107, No. 2

Times of crisis always seem to bring out that fundamental and powerful human response of looking back toward a golden age, whose re-establishment in contemporary form is thought to be essential for successfully overcoming crisis. The darker the present, the more powerful the urge to look to the past for the ideal that the future is tasked to recapture.

Al societies appear to have a golden age somewhere in their cultural back pocket--and sometimes elements of society, important social actors, have very specific eddies of "gold" that they can mine within these rapidly receding times that look better and better as they move farther and farther from out experiences. 

So it is with the world of the American academic community.  In the face of a crisis, and the likley end of a century of more of less stable ideals of university education, a crisis with respect to which  there is more than enough complicity to go around involving all of the academy's major stakeholders, even the complicit can look back and seek to replicate in modern form the essence of a past age which in retrospect now looks so appealing. 

To that end, the American academy has sought solace in the Great Depression, and in the transformative changes that occurred then (judged in the rear view mirror of time of course) --now transposed in ways that are acceptable to modern sensibilities, to the contemporary age and its contemporary problems.   Thus Academe's marvelously valuable Vol. 107(2).  Whether or not one is open to the vision that its many essays develop, the volume itself serves as an extraordinary testimony not just to the times, but also to the passing of an age.  And it is in the shadow of the hope that these essays advance, that one might see the darker forms of what actually lies ahead for the American academy. Links to the articles follow below.

The Transformation of University Governance and the Triumph of a Peculiar Ideology of Fiscalization in the American University

 

 

The American Association of University Professor (AAUP) has just announced publication of a set of quite interesting article in the Spring issue of its Academe Magazine..

The spring issue, which will be published in full in May, focuses on the campaign for a New Deal for Higher Education and builds on the work of Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education, a group founded last year by Jennifer Mittelstadt. Follow the links below or visit https://www.aaup.org/academe to read more about the Scholars for a New Deal and the work of the faculty activists who are mapping out a new vision for the future of higher education.

Of particular interest is the "better late than never" observations of Michael Bérubé and Michael DeCesare in their Column: State of the Profession: Twin Crises. They offer a "blunt assessment as cochairs of the AAUP committee that investigated departures from AAUP-recommended standards of governance at eight institutions." From this they weave a set of observations of trends they deplore that combine the trajectories of fiscal stewardship and protection of health into a potent cocktail spiced by the principles (so current in contemporary administrative ideology) of nimble leadership and of the migration of stewardship and responsibility from a decentralized model built around engagement by university professionals and overseen by its administrators, to one in which the professionalization of administration has itself served as the basis for drawing all authority into the now separable administrative class governing the university. Far too late (the professorate is itself trapped by the logic of its own pretensions as firmly as administrators are trapped in the logic of their own caste)  they have come to realize the extent to which ideologies of governance to which they have been indifferent now serve as a powerful baseline for authenticating and legitimating decisions that effectively reduce faculty to factors in the production of goods (graduates and outside income) who are both fungible and whose employment is a function of institutional profitability as such things are measured by university administrators and driven by their boards. A de-professionalized faculty is one that is vulnerable to attack on its professional prerogatives. And yet over the course of a generation, faculty has done little to resist the incremental gnawing away of both its status and its prerogatives

Still, this lamentation is worth a careful read, if only for a glimpse at the state of affairs in university governance. But the time for lamentation has passed.  And that is the great pity and the great failing of this effort. University stakeholders are not in need of keening; they are in need of the organization of response, or a consensus that response is now impossible if the goal is to preserve the imaginary of an academic life world that is quickly receding into historical fantasy. It is in that context that the issue theme assumes its ironic character.

Call for Papers: AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom

 

 

Journal of Academic Freedom

The AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom publishes scholarship on academic freedom and on its relation to shared governance, tenure, and collective bargaining. Scholarship on academic freedom is typically scattered across a wide range of disciplines. The Journal provides a central place to track the developing international discussion about academic freedom and its collateral issues. Essays range from historical studies to analyses of contemporary conflicts, from accounts of individual faculty experiences to institutional histories.

