Abstract

On the verge of the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of the American Association of University Professors, we examine the organization’s focus on academic freedom, shared governance, and the challenges the AAUP faced during its early years. The history is a fairly uncontested one: higher education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States was the context for the struggle over academic freedom and shared governance. Dismissed professors, resignations by colleagues, and the struggle of professionalization characterize the period.1 A century later, we wonder about the state of academic freedom and shared governance. We argue that higher education is currently so..