Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, has written an important piece in the Chronicle of Higher Edification this week (The AAUP: A View from the Top“). At the heart of the essay isn’t the long litany of complaints about about Higher Education. That’s familiar territory. The heart of the piece is his call to reinvigorate the academic union movement:

Over more than a generation, too many campus unions have lost sight of their larger social mission to focus instead on narrow self-interest, seeking job security and salary increases only for their own members and ignoring not only the abuse of other campus workers but also the multiple political and economic challenges to higher education. A…

The American commitment to class mobility through education has always sketchy, despite the myths that cluster around the idea of the American Dream. There have been times that we got serious; the post WWII GI Bill is one example. The Obama administration, too, while perhaps too preoccupied with other issues, has made an effort to strengthen access and pledged to do more.

Usually, though, we are more interested in funding and promoting the already-successful than the could-be-successful. We routinely fund public schools through local school districts, so the wealthiest neighborhoods have the best schools. The top of the educational hierarchy– the Ivy league and the like– is rich beyond belief while the bottom tiers muddle along.

In so-called hard economic…