The Journal is published online annually, and is supported by funding from the AAUP Foundation. We release a call for papers each fall.

JAF has put out a "Call for Papers"  for its next volume, scheduled for publication in fall 2021. The Journal of Academic Freedom will consider any original article on the topic of academic freedom,

See the latest call for papers. Which also follows below

 

The COVID-19 Crisis: Fall 2020 Issue of AAUP's ACademe Magazine

 

I am delighted to share the articles in the Fall 2020 issue of Academe which describes itself as taking "stock of the crisis that has transformed our lives and the way we work. It features a series of reflections on faculty life during the pandemic as well as articles that look ahead to the near- and long-term challenges of the COVID-19 crisis in higher education."

Links to the articles and essays follow.

COVID and the University from the American Association of University Professors

What’s New with Academe?

This month’s newsletter offers a preview of selected articles from our forthcoming fall issue on the COVID-19 crisis in higher education. Follow the links below or visit https://www.aaup.org/academe to read a new series of reflections on faculty life during the pandemic and other highlights from Academe and the Academe Blog.

Links to the articles follow below.

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Announcing Publcation of the AAUP Journal Academe 106(2) (Spring 2020) "In Defense of Knowledge and Higher Education"

The spring 2020 issue of Academe, inspired by the AAUP’s statement In Defense of Knowledge and Higher Education, examines the complexities—conceptual, critical, structural, and political—of the production of knowledge. Joan W. Scott, professor emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, served as the guest editor of this special issue of the magazine.

Follow the links in the table of contents below or read the entire issue at https://www.aaup.org/issue/spring-2020.

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FEATURES

Rebellion, Authority, and Knowledge
Disciplined thought and expertise are essential to the advancement of knowledge.By Robert Post

The Big Secret in the Academy Is That Most Research Is Secret
The dangerous rift between open and classified research.By Kate Brown

A Dissenting View from the Humanities on the AAUP’s Statement on Knowledge
In defense of critical inquiry.
By Judith Butler

Dialogue across Divides
The humanities can provide understanding across disciplines.By Joy Connolly

Academic Freedom as Democratization
Faculty must be involved in all aspects of university decision-making.By Christopher Newfield

Data Snapshot: Survey Data on Attitudes toward Faculty Freedom of Expression(online only)
How might political views influence attitudes toward academic freedom?
By Hans-Joerg Tiede

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BOOK REVIEWS

Snowflakes and Syllabi
Brian Hutler reviews What Snow­flakes Get Right by Ulrich Baer.

Understanding Students Who Are Parents
Jillian M. Duquaine-Watson reviews Back in School by A. Fiona Pearson.

Liberal Education Needs Integration, Not Unbundling
Rebecca Pope-Ruark reviews College Made Whole by Chris W. Gallagher.

Should Only the Strong Survive?
Lawrence Stelmach and Allison A. Buskirk-Cohen review Strategic Mergers in Higher Education by Ricardo Azziz, Guilbert C. Hentschke, Lloyd A. Jacobs, and Bonita C. Jacobs.

Rebalancing Power in the Gig Academy
Roger G. Baldwin reviews The Gig Academy by Adrianna Kezar, Tom DePaola, and Daniel T. Scott. 

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CHAPTER PROFILE

Rutgers University AAUP-AFT

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COLUMNS

From the Editor: The Politics of Knowledge

From the President: Eight Years of Organizing for Change

Legal Watch: Two Cases to Watch

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NOTA BENE

Responding to the COVID-19 Pandemic

2019–20 Faculty Compensation Survey Data

Graduate Employees Strike at UCSC

The spring 2020 issue of Academe, inspired by the AAUP’s statement In Defense of Knowledge and Higher Education, examines the complexities—conceptual, critical, structural, and political—of the production of knowledge. Joan W. Scott, professor emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, served as the guest editor of this special issue of the magazine.

