AAUP supports UC faculty collective action

In today's letter to UC faculty, the AAUP supports "calls for collective action — most recently a system-wide walkout of all UC faculty," pointing out that such collective action is direct consequence of UCOP's rejection (via the Pitts memo) of the Academic Senate recommendations. Here are some highlights:

The rejection of the faculty’s unanimous voice about implementing furloughs, through a vote of the Academic Council on July 29, 2009, is at best unwise and at worst dismissive of a cornerstone of the UC system’s strength, its faculty...

The principles of the American Association of University Professors hold that the managerial assertion of financial emergency powers does not justify failing to incorporate the full and meaningful participation of faculty in shared governance ...

For too many years university presidents have accepted and preached the pattern of public disinvestment as inevitable, advanced the privatization of public universities, and suggested that we can do more and more with less and less. By their actions, university presidents have advanced a model of academic capitalism that has compromised educational quality, and now that model is collapsing financially.

Collective action being considered at UC, in the form of walk-outs or teach-ins, is necessary to send a clear signal that cuts to the University are not painless and have consequences, the model of the university-as-factory nothwithsatnding.