Academic Freedom Symposia at UVU...Past and Future

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 In 2010, Cary Nelson, then national President of the AAUP, gave a keynote address at UVU for a conference on academic freedom, co-sponsored by the UVU Center for the Study of Ethics and our UVU Chapter of the AAUP. He discussed sixteen threats to academic freedom at American universities, including several related to current issues at UVU: 

instrumentalization (the notion that higher education is first and foremost job training), 

authoritarian administration(a general culture of governance by fiat), 

administration restrictions on the use of communication technology (email was his focus, but the problem has been exacerbated by the learning management system CANVAS and by the “Digital Measures”—“Watermark Faculty Success” systems that assemble and centralize information on members of the faculty), 

managerial ideology (“the rise of a separate class of career administrators and the substantial increase in their sheer numbers has helped fuel the belief that faculty are not full partners in the educational enterprise but rather resources to be controlled and managed”), 

circumvention of shared governance (this intersects with other categories), 

inadequate grievance procedures (“too often the only appeal is to the very administrator responsible for the offence”). 

You can find a recording of the UVU talk HERE and a preview of Nelson’s book No University Is an Island published the following year HERE.

This coming spring, 2023, the joint UVU Chapters of the AAUP and the AFT will sponsor another symposium, this time focusing on shared governance. We have preliminary agreements from the UVU Faculty Senate and the Center for the Study of Ethics as co-sponsors.

We're in the process of inviting a keynote speaker and will soon issue a call for papers by UVU faculty, staff, students, and administrators. We're hoping for presentations by representatives of various Faculty Senates from the Utah State system as well. Stay tuned for further information.





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