Follow the links in the table of contents below or read the entire issue at https://www.aaup.org/issue/spring-2020.

From the American Association of University Professors--A Rich Collection of Articles and Reports from its Summer 2019 Bulletin

The Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors is published annually as the summer issue of Academe. This year's Bulletin features academic freedom and tenure investigative reports, college and university governance investigative reports, a report on the assault on gender and gender studies, a statement on dual enrollment, and annual reports and other business documents. Follow the links in this email or read the entire issue at https://www.aaup.org/issue/summer-2019-bulletin.

 

Links follow: 

 

On the Battlefield of Shared Governance--Maricopa Community College and the Shift from Ideas to Faction in Shared Governance

(Pix © Larry Catá Backer 2019)

Shared governance appears to have acquired a political patina.  And that is unfortunate--especially since the labels that are used to describe combatants tends to veil rather than illuminate the agendas and ideologies of the combatants.  The field of battle, of course, is that cluster of practices and principles we have come to describe as "shared governance." The conventional liberal-conservative divide appears to have formed around the binary--"for" or "against" shared governance. Those binaries infect not merely analysis of the evolution and protection of shared governance, but induce even the most well meaning to clothe themselves in these labels.

More's the pity for the way it tends to shift the focus from the construction and reconstruction (or perhaps dismantling) of shared governance to the more mundane issues around fidelity to political faction and its orthodox expression of "positions" with respect to "hot button" issues. Indeed, the shift from ideas to faction  points to the difficulties of discussing shared governance under current conditions.  Ideological conservatism could as easily embrace a robust defense of traditional shared governance and champion the protection of the continued professionalization of the profession, grounded in the notion of classical ideals around the production and dissemination of knowledge whose economics are driven by (the communally) shared value of of both.  Factional conservatism can adopt a corporatist stance, viewing education as an industry and its professorate as assembly line workers producing objects (graduating students and outside funded research commodities). Conversely liberal factionalism can easily descend into the sort of totalitarian orthodoxy that seeks to impose quite specific catechisms within the academy and views its academics as instruments for the propagation of a specific gospel. Ideological liberalism can easily foreground issues around the community of academics with respect to whom the process of professionalized knowledge production and dissemination might flourish in way that advance a core vision of the arc of progress of both.

There is a complementarity between liberal and conservative factionalism, as well as between ideological liberalism and conservatism.  One cannot help noticing that, over the course of the last generation, the ways in which the key stakeholders in the governance and ideological construction of the university have tended more and more to favor the factional stance and to marginalize (that is to reduce to empty sloganeering) the more nuanced and important debates around the ideology of the university (as opposed, of course, to the ideology of specific bits of knowledge or judgments which now masquerades as institutional ideologies of knowledge).  

It is in this frame of ideological mind that one approaches the AAUP's excellent work in the case of Maricopa Community Colleges (the report of which may be accessed here).  The transformation of the debate about shared governance from its ideology to its politics--and certainly around what passes for Republican Party politics in Arizona ought to be telling (Report: @ "C. Political Aspirations of Board Members as Motivation").

The AAUP Press Release and the text of the Rport (plus its addendum) follows below.

Speech and the American University: Views from the AAUP in its Current Issue of Academe

The American Association of University Professors has just published its latest issue of its Academe Magazine.  This month focuses on speech issues on campus.  The Press Release notes:

This issue of Academe addresses the questions of speech that have fueled the culture wars on college campuses in recent years. Articles discuss the assault on the public mission of higher education; the implications of a polarized political climate for faculty members, administrators, and students; and the parameters of current debates about academic freedom, free speech, and inclusion.

The articles are useful for understanding the state of discourse about discourse in the American Academy especially along its current ideological fault lines.


Follow the links in the table of contents below or read the entire issue at https://www.aaup.org/issue/winter-2019.

