The Bloomington chapter of the American Association of University Professors has been in existence for over a century. The earliest recorded member, S.E. Stout (later a long-time dean of the College of Arts and Sciences), joined the AAUP in 1916, one year after the national organization was founded. The earliest recorded chapter meeting was held January 6, 1919, and the chapter continued to meet through the following decade, although detailed records don’t begin to appear until the 1930s. The first membership list we have is for 1930-1931: Herman B Wells is listed there as a junior member in his first year on the IU faculty. President Wells continued a seven-decade relationship with the chapter and led the signatories on the recruitment letter for the chapter’s Spring 2000 membership drive.
The focus of chapter concerns has varied over the past century. In the early years the chapter was particularly concerned with the creation of policies governing tenure and promotion, the relation between the traditional liberal arts core and newly created professional schools, and the organization of faculty governance and committee work. During the early postwar era, as the US economy underwent rapid change, the work of the chapter was largely devoted to the economic status of the faculty, a focus that shifted towards issues of academic freedom as the rise in anti-Communist sentiment of the 1950s placed pressure on universities to censor political speech and dismiss outspoken faculty. On these issues, the chapter found itself closely aligned with, and expressed support for, the Wells administration. President Wells joined chapter meetings on multiple occasions.
In the 1970s and 1980s the chapter’s relationship to the Ryan administration, about which it issued a highly critical report, was sharply different. The situation in the early ‘70s led the chapter to explore becoming a collective bargaining unit. Ultimately, the Bloomington AAUP chose to remain an advocacy chapter. In the ‘80s, however, when some faculty established a Bloomington chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, the AAUP chapter cooperated with the AFT in a number of activities and studies, while remaining independent.
Throughout its history, chapter membership has fluctuated while the size of the faculty has grown. In the early 1930s, the chapter recorded membership of over fifty percent of tenured faculty, a body then numbering under two hundred. In the postwar eras and at the beginning of this century membership numbers exceeded 250, but that represented a much smaller percentage of the faculty. Other periods have seen membership wane, particularly when faculty governance was weakened by less consultative administrations, lowering general faculty interest in university service. The McRobbie administration is a recent example.
The chapter has historically acted as a partner to the Bloomington Faculty Council from its establishment in 1947. During periods when the chapter was strong and its membership engaged with the BFC, the chapter has frequently been the source of detailed task-force reports and specific policy proposals forwarded to the BFC for possible legislative action: for example, policies for faculty participation in administrative searches and the establishment of the BFC’s Budgetary Affairs Committee were responses to AAUP proposals. Although it is not current practice, the chapter also used to communicate routinely with Trustees, and its Executive Committee met annually with area state legislators. More recently in 2005 and 2022, chapter leadership has taken initiative to bring faculty together at critical points by organizing town hall meetings to successfully petition the BFC for all-faculty meetings, allowing the faculty to express its views as a body directly to University leadership.
2/1/2024