A Free-Speech Victory at the 'University of Nike'

The "University of Nike" sounds like an institution straight out of a dystopian novel. But that moniker has actually been embraced by the University of Oregon, where Nike founder and chairman Phil Knight is one of the school's most important donors. A gleaming new football center, complete with a locker room requiring biometric thumbprints to enter, isn't the only sign of the corporation's influence on campus: During negotiations with the school's faculty union over its first-ever contract, critics say that the university pulled out some fancy footwork meant to preserve the patronage of Nike and other major donors, including provisions that would have narrowed protections for faculty who speak out against university policies. But an ultimate victory this week by the union, which faculty voted to form last year, helped beat back these measures and uphold the academic freedoms that are increasingly endangered by campuses' corporate ties.

Unionization rates among U.S. faculty members are traditionally lower than those of their counterparts in other countries, and faculty at private colleges and universities are barred from collective bargaining entirely. But the tussle at the University of Oregon demonstrated that dwellers of the Ivory Tower are also workers under attack--and that their ability to take collective action is essential to the future of higher education.

During the past week, several proposals advanced by the Oregon administration have alarmed campus free-speech advocates and captured national attention. Colleen Flaherty reported at Inside Higher Education on the attempt to insert a "civility" clause into a section of the contract on "faculty responsibilities," a measure that the watchdog Foundation for Individual Rights in Higher Education (FIRE) says is often abused on campuses in order to "punish unpopular viewpoints." Even after this proposal was withdrawn last week, City University of New York Professor Corey Robin, who blogs about the politics of higher education, noted that the administration's insistence on its right to monitor faculty e-mails and even review non-work e-mails "to the extent that they address work-related subjects" represented a "draconian assault on faculty autonomy and privacy."

Another proposal to limit the ability of faculty members to consult for outside organizations when the Provost deemed it "contrary to the university's best interests" drew particular concerns that the administration might kow-tow to corporate donors eager to silence their academic critics. Given that Oregon's Board of Trustees includes "CEOs from the state's timber and construction industries, the wife of the CEO of Microsoft, and a retired executive from Nike," wrote Robin, "it's not hard to imagine a scenario in which a professor is forbidden by the provost from consulting with an organization critical of Nike's labor policies or Microsoft's market practices."

But at a bargaining session on Wednesday, the administration backed off these measures, and the two sides reached a tentative agreement on a new contract that also includes average salary increases of 11.75% over the two-year agreement. United Academics (UA), which is comprised of both tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty, also won new contract protections for contingent faculty. Full details of the agreement have not yet been released, but Susan Anderson, a German professor and member of the bargaining committee, tells In These Times that it includes "robust protections" for free speech, including language referring to the First Amendment. The union will vote on whether to ratify the contract on October 8.

In a statement released yesterday by the university, U of O President Michael Gottfredson said that he also welcomed the agreement: "Our students benefit from the talents of professors who share their knowledge and passion for research and scholarship every day and this first contract reflects a fiscally responsible agreement that rewards excellence and invests in our faculty--strengthening the University of Oregon for all of our community."

The administration's shift is a particularly significant one because its initial proposal eschewed a union demand to guarantee the right to free speech outside the classroom, including where this concerns debate about institutional policies. Instead, Flaherty notes, the university's proposal "decouples academic freedom and free speech, addressing them separately. Academic freedom is 'necessary to teaching and research,' it says, with no mention of the role of academics in speaking out if not related directly to teaching and research."

The ability of faculty members to criticize university policies was a key tenet of academic freedom when the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) codified the concept in 1940. But the free-speech rights of university faculty have fallen into murky territory since 2006, when the Supreme Court ruled that public employees were not entitled to these rights for speech "pursuant to their official duties." The Supreme Court did not address whether this ruling applied to professors at public universities, leaving the question in a legal limbo. Advocates are hopeful that a decision earlier this month from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco--which ruled that a controversial proposal circulated by a former Washington State University Professor David Demers to overhaul the school's communications department should have constituted protected speech--will form the basis for more robust protections in the future.

But apart from legal uncertainty, academic freedom faces another threat: the growing reliance of universities on corporate patronage. To make up for stunning shortfalls in state funding, public universities have both hiked tuition and courted investment by private donors. "When universities are dependent on the money of private donors, administrators may feel pressure to enact policies that jeopardize the status of the university as a place of free inquiry," says Anderson. Oregon has already seen this kind of influence wielded--the university reportedly terminated its involvement in the anti-sweatshop Workers' Rights Consortium following pressure from Nike's Knight.

Yet in the face of creeping academic commercialism, writes Jen Washburn, author of University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education, the AAUP and other advocates have been slow to respond, adhering to a "narrow, individualistic interpretation of academic freedom" that disregards the broader politics of today's universities.

According to Joe Lowndes, an associate professor of political science and member of the union's organizing committee, the contract fight at the University of Oregon "has shown that a unionized faculty can, among other things, act to safeguard academic freedom--a freedom we have learned not to take for granted within the changing structure of American higher education."