Sexual Assault on Campus--Law and Politics in the Shadow of Battles for Control of an Ordering Normative Narrative

"What counts as safety and risk is not adequately defined. In a number of cases in which a faculty member’s speech are the grounds for the accusation, the university has, upon receiving the complaint, removed them from the classroom and the campus (e.g., Buchanan and Adler). In such cases, the only apparent threat is the one to the university’s reputation; there is no imminent danger to students or colleagues. When speech is the issue, we think there needs to be a clearer definition of what counts as an emergency." (Comment on the Department of Education Proposed Rule: Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Sex in Education Programs or Activities Receiving Federal Financial Assistance
34 CFR 106 Comment submitted by: AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS, January 28, 2019, p. 14)

Mostly out of the glare of social media, a great contest has been playing out over the law and politics of managing relations of individuals generally around the increasingly indeterminate cultural idea of "sex" in North America.  I have been posting about one of the battlegrounds--the fight within legal elites in the American Law Institute for control of the narrative (and the framework of legal responsibility) of sexual assault and related criminal acts (e.g., The Battle Over the Legal Construction of Sexual Assault -- A Report From the Battle Lines at the American Law Institute's Model Penal Code Revision Project). 

But another battleground merits serious attention--the university.  This battle is waged for control of the socialization of students (and the stakeholders who serve them).  It's language is that of law (actually administrative regulation and the exercise of administrative discretion in creating the "atmosphere within which interpretive exercises will be judged legitimate--by courts and the university administrators who are expected to apply them). That conflict now has a long and quite contentious history, the last phase of which was started with the Obama Administration's no (in)famous Dear Colleagues letter (critically assessed here), and the reaction, now the site of contention, as the successors to Mr. Obama's administrative apparatus seek to re-frame law and its politics through to proposed amended regulations implementing Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.

This post includes the recently circulated comments of the American Association of University Professors to those changes.  It is largely an opportunity for the AAUP to push its own view published in 2016 (The History, Uses, and Abuses of Title IX), which appears to take something of a broadly understood middle position between those of the Obama and Trump Administrations, but also sees in the regulation an opportunity to legalize politics, and especially the politics of what is taught in the university. But even in this middle ground there is a large space for contention--the AAUP's stance on exemptions for religious schools, and its efforts to use liability standards as a means of socialization are two of them. Moreover, the concept of hostile environment is now one ripe for interrogation, but not, it seems, among the critical stakeholders driving this debate and the regulations that follow.

The comment is worth reading for its politics and for its engagement with legal standards, and follows below, along with its executive summary and the press release announcing its circulation. The Department of Education Proposal, Department of Education Proposed Rule: Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Sex in Education Programs or Activities Receiving Federal Financial Assistance (83 FR 61462-61499 (38 pages))  may be accessed HERE.

The AAUP Will Now Investigate the Mass Terminations at Vermont Law School

(Pix © Larry Catá Backer 2016)

Some time ago I wrote about the implications of the mass terminations at Vermont Law School (Thoughts on Mass Tenure Revocation at Vermont Law School in the Shadow of the Market and Beyond Shared Governance). For that post, I offered

some brief thoughts on what is likely to be a very useful and evolving addition to the toolkit of administrators as they continue the hard task of commodifying and capitalizing education within what is still nostalgically referenced as "the university." The focus is not on the lawyering of protection for those faculty with respect to whom tenure has been made a mockery, though one clothed in the delightfully unctuous ululations of administrator speak. Rather the reflections here focus on the ways in which these actions evidence more generally a perhaps significant changes of power relations within an institution in which the notions of traditional shared governance has withered away.  The character of that withering away is itself of interest, as the successful de-professionalization of the faculty has opened the way for their replacement in governance by an emerging corps of professional administrators only some of whom are drawn from their ranks who (ironically) remain protected by tenure. 

