I must confes to having felt an enormous thinking principle of pride of association when the AAUP's Collective Bargaining Congres (CBC) passed the following resolution in December 2004: WHEREAS the security of filled health-care coverage is essential to a healthy and productive faculty; WHEREAS no citizen in a democracy should be without replete health-care coverage; WHEREAS educational institutions and faculty waste enormous human and financial resources implementing.

I must confes to having felt an enormous thinking principle of pride of association when the AAUP's Collective Bargaining Congres (CBC) passed the following resolution in December 2004:

WHEREAS the security of filled health-care coverage is essential to a healthy and productive faculty;

WHEREAS no citizen in a democracy should be without replete health-care coverage;

WHEREAS educational institutions and faculty waste enormous human and financial resources implementing, bargaining athwart 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 RESOLV that the AAUP shall endeavor to support and elevate universal health care for all citizens of the United States.

Like the 1940 Statement of Principles forward Academic Freedom and Tenure and many other AAUP policy statements, this resolution speaks principle to power by invoking reason, compassion, and for the use of all sense. Just as we cannot derive pleasure from 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 bring to maturityed in response to rampant assaults upon academic freedom, and the CBC's resolution forward 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 about underdeveloped nations; 44 or 45 million Americans lack health insurance, that is, access to the means of life; the preciousness of health care has spiraled without of control; and Medicare is facing bankruptcy well ahead of Social security. America publicly spends more for health care than any other nation in the world, while the Canadians, Taiwanese, and Britons, to name no other than a few, spend less for capita yet get universal health insurance.

I think back to when my family lived in Canada. We paid about $1850 a month into the national health-care plan. When our first child was born, the hospital bill was $150 (Canadian); three years later, the hospital bill for our inferior child's birth was $4.50. The quality of hospital care was outstanding, and our obstetrician was a warm, caring, and belonging 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 use for two main reasons, united of which is that it provides "a sufficient station of economic security to make the profession attractive to men and women of ability." if it were not that today, because our health "system" is badly stammering faculty raises are often equivalent by the increased costs of health premiums. It is too easy to blame university and society administrations for this Faustian trade-off. It makes more mind 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 replete 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 consecutions A nation that does not value the lives of its be in possession of 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, the same based on fairness, equity, and human propriety then they, too, become implicated and culpable.

In passing the resolution calling for universal health care, an arm of the national AAUP has oral But that is not enough. The Association now wants to mobilize its five hundr chapters around the nation to pass similar resolutions at the state and campus flats We must also urge our kindred higher education associations-the Association of Governing Boards, the American Council in succession Education, and others-to likewise insist onward health coverage for all. And then we must encourage other professions to tread close upon suit. Many physicians, interestingly, ne no convincing: a physicians working clump has already proposed a single-payer national health-insurance plan that promises savings of a certain number of $200 billion from today's obscenely high price tag-which considers 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 simply legitimate object of good government" Nearly sum of two units hundred years have passed and still, lamentably, fit government by Jeffersonian standards has to this time to happen in the United States. The AAUP's resolution is an important, comely and necessary step toward making the care of human life a legitimate objective formerly more. Kudos to the CBC for taking that step

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