Simply put, charter schools have not lived up to their advocates' promise of equity. Using examples of tangible civil rights gains of the twentieth century (e.g. Brown v. Board, Lau v. Nichols) and extending feminist theories of invisible labor to include the labor of democracy, the authors argue that the charter movement renders invisible the labor that secured civil protections for historically marginalized groups. The charter movement hangs a quality public education-previously recognized as a universal guarantee-on the education consumer's ability to navigate a marketplace. The authors conclude that the neoliberal agenda of positioning choice as the best mechanism for securing an education rolls back the rights that were already secured through the labor of democracy.

This essay situates John Dewey in the context of the founding of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in 1915. We argue that the 1915 Declaration of Principles, together with World War I, provides contemporary academics important historical justification for rethinking academic freedom and faculty governance in light of neoliberalism and what we argue is an increased corporatization of higher education in the United States. By revisiting the founding of the AAUP and John Dewey's role in the various debates surrounding the establishment of the organization-including his broader role as a public intellectual confronted by war, questions of duty and freedom, and the shifting boundaries of the professoriate-we argue that professors today should demonstrate academic freedom and reclaim faculty governance for the public good over private interests. introduction On the verge of the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), we examine the organization's focus on academic freedom, shared governance, and the challenges the AAUP faced during its early years. The history is a fairly uncontested one: higher education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States was the context for the struggle over academic freedom and shared governance. Dismissed professors, resignations by colleagues, and the struggle of professionalization characterize the period. 1 A century later, we wonder about the state of academic freedom and shared governance. We argue that higher education is currently so influenced by corporatization and neoliberal entrepreneurialism that it is limiting the rights of professors, often with colleagues looking the other way or, worse, enacting administrative fiat E&C EduCation and CulturE 18 nicholas J. Eastman and dEron boylEs under the pretense of faculty governance. We focus on the beginning of the AAUP and contemporary issues, not at the exclusion of the 1940 AAUP statement, the McCarthy era threats, the so-called "disruptions" of the 1960s and 1970s, and so on, but as a means of recapturing the significance of the origination of the AAUP and to challenge readers not to retreat from the intellectual courage that was so eloquently, though not unproblematically, articulated a hundred years ago. historical considErations The creation of the AAUP is a seminal event in the history of academic freedom because it marked the first time professors from across the United States came together to create a lasting interdisciplinary body dedicated to preserving the integrity of scholarship, teaching, and learning in higher education against intramural and extramural pressures, and sought to define for themselves what was acceptable academic speech. Leading up to the founding of the AAUP in 1915, as Robert Ludlum details, university professors-and university presidents-faced firings for a variety of reasons. Professors and administrators were dismissed for making claims that were incompatible with the religious institu...