By Emily Bruzzo, News Editor

Published in print Apr. 1, 2015

Professors from across North Carolina didn’t hold back about the politics and social issues impacting higher education on Saturday when the N.C. State Chapter for the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) held its annual conference at UNC-Greensboro in the Elliott University Center.

The conference was titled, “Reclaiming the Narrative for Higher Education in North Carolina,” and attendees had a busy daylong itinerary of panel presentations and keynote speakers.

One forum was devoted to higher education coalitions and the panel included: Greg Knehans from Faculty Forward, Lisa Levenstein from Scholars for NC’s Future, Aaron Bryant from the NC Student Power Union and Matthew Chamberlin from Higher Education Works.

Jonathan Tudge, a professor from UNCG’s human development and family studies department, moderated the panel.

Knehans, a field organizer for Faculty Forward and a former adjunct at UNCG, was the first to speak.

Knehans focused on the issues and obstacles adjuncts face and why students and tenured faculty should care. He explained that more classes are being taught by adjuncts yet students and parents often don’t know about the stressors with which adjuncts must deal.

“When we’re talking about the situation for adjuncts,” Knehans said, “for many of them it quite literally is life or death. They don’t have healthcare; they don’t have retirement. They are in a desperate situation.”

Knehans shared a story about an adjunct who is currently teaching 10 classes, working part-time at three universities in order to support her family. Knehans said the adjunct wished to remain anonymous, and he used her request for anonymity to highlight the fear adjuncts have about speaking out for better rights within the apparatus of higher education.

Knehans argued that tenured faculty should fight for adjunct rights if for no other reason than to protect their own rights. He posited that the more adjuncts universities hire, the less universities will offer tenure-track positions.

The second panelist to speak was Lisa Levenstein, a history professor at UNCG and board member and co-leader of Scholars for NC’s Future.

Levenstein explained that Scholars for NC’s Future (SNCF) is an organization committed to using scholars’ research to influence contemporary state political, economic and social colloquies.

Levenstein said that by connecting academics and their policymakers, academics can make their case for higher education’s relevancy and policymakers benefit from obtaining useful research that can inform their work in legislation.

Levenstein also asserted that the issues and obstacles facing higher education are connected with other national problems.

“Higher education isn’t the only institution under attack right now,” Levenstein contended, “The problems we confront in universities are not isolated from the attacks on voting rights, from the denial of unemployment insurance and Medicaid, from the attacks to restrict women’s reproductive rights. This is all happening together.”

“As scholars, we need to be speaking out on as many of these issues as possible,” Levenstein concluded.

The next panelist to speak was Aaron Bryant, a former UNCG student and current organizer for the NC Student Power Union.

Bryant explained that he saw the issues facing students and faculty within the institution of higher education as inextricably linked and he argued allyship was necessary to combat the political and social issues Bryant said the Student Power Union wishes to remedy.

Bryant argued universities are using students as “credit cards” and professors as “cheap labor.”

“What we really want to bring is a radical critique of the ‘economic development’ of the school system, which is, in reality, just neoliberal expansion,” Bryant said about the Student Power Union’s mission.

The final panelist to speak was Matthew Chamberlin with Higher Education Works.

Chamberlin explained that Higher Education Works is a bipartisan organization that aims to increase the public support and funding of higher education.

The group focuses on three pillars that are centered around higher education’s role as one of the strongest economic generators for North Carolina, the state’s historical commitment to accessible higher education for citizens and the UNC system’s current risks due to cuts in funding.   

The group currently has 11 representatives from the 17 campuses that make up the UNC system, and Chamberlin said they are hoping to get representatives from the remaining campuses soon.

One audience member was concerned about the “corporate language” the organization seems to use and, what she argued, was a “top-down approach.”

Chamberlin responded by saying that he was working to help the group introduce more “human language,” because “people respond to other people.”

Concerning the accusation of a top-down approach, Chamberlin reminded the audience attempts at collaboration and education of legislators and leaders within the UNC system shouldn’t stop because those legislators and leaders’ politics might be different from the politics of faculty members. 

“The board of governors has the makeup that it has; the GA has the makeup that it has; the governor’s office has the makeup that it has. We know that we need to work with these guys and I think that finger pointing establishes that we can’t antagonize the people we really need to work with,” Chamberlin said.