Like most scandals of its kind, the scandal appeared to have a very short half life.  It was just another marker on the road to the unwinding of the American university, and its re-constitution as a learning factory within which administrators could preside over a  large factory, not so much producing knowledge--as disseminating enough of it so that its objects might be successfully inserted in appropriate slots in the American wage labor markets. To that end, tenure is an impediment--a marker of a quite different and disappearing way of life that can no longer be justified within the emerging business model of the contemporary university.  

That business model, in turn, is increasingly a function of quite straightforward quantitative markers. These were once proxies for quality; they have now become the incarnation of the quality they were meant to measure. These proxies now tell the tale of the contemporary university, not just in the measure of its production, but also in its dissemination of knowledge and in the "results" that dissemination produces for its consumers.  The value of knowledge dissemination is measured the momentary connection between the knowledge consumer and the objective for which consumption is undertaken--employment. Value is measured over time, with particular emphasis on the value of an initial insertion into wage labor markets.  Value itself is measurable in money; it is measured in the present value of anticipated earning, and in rates of return to the university--alumni donations, and the value of networks through which future students may be successfully inserted in wage labor markets, for example. The value of the quality of earning is also measured by proxy--through a detailed classifications of the status of the employment which itself serves as proxies for the value of dissemination programs. 

The value of knowledge production is measured by dollars. It's impact is now understood as a species of "clickbait," the value of which is to enhance the clickable potential of that which follows, which relentless follows, with regard only to time. For if time is now money, then the efficient use of time is measured by the artifacts, by the measurable things, with which it may be filled--graduation rates, bar passage rates, employment rates, citation rates, production rates, grant award rates, invitation rates, mention rates, collaboration rates. Quality has become its proxy precisely because it is the proxy that is valued. And in this inversion emerges the new business model of the university.  The inevitable consequence will be a parade of variations on the theme so scandalously elaborated in Vermont.

Now the AAUP has announced that it will investigate this action at Vermont Law School. It is necessary in the way that rear guard action is necessary slow the speed of transformation. And to be sure, such transformation will affect those very few institutions designated as the nurseries of power. And the forms of production will remain vibrant, as the producers of knowledge--ever sensitive to incentive and market forces--will adjust the quality of their production to suit the times. That is as it should be; but to that end, the model grounded in tenure (and its protections) will become increasingly irrelevant, except at the margins. Still, long after it will have effectively ceased to serve much of a function, its mythology will continue to inspire those who will be recruited into the learning factories that are now emerging.  Fading institutions retain their form long after its substance has vanished.  

The announcement follows.   We should all look forward to its results. 

Gender on Campus--New Essays From Academe Magazine

My friends at the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) have just released the latest issue of their signature magazine--Academe.  There are some very interesting essays worth reading.  The specific focus for this issue is gender in the academy, and the conceptual context is intersectionality analysis (my recent take here on intersectionality analysis).

Here is what they had to say about the issue:

This issue of Academe uses the feminist concept of intersectionality to consider gender on campus in relation to race, class, and other categories that shape our understanding of higher education. Contributors reframe problems such as sexual violence, declining access to public education, the vulnerability of contingent faculty, and the exploitation of graduate student labor through the lens of intersectional solidarity.

The links to the features follow.

From the AUP: Academic Freedom and Tenure: St. Edward’s University (Texas)

Even as the nature of university education change, and its forms and functions along with it, there is sometimes some reassurance from knowing that things never change. But reassurance is only short lived, In the case of university administrators with thin skins and no appetite for criticism, shared governance continues to be increasingly incompatible with governance models that are based on hierarchy whose principal mission is compliance and risk mitigation. It is with that in mind that the AAUP presents yet another casualty in the long slow decline of shared governance and its transformation into something else.

The recently circulated Press Release announces:

Calling general conditions for academic freedom and governance at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas, “abysmal,” a report we released today found credible the claims of three faculty members that their criticism of administrative decisions led to actions against them. Two of the faculty members, both tenured, were suddenly fired in their twelfth year of service. The third was not reappointed after her fifth year on the tenure track, ostensibly for financial reasons.

