Statement Against ST-83 Proposed Changes to Academic Freedom
The Graduate Employees’ Organization of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, GEO Local 6300 IFT/AFT AFL-CIO, strongly opposes the proposed ST-83 revisions to the University Statutes and its potential effects on our university. These revisions would severely narrow the scope of academic freedoms on campus. There are two major proposed changes:
To define workers with academic freedom protections as “faculty and academic professionals” instead of the current use of the category “academic staff.” This would explicitly exclude, clinical assistant, research assistant, teaching assistant, other graduate assistants, and civil service librarians. These categories of workers encompass our entire bargaining unit and more.
Further, ST-83 narrows the scope of academic freedom and its accompanying protections to teaching, discourse, and research that lies within the bounds of an individual’s “expertise.” This is a radical departure from the current Statutes, which define the same in terms of an individual’s “interests.”
The GEO and the Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure (CAFT) are extremely concerned by this narrowing of the scope of academic freedom as well as the scope of who is protected by rights to academic freedom. Not only does this change of language wholly exclude graduate student workers, the previously used definition of academic staff included the academic ranks of adjunct, visiting, and clinical faculty, as well as post-doctoral researchers. Therefore these changes in policies have the potential to adversely affect these workers as well.
At its core, these policy changes argue that even graduate workers who are the instructors of record for their courses do not have academic freedom over their course content. Similarly, graduate teaching and research assistants would no longer have academic freedom protections when TA-ing for courses or working on supervisors’ research projects that do not directly correspond to their thesis or dissertation research, placing undue labor on tenure-track faculty. It is elitist and exclusionary to only afford these rights to tenure-track faculty and dismisses the knowledge and labor of graduate workers, non-tenured faculty, librarians, post-docs, and other academic staff.
Furthermore, the language of these proposed changes is hasty and unclear. The term “faculty and academic professionals” has been added only to the portion of the statutes regarding academic freedom, whereas academic staff remains in use throughout the rest of the University Statutes. The term “expertise” is also troubling and begs the question as to how one’s particular area of expertise would be defined, and who would have the power to adjudicate these definitions.
These proposed revisions to the University Statutes are a violation of our labor rights under the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Act (IELRA). Should these revisions be implemented, we are committed to entering an impact bargaining process with university administration to repeal them. We stand in solidarity with the workers of the Non-Tenure Faculty Coalition (NTFC), Local 6546 AFT/IFT, with whom university administration will also be under obligation to impact bargain these changes.