Annual State Conference
March 30-31, 2007
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

"The End of Education"
7 p.m., Friday, March 30, FedEx Global Education Center
Open to the Public

Cary Nelson, President of the AAUP, will speak on the critical issues facing faculty, contingent faculty, and graduate students in higher education. The public is welcome to attend this event.Cary Nelson, longtime scholar-activist and the recently elected president of the AAUP, will speak at UNC-Chapel Hill on Friday, March 30 at 7 p.m.

Nelson, the author and editor of 25 books, has written widely on major issues of higher education: academic freedom, contingent labor, corporatization, globalization, political correctness, and the relationship between teaching and research. He regularly lectures around the United States and abroad.Nelson is a vocal and widely-recognized commentator on the status and politics of higher education. In books such as Manifesto of a Tenured Radical and Academic Keywords: A Devil's Dictionary for Higher Education, Nelson made his name as a witty, sardonic and lucid academic activist, defending the rights of graduate students and part-time faculty while fighting for a university community held strong by its tenured professors.

Indeed, Nelson was elected president of the National AAUP on a campaign rooted in his hallmark idealism and a strong desire to communicate that message to a larger portion of the professoriate. "Thousands of faculty have spent the last two decades hiding from the changing realities of higher education--ignoring the increased reliance on contingent labor, ignoring the gradual shift of power to central administrations," he writes.

Yet alongside his activism, Nelson has always been an academician of the highest order. As a professor of English and a Jublilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the Univeristy of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Nelson has written on modern American poetry, his main area of study, in books such as Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945 and Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left. He has also served as editor of numerous publications and served on the Executive Committee of the Modern Language Association. As Alan Wald -- director of the program in American Culture at the University of Michigan -- writes "Cary [Nelson] has succeeded so brilliantly as the scourge of bankrupt university administrators and head-in-the-sand officials...that one might fail to apprehend the full import of his coupled contribution as the foremost researcher and theorist of modern social poetry of his generation.