An AAUP investigative committee found that administrators had violated the academic due process rights of all three faculty members. The committee also noted that “fear and demoralization” are widespread among the faculty at the university.

Read the full report here.

From the American Association of University Professors: Report of Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, 2017–18

The American Association of University Professors has just released its 2018 Bulletin.  Its website explained that "This year's Bulletin features an academic freedom and tenure investigative report, revised Recommended Institutional Regulations on Academic Freedom and Tenure, reports on the assault on science and campus-free-speech legislation, and annual reports and other business documents. 

Most interesting was the Report of Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, 2017–18,  which follows below.  The Report was particularly interesting for the way in which the Committee continues to wrestle with the efforts to boycott the State of Israel (and deal with Israeli state retaliation) as well as discussion of the release of the Report: National Security, the Assault on Science, and Academic Freedom. This is particularly interesting for the development of an American academic set of principles dealing with foreign exchanges and espionage, as well as the difficulties of engaging with the political effects of academic work.

Janus v. AFSCME Council 31: Brief Thoughts and AAUP Statement

In Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, 431 U.S. 209 (1977), the United States Supreme Court extended the right to a union shop to public service employees. They reasoned effectively that public employees ought not to be denied a right accorded to private sector employees. Certain elements of the political sector have been quite cross ever since. On June 27, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Janus v. AFSCME Council 31 (see the court's opinion).

One can view the issue in at least two broad ways; the choice of which to privilege depending in part on one's politics, and political agendas.  In one perspective, the case reduces itself to the protection of formal political rights among individuals, and extends that protection to the context of economic relations between labor and capital and among labor collectives and dissenting individuals. In another perspective, the case reduces itself to the reduction of the collective power of labor (compared certainly to the power of collectivity in capital) within firms, and shifts the distribution of economic power within labor and between labor and capital in the operation of firms. That distribution of power, especially in the context of shifts of power allocation between aggregations of capital and aggregations of labor have long marked this Republic. "Indeed, under common law, “collective bargaining was unlawful,” Teamsters v. Terry, 494 U. S. 558, 565–566 (1990)" Janus, n. 7 majority opinion)). 

Of course, the mediation of both views would have been important.  But this saga might better be understood in legal cultural terms as a generation old act of revenge by one reconstituted side of the American economic-cultural-political spectrum against another.  It was a long road from Abood to Janus. And it was a war littered with interest, advantage, and intransigence on all sides. But this is politics ("Today, the Court succeeds in its 6-year campaign to reverse Abood." Janus, Kagan, dissenting) p. 2). That is is an excellent marker of the benefits and challenges of judicial politics well into an age in which the U.S. has adjusted itself to the reconstitution of the judiciary as perhaps its most political branch, remains to be seen. For lawyers, beyond the constitutional points, the discussion of stare decisis would be worth some thought. These are the rules that sometimes liberalize or constrain the political opportunities offered through litigation, even they they might, in the process, undermine (or transform) the once conventional judicial character of the institution (assuming that was itself never a myth, though if so a useful one for national stability).

Indeed, in line with the great political cases, well funded by national (and increasingly international) actors using the courts as a more efficient medium for political reconstitution (as opposed to the cumbersome and expensive legislature, the complex bureaucracy, or the executive branch that is usually too disorganized to be effective consistently), this case can be understood as another in a long line of instances in which powerful actors focus their competition in the courts. In this case, unremarkably, Janus was represented in court by the Illinois Policy Institute’s litigation partner, the Liberty Justice Center, as well as the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.

The decision has significant effects, though their character and direction remains to be seen, for the university. This might be interesting, for example, with respect to application to publicly assisted universities. And the fight over the rights of labor and capital to aggregatinbg power remains an unfinished story.

