Last week three professors employed respectively by California, Washington and Stanford Universities informed the people of Oregon that their Chancellor of Higher Education, William Jasper Kerr, was totally incapable of educational leadership, that his election was a "stupendous blunder" in the first place, that their State University would never have a "healthy and normal life" until they got rid of him. This blast, a monstrous piece of impertinence on its face, was delivered by the three professors as representatives of that extraordinary organization, the American Association of University Professors.
A. A. U. P. speaks with the authority of 12,000 members in 450 U. S. colleges & universities. Dues range from $1 per year for emeritus members to $4 for active members. Any teacher or researcher in an accredited institution may join. Founded in 1915 to "increase the usefulness and advance the standards and ideals of the profession," the Association has ever since been strenuously denying that it is a "professors' union," that its prime purpose is to champion victims of academic injustice. Its committees range from A to Z, busy themselves with such subjects as "Cooperation with Latin-American Universities," "Pensions and Insurance," "University Ethics," "Depression and Recovery in Higher Education." But its Committee on Academic Freedom & Tenure, significantly designated Committee A, almost alone makes News. Committee A does not pull its punches. Its reports are models of courageous investigation and forthright speaking. If the entire profession should ever nerve itself to act as vigorously as this militant minority speaks, it would dispel forever the lay conviction that professors as a class are learned mice.
Comprising a cloistered collection of crotchety individualists who mortally dread insecurity, the normal U. S. campus resembles an inactive volcano. Beneath its outward calm there rumble, seethe and surge perpetual gratings of opinion, ripples of backbiting and intrigue, tides of hate and fear. With fortunate exceptions the instructor fears and resents the department head, who fears and resents the dean, who fears and resents the president, who fears and resents the trustees. Most pedagogs work off their passions in private talk, present smiling exteriors to superiors. But occasionally one stiffens his spine, talks back or speaks out in defiance of tradition, ruling beliefs, sacred cows. Then the volcano is apt to erupt, spew him out. Ready for just such an emergency stands A. A. U. P. with its Committee A.
The Association acts only on specific complaint, usually one of dismissal without just cause or notice. Last winter it deplored the farce which Huey Long had made of academic freedom in his Louisiana State University, but held its fire because no facultyman had yet dared raise his voice in protest. When a complaint seems worthy of action, Committee A asks A. A. U. P. chapters in neighboring universities to nominate an investigating committee. The committee visits the complainant's campus, hears both sides firsthand. Sometimes it finds that a sluggard or incompetent has got his just deserts. Sometimes it is able to "work a reconciliation. Only in flagrant cases of injustice does it consign the offending university to public infamy in a stinging report.