I must confess to having felt an enormous sense of pride of association when the AAUP's Collective Bargaining Congress (CBC) passed the following resolution in December 2004:
WHEREAS the security of full health-care coverage is essential to a healthy and productive faculty;
WHEREAS no citizen in a democracy should be without full health-care coverage;
WHEREAS educational institutions and faculty waste enormous human and financial resources implementing, bargaining over, and paying for health insurance;
WHEREAS these resources are better utilized in service to the mission of institutions and the fulfillment of faculty responsibilities;
BE IT RESOLVED that the AAUP shall endeavor to support and promote universal health care for all citizens of the United States.
Like the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure and many other AAUP policy statements, this resolution speaks truth to power by invoking reason, compassion, and common sense. Just as we cannot enjoy the pursuit of truth in the absence of academic freedom, we cannot have meaningful rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness-a real democracy-in the absence of universal health care.
The 1940 Statement was developed in response to rampant assaults on academic freedom, and the CBC's resolution on health care springs from a crisis in health care in America. You know the facts: life expectancy in the United States is lower than in some underdeveloped nations; 44 or 45 million Americans lack health insurance, that is, access to the means of life; the cost of health care has spiraled out of control; and Medicare is facing bankruptcy well ahead of Social security. America currently spends more for health care than any other nation in the world, while the Canadians, Taiwanese, and Britons, to name only a few, spend less per capita yet get universal health insurance.
I think back to when my family lived in Canada. We paid about $18.50 a month into the national health-care plan. When our first child was born, the hospital bill was $1.50 (Canadian); three years later, the hospital bill for our second child's birth was $4.50. The quality of hospital care was outstanding, and our obstetrician was a warm, caring, and competent doctor. My sister's first child was born in the United States around the same time, and I recall that her hospital bill was in the thousands of dollars.
The 1940 Statement hails tenure for two main reasons, one of which is that it provides 'a sufficient degree of economic security to make the profession attractive to men and women of ability.' But today, because our health 'system' is badly broken, faculty raises are often offset by the increased costs of health premiums. It is too easy to blame university and college administrations for this Faustian trade-off. It makes more sense to blame the absence of national political leadership for failing to embrace the principle that the CBC resolution endorses-no citizen in a democracy should be without full health-care coverage.
That principle, like that of academic freedom, is not abstract, nor is it idealistic. Rather, it is derived from scientific observation of real conditions that bear real consequences. A nation that does not value the lives of its own citizens enough to ensure access to the means of life-health care-is a nation lacking moral leadership. If the citizens themselves do not advocate for a solution, one based on fairness, equity, and human decency, then they, too, become implicated and culpable.
In passing the resolution calling for universal health care, an arm of the national AAUP has spoken. But that is not enough. The Association now needs to mobilize its five hundred chapters around the nation to pass similar resolutions at the state and campus levels. We must also urge our kindred higher education associations-the Association of Governing Boards, the American Council on Education, and others-to likewise insist on health coverage for all. And then we must encourage other professions to follow suit. Many physicians, interestingly, need no convincing: a physicians working group has already proposed a single-payer national health-insurance plan that promises savings of some $200 billion from today's obscenely high price tag-which reflects profit taking by marketing agencies and private insurance companies. (see the August 2003 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.)
Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1809 that 'the care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.' Nearly two hundred years have passed and still, lamentably, good government by Jeffersonian standards has yet to happen in the United States. The AAUP's resolution is an important, decent, and necessary step toward making the care of human life a legitimate objective once more. Kudos to the CBC for taking that step.
