The time will come when faculty at Auburn University will behold the Board of Trustees and say that it is good. A process has been unleashed that could transform our Board from being a source of embarrassment to one that works in partnership with faculty, administrators, and students to help this university achieve its highest potential. Political momentum behind trustee reform is building throughout the state, but there are battles yet to be fought.

There are two bills presently before the Alabama legislature. Details of these bills have been presented in the media, and can be reviewed online at our AAUP webpage <http://www.auburn.edu/aaup/>.

After passage in the House, the two bills were sent to the Senate in early March. Lowell Barron, AU Board member and President Pro Tempore of the Senate, waited until April 4^th to assign this bill to the Finance & Taxation (Education) Committee. Nearly a month was lost, and the bill now sits in the docket of the Senate's busiest Committee with more than half the legislative year passed.

This is not the first time the need to reform Auburn's Board has been brought before the state legislature. Over the last three years, efforts were made by Auburn First, spearheaded by a group of Birmingham-based alumni. Their efforts served to draw attention within the legislature to Auburn's Board but were doomed by a narrow base of support. This year an entirely different approach has been adopted. The Auburn Alumni Board began work on this year's reform effort early last summer, organizing a Legislative Task Force and hiring a lobbyist to coordinate their efforts. Most importantly, each chapter of the Alumni Association in the state has selected a campaign chair who has been provided a three-ring binder full of information to use in contacting local legislators. Hundreds of alumni are writing their legislators in support of the reform effort. Last summer Marcia Boosinger (Secretary to the University Senate) and I (representing the AAUP) were invited to a meeting of the Legislative Task Force in Montgomery. We were warmly received, and they asked for our help. Here is what we need to do. The bills are in the Finance & Taxation (Education) Committee, the body that is responsible for developing the educational budget. This is a large committee, made up of 16 out 35 total Senators (for a list of their names, addresses, and phone numbers, see the AAUP web page /academic/societies/aaup/. These Senators need to hear from constituents. Many of us have friends and colleagues at various colleges and universities around the state whose Senators happen to be on that committee. Contact your friends. Ask them to contact their Senators. Explain to them that, while these two bills are about Auburn, they also are about the integrity of higher education in Alabama. Auburn Alumni chapters are turning up the heat on these Senators. If they start getting calls and letters from faculty from the University of Alabama, UAB, Jacksonville State, Alabama A&M, and AUM (all of which have Senators on this target committee), it will add another dimension to the campaign. Ask your friends, family, and colleagues to help.

Do it now. Opponents of the two reform measures hope that the combination of delay and committee inaction will kill this year's reform effort. The Alumni Association has vowed to see this battle through to a successful conclusion, and to make any opponent -- especially any opponent acting on the basis of narrow self-interest -- pay a price. If the effort fails this year, they will be back next year and mad as hornets at any legislator who plays games with Auburn's future. That threat forced Senator Barron's reluctant hand. Now is the time for a final push. Make a call. Write a letter. We've all spent a lot of time and energy cursing the darkness. It is time for us to call for some light.

By Jo Heath

Auburn University has several types o f non-tenure track faculty; some are allowed to enjoy full time employment, others are not. This article will discuss the academic non-tenure track faculty and their potential problems with academic freedom issues and why some faculty are not allowed full time employment.

We have two new types of non-tenure track faculty positions: the research professor track and the clinical professor track; both are full time positions with promotion career ladders built in. The design of the research professor track began a couple of years ago and was, at first, an excellent track. The research professors were to be integrated into the tenure track faculty, they were to be evaluated by the Promotion and Tenure committee, they were to have the same protection from arbitrary dismissal and hence the same protection of academic freedom as the tenure track faculty, and they were to be funded only by soft money, thus protecting tenure track positions. The only significant difference between a research professor position and a tenure track position was that the existence of the research professor's job required continued soft money support. The University Senate voted its approval of this new type position. However, some time later Michael Moriarty submitted a gutted version to the President. He had removed the protection of academic freedom by deleting the protection from arbitrary dismissal, and he had removed the limitations on funding for the positions with the result that it would be possible for tenure track positions to be converted to non-tenure track research professor positions. When Glenn Howze and I protested (we were Senate chair and chair elect at that time), President Muse and Provost Walker set up a negotiation process. After many meetings and changes made, we agreed to present an amended track to the Senate, and it was approved. This amended version is the one being used now. The improvements added were (1) that the allowable sources of funding for the research positions are specifically listed (and the list does not include money that is used for tenure track positions) and (2) that if a research professor is not continued at the time of the yearly contract renewal, the professor has the right to be provided, if requested, with a written statement of why the contract is not to be renewed, and to use the Faculty Grievance Committee or to follow the Scientific Misconduct procedure. It is important to note that in a situation like this, it is difficult to use the Grievance Committee effectively without the written statement. These positions are not as solid as they would have been if the original proposal had gone through, but they do provide some protection of academic freedom and some protection from erosion of tenure track positions. Later, the clinical professor track was constructed, and approved by the Senate, with the same basic provisions as those of the revised research professor track.

