• U.S.

Education: Professors’ Union?

2 minute read
TIME

When their academic freedom or their very jobs are threatened, U. S. college professors have few means of combating college trustees and corporations. They can only issue mild rebukes, disapproving resolutions. Last week the American Association of University Professors (membership 10,000) held its 17th annual meeting in Cleveland, discussed a plan first proposed last year by Psychology Professor Louis Leon Thurstone of University of Chicago. Plan is that the Association (or a committee representing a number of learned societies) should prepare a list of institutions satisfactory in scholastic standing, freedom of teaching, security in professorial position. Institutions could be blacklisted for unwarranted dismissal of teachers or interference with freedom of speech; teachers who accepted positions in discredited institutions would forfeit membership in the Association.

Many professors at last week’s meeting feared that such a plan would turn the Association into a Professors’ Union, would be unenforceable. They met in private sessions, voted to form a commit tee which will take up the question, re port perhaps next December, perhaps later.

Definite action taken during the meet ing was to adopt resolutions: 1) dropping from the Association’s eligible list four Mississippi State-controlled institutions from which Governor Theodore Gilmore Bilbo dismissed 179 officials and faculty members last June (TIME, Dec. 29) ; 2) requiring that university professors who receive “compensation” from corpo rations shall enter no “public discussion of questions of public policy” without naming the corporation.

Convinced as any one that U. S. professors are dominated by business-like administrations is Physiology Professor Yandell Henderson of Yale University, retiring chairman of the Yale Chapter, American Association of University Professors. In the Yale Alumni Weekly, day before the meeting opened in Cleveland, he made known his views: “Nothing could be more disastrous for higher education and learning than for this condition [industrializing of education] to develop to such a point that the American Association of University Professors or other organization should assume the functions of a labor union of teachers. . . . We should urge on our own University . . . on all American Universities, such a re form of university organization that a teachers’ guild would be unnecessary. . . .

The teaching staff should be partners in a noble enterprise, not employees in an industry.”

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