Craig Vasey. Candidate for District IV Council seat Feb 19 2015
Philosophy, University of Mary Washington
I am the Past-President of the Virginia Conference of the AAUP, and represented District IV a few years ago on the Council. For the past three years I have been a member of the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education, representing Virginia at the biannual meetings around the country that have promoted new awareness of the crisis facing higher education from the over-use and exploitation of contingent faculty, the cutting of public funding, and the dubious turn toward MOOCs and on-line learning as an alternative to providing access to high quality education for everyone who needs and desires it. I currently serve as the Chair of the AAUP’s Committee on Teaching, Research, and Publication, which is now combing through 5,000 comments in the 9,000 responses to our recent national survey on teaching evaluation. I’m also a member of the Committee on Professional Ethics. I attend the annual Capitol Hill Day in Washington D.C., and the Virginia Higher Education Advocacy Day in Richmond to lobby on higher ed issues. I’ve been attending the national meetings in Washington for the past eleven years, representing the Virginia Conference. Virginia is not a collective bargaining state, but we have a strong tradition of advocacy for the essential principles of the AAUP: tenure, academic freedom, shared governance, and seeing higher education as a public good. I have been President of the UMW AAUP chapter, Faculty Senate President, and a member of the University Faculty Council.
I have been teaching philosophy at the University of Mary Washington since 1986, and have been chair of the Department of Classics, Philosophy, and Religion for the last sixteen years. My graduate training in Philosophy was at Université de Paris-Sorbonne and Brown University; my teaching and research interests are in phenomenology, feminism, race theory, and logic. We have three children, and now four grandchildren –who deserve to have affordable high quality higher education available when they get older.