These non-tenure track faculty, and many others, are employed full time and enjoy full benefits. Who is not full time? Primarily, those non-tenure track faculty who are substantially involved with instruction. To avoid de facto tenure, non-tenure track instructors are allowed to teach full time for only a few short years, and then, however excellent their performance, they are switched to part time, they lose most of their benefits, such as health insurance, and, of course, their salaries are smaller. This policy is the result of the AAUP belief that every instructor should be probationary or tenured because no faculty member should be without the protection of tenure past her or his probationary years. So why is the protection of tenure for instructors this important?

This problem and others will be discussed at the April 18 AAUP forum starting at 4:10 in 206 Tichenor.

Universities and colleges are for students the transition stage between the security of high school and the uncertainty of the real world. Part of the role of an institution of higher learning is to expose young people to various kinds of truth so that when they have completed their education, they can decide on their own brand according to which they will live and work as citizens of a democracy. This presupposes that the educators in colleges and universities are free to disseminate ideas and that they work under acceptable conditions, that is that they themselves enjoy academic freedom. While students, parents and the community assume that this is the case, the present reality in higher education is different. According to the AAUP 1995 Bulletin, more than forty per cent of university/college instructors are on non-tenure track appointments, mainly on an involuntary, part-time basis. This comprises just one way of compromising and limiting academic freedom and affects a large number of qualified educators when there is no guarantee of job security, when there are no medical benefits and when the groups are not even acknowledged within the universities.

I am a member of this part-time group, not by choice but because it keeps me from having any claims on tenure. Universities and colleges do not make long-term commitments to us, but we save these institutions a great deal of money since our salaries are low and we enjoy no medical or life insurance benefits. The trend is not new in American businesses, but it is overwhelmingly inconsistent with the concept of academia. The guarantee for academic freedom which tenure had provided in the past is now being violated by the exploitation of a large number of highly educated and specialized holders of advanced degrees who staff most of the classes, especially in service departments like English, History and Foreign Languages. The non-tenure track positions have created a rigid class system within the university in which some educators are "more equal" than others.

This has divided the faculty and has created an atmosphere where collegiality has been replaced by hostility, where it is hinted that the non-tenure track faculty are not professional enough and where we have been held responsible for the erosion of tenure. The main attitudes of tenured faculty on this issue have been: 1) a few vocal supporters who want to see fairness and justice done to those people whom they unreservedly consider their colleagues and equals; 2) a few vocal opponents who see the end of the tenure system even in the mere physical presence of the non-tenure track faculty; 3) and the silent majority who will take no position on the issue, probably hoping that if they ignore it long enough, it will dematerialize.

What some fail to see is that the non-tenure track positions are part of an enormous change in academia. The overall emphasis on business and profit in the wider society has contaminated institutions of higher learning and is turning them into centers of mass production of educated young adults. The humanities departments which have been traditionally connected with preserving and promoting language, culture and intransient values for the forthcoming generations are the ones which rely the most on non-tenure track faculty and therefore they are the most affected by class hierarchy, division and hostility. As long as the faculty in any university or college consists of almost fifty per cent who enjoy academic freedom and another fifty per cent who do not, we can be sure that Academic Freedom is not the beneficiary. As long as there is a large supply of non-tenure track educators and a large demand for staffing courses at a lower cost, tenure-track positions will increasingly be considered too expensive and therefore redundant. In a society where cost efficiency, profit and fast wealth reign, there will be not much heartache in choosing the less costly educators to teach the existential misgivings of Hamlet or the significance of Mr. Rochester's blindness in Jane Eyre.

The non-tenure track faculty is not the enemy of academic freedom or of tenure nor are we the threatening "other." The abuse of the non-tenure track educators, however, is the enemy. If this is not acknowledged, soon the fifty per cent of the "more equal" will be joining the other fifty per cent of the "less equal" faculty to be forming the one hundred per cent of higher education teachers whose most attractive quality to administrations will be one and only one---disposability.