This post includes the statement of the AAUP  

The Prissy University and Academic Naughty Words--The AAUP Files an Amicus Brief in Buchanan v. Alexander NO. 3:16 - CV - 41 (5th Cir. on appeal)

(Alex Morey, "Teresa Buchanan Uncensored: How an Innovative Educator Created Top Teachers and Got Fired for It, Fire," Jan. 22, 2016 )

“I got fired for what they called ‘sexual harassment,’” Buchanan said of her 2015 termination, but there were no allegations she “harassed” anyone, sexually or otherwise. Rather, LSU took action because of some of the language Buchanan used in course instruction with her adult students. “Everything that they accused me of had to do with things that I had said as part of my teaching methods,” said Buchanan, noting that no student ever accused her of sexually harassing them. Rather, her approach was designed to enable new teachers cope with teaching in the real world, and doing so at some times involved the use of harsh language.  (Alex Morey, "Teresa Buchanan Uncensored: How an Innovative Educator Created Top Teachers and Got Fired for It, Fire," Jan. 22, 2016 )

The modern university has tended to become a safe space--but not in the way that term is commonly understood.  The safety of the university space is ensured through emerging programs of compliance driven in turn by the socialization of a riskless environment.  And cultures of risk negating behaviors include not merely forbidding hiking clubs to hike (here) or researchers to explore (here) but it seems it now also includes constraining teaching and teaching innovation through the broadened use of social control mechanisms, including, in most interesting ways, the otherwise important and necessary  regulatory architecture for the suppression of sex harassment on campus.   Increasingly, this policing of risk, in the form of compliance, has begun to affect the shape and scope of tenure and academic freedom (here). 

It is at the intersection of these trends that one finds Teresa Buchanan, a faculty member at LSU who was terminated after the university determined that her teaching methods constituted harassment ("LSU said in a statement released Thursday through spokesman Ernie Ballard that the university is confident the action it took against Buchanan was appropriate. “We take our responsibility to protect students from abusive behavior very seriously, and we will vigorously defend our students’ rights to a harassment-free educational environment,” the statement added." here). And yet it was those very methods that appeared to have made her teaching a success judged by the standards of the university. An interesting conundrum appears as a consequence, one situated at the intersection of ancient values and now apparently of zero sum dignity considerations. 

This month [June 2015], Louisiana State University fired—outright fired—a tenured professor of education, Teresa Buchanan, ostensibly for creating a “hostile work environment” via sexual harassment. Her infraction? Allowing profanities to pass from her tenured lips, and unleashing a single ill-advised bon mot about sexual intercourse. . . . For all this, after an 11-hour hearing, a committee of Buchanan’s peers concluded that she be officially censured (which is not the same as “censored,” except in this case it is), and never use “potentially offensive language” in the classroom again. But the LSU administration found that already-Draconian punishment insufficient. Buchanan actually got fired. (Rebecca Shuman, "Academia’s P.C. Brigade Has Started Policing the F-Word. That’s Taking It Too Effing Far," Slate June 2015)

The LSU Faculty Senate condemned the action (here for the resolution of the LSU Senate seeking the censure of senior administrators and the reversal of the decision). The AAUP censured LSU (here). Buchanan sued (complaint here) and lost in the lower courts (see here). To the delight of the LSU Administration the case was dismissed in January 2018 (report here). The case is currently on appeal before the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

This post includes links to the brief filed by AAUP in support of Professor Buchanan's appeal. The issues touch on a core area of transformation of the university and its relationship both to the production of knowledge and toward its producers within a regulatory and institutional environment that tends to prefer performance to the average and a homogenized product that can be sold without substantial risk or pain.  One can't blame the university--they believe they are in the business of producing individuals qualified for insertion into wage labor markets. Yet, the university might still be condemned for the choices that led them to those beliefs and practices.  Teaching professionals also believe they are engaged in producing individuals better suited to live lives that maximize their value to society and to the student. To that end a bit of experimentation and risk taking may be necessary.  Where one draws the lines is now one of the more important issue framing the way in whcih one understands tenure and academic freedom in the contemporary university.