Hey, Hey, Norma Rae

On Labor and Spirit, on the AAUP and not keeping secrets

One of the things I love about working-class people and those raised with working-class values is that they see labor. This is a social and spiritual orientation. If they ask you for a favor, their thanks often alludes to the time and skill taken to do that thing. “Thanks for all of your time” is one of the sweetest thanks there is. These things make a difference. They add a spiritual and emotional texture to interactions and exchanges, a sense of realness and being seen, that is often absent in other interactions.

It has taken me a long time to see and articulate this. I think this is one of the culture shocks of my residing in academic culture, that sense of extraction that is a value of the institutions where we may work and that people who work there often adopt.

I am motivated by the stories of people who came before me who worked their butts off with no protection, like my grandmother who literally honestly worked in a mine as a teenager and then at a paper mill, and my grandfather who lost two fingers in a meat grinder, and my other great-grandfather who roamed around Germany organizing coal miners and getting fired and who died of black lung disease. When I think of my ancestors, I think of the harm done to their bodies and minds for the sake of profit.

caption...

This is a shot of Sally Fields from the awesome movie Norma Rae, and the real person who the movie was based on is Crystal Lee Sutton, who helped organize her workplace with the UFCW.

So as of this summer, I’m president of our campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors. I can’t believe I’m at this place, because I’ve worked with AAUP for a long time. Cliff and I restarted the dormant AAUP chapter on campus at Georgia Southern University, where we were threatened for doing so. We fell in love while organizing. Cliff lost his lecturer position because he was president. I will never stop telling this story because it was so formative. As the result of my work in AAUP, I was told by a dean who was later removed from his position that I shouldn’t apply for tenure at Georgia Southern. (Even now as I type those words, I have a kind of fear hovering, like they’re still going to get me or something!) I had won all the awards I could win at that place, and I had published a book, and I was an excellent teacher. And yet, as the people who I trusted most in the department warned, it was fruitless to even try. So onto the job market I went, and we made sure to land at a school with a strong AAUP chapter. That decided it for us. My husband had met Irene Mulvey, who just ended her term as president of the National AAUP, at a conference, and she was amazing, and she taught at Fairfield. She went on to forge an important linkage between two powerful organizations, the AAUP and the American Federation of Teachers.

I have been thinking about academic freedom a lot this summer, since I’ve had to dig into the AAUP Policy Documents and Reports, called the Red Book, to make arguments about policies that impinge on academic freedom.

According to the AAUP, “Academic freedom is the freedom of a teacher or researcher in higher education to investigate and discuss the issues in his or her academic field, and to teach or publish findings without interference from political figures, boards of trustees, donors, or other entities. Academic freedom also protects the right of a faculty member to speak freely when participating in institutional governance, as well as to speak freely as a citizen.” More here.

When I worked at Georgia Southern, I saw academic freedom as some far off ideal I didn’t understand and as something that would be nice, but that we really didn’t have in Georgia. We could get in trouble for what we said in class on a range of issues, even if we were careful. The central reason I was brought into conflict with the dean was that the entire staff of the University System of Georgia had been given a two-week furlough. This was in 2008. We each got our pay docked for two weeks because of a budget crunch. I was a single mom going through a divorce, so I felt that loss. AND the most awful thing about the furlough was that we were not to speak of it to the students. And it was not to impact what we delivered in our classrooms in any way.

I hate being told to shut up. I couldn’t abide it. So I cancelled class for one session and told my students I was going to the beach. And one of my students reported me to the Provost’s office. Because I said I was going to the beach.

With all the stress that ensued, and being brought into administrative offices to be yelled at, I didn’t have time to process that this was a major violation of the academic freedom that we really didn’t have. We were busy writing letters about the policy and contacting the national AAUP to try to figure out how to get Georgia Southern on the censured university list. It would have taken a lot more examples and documentation, and we didn’t have the focus because we were figuring out how to stay afloat.

But the AAUP chapter we restarted is still there at Georgia Southern. And this morning, I read in Inside Higher Ed that there’s ongoing debate about an actual law in Indiana that was passed that says that professors in the state university system do not have First Amendment rights in the classroom. You can be denied tenure there, or have it revoked, if you’re not doing enough to “foster … intellectual diversity.” A lawsuit charged the state with limiting free speech and academic freedom and the state attorney general replied that “The curriculum used in state universities and instruction offered by state employees” is “state speech” … “plaintiffs”— the professors—”have no right to control how the State speaks.”

When I read this article about state speech, I was outraged, and then as it sank in, I realized this wasn’t unfamiliar.

The wonderful thing about this idea of “academic freedom” is that it’s not a law, and yet it is real. By dint of being repressed during the Red Scare and so many other waves of state repression, the early members of AAUP came together to formulate an idea that made sense to them and that represented the freedom to teach and to learn. The policy documents are a detailed and fine-print tome that sketches out how things should be and why. When AAUP members who are not lucky enough to be in a union (some are and some aren’t, like my campus, and this depends upon lots of prior legal decisions about who is seen as a “worker” and why) engage with the administration at their school, they have outside principles and precedents they can point to so that they don’t have to start from scratch.

The labor movement didn’t start with permission to organize. It started with people who organized despite not being allowed to. The principle of solidarity also dovetails nicely with my own spiritual watchwords for myself: Don’t Keep Secrets. Ask for Help. In other words, reach out to people in the same situation, say what’s going on, get advice. So it was a distinct honor to also get to talk to folks this summer over Zoom who are contemplating starting a new AAUP chapter at a non-union campus.

AAUP isn’t perfect, and its history includes excluding people of color from membership, and not focusing enough on part-time and adjunct labor. But a collective like this has sustained my entire career, and I’m proud to say that we’re an AAUP/AFT & NEA union household. Even if you aren’t allowed to organize, you can talk union. When they scare you and threaten you, don’t keep their secrets for them. Find someone and say something. And vote against the Republicans who support Project 2025, which has as its aim to eliminate unions, as this important article by Jenny Brown describes.

And if you’re AAUP-curious, I’m happy to zoom with you. And if you love this topic of unions in general, subscribe to Labor Notes.