A UA professor who has been dedicated to the fight for continued academic freedom and tenure may become the president of the nation's top organization that defends faculty rights.

Carol Bernstein, research associate professor of microbiology and immunology, is one of three candidates running for the presidential seat of the American Association of University Professors.

The AAUP was founded to advance and defend the process of academic freedom and academic tenure in higher education, said Jonathan Knight, AAUP associate secretary.

Bernstein said the organization assists faculty and staff members who have suffered from a lack of due process or harassment.

Every two years, the AAUP elects a president, two vice-presidents and a treasurer. Approximately 37,000 ballots, originally sent out March 1, will remain uncounted because of violations that called for a re-run of the election.

Theodore Downing, UA research professor of social development and former president of the AAUP Arizona Conference, said James E. Perley, the incumbent, violated election rules when he used membership funds from his state chapter for campaigning.

The AAUP's nominating committee selected Bernstein and Perley, a biology professor at the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio, for the presidential candidacy.

Mary Gray, professor of mathematics at American University in Washington, D.C. and former head of the AAUP's committee on women, petitioned her way onto the presidential ballot with 400 signatures.

Ballots for the re-election of president, vice-president and treasure were sent out Friday. Bernstein said the results should be announced June 1.

At the UA, Bernstein has been active in colon cancer research for the past four years. She is the author of Aging, Sex and DNA Repair and also teaches part-time. She is the president and principal registered lobbyist of the AAUP Arizona Conference.

Bernstein said that as president she would change the priorities of the national organization. She supports an increase in the income given to state and chapter initiatives. The AAUP currently gives local activities 4 percent of the $3.8 million it collects in dues.

She said activities at the state and chapter level are crucial to the role of the AAUP because it is at the campus level that attacks on tenure and academic freedom are made.

"Combatting attacks on academic freedom often subjects the AAUP officers and leaders on campuses to defend academic freedom," she said.

Bernstein also said she believes faculty members should be provided with a legal benefit of a free one-hour conference if they feel they have been harassed.

She would also like to provide part-time and adjunct faculty members with appropriate working conditions such as office space, electronic mail and telephone services. That way, they can teach as tenured professors without fear of being terminated "because of student popularity evaluations," she said.

Another area of concern, Bernstein said, is the UA practice of hiring teaching assistants and adjunct faculty members and ignoring the Arizona legislature's mandate of a 22-to-1 full-time student-to-faculty ratio.

Bernstein said the UA's ratio is currently at 27-to-1 and is way out of range with what the legislature expects. The ratio also exceeds the ratios of the UA's 15 peer institutions. Michigan State University, for example, has a 19-to-1 ratio while the University of Virginia has a 14-to-1.

"On our campus, the university is undermining tenure by not providing a national average ratio of tenured faculty to students. The UA is utilizing teaching assistants and adjunct faculty members, both of whom have no protection for their rehire if they demand high performance from student and therefore receive complaints on student evaluation forms," she said.

While in office, Bernstein would also like to evaluate institutions on their proper promotion of teaching, research and service and appropriate working conditions of part-time and adjunct faculty. "That would improve academic missions if we begin to evaluate them," she said.

Former AAUP Arizona Conference President Downing said Bernstein is imminently qualified for the national AAUP presidential seat.

"She has worked in the interest of the whole state university system for over a decade, especially for university students."

He said it was under Bernstein's direction that the AAUP conducted a study on the declining student graduation rates at the UA. The administration and Arizona Board of Regents took action on the declining rates of student's graduating because the study brought it to their attention, Downing said.

The AAUP, he said, sets the standards nationally for what is academic freedom, due process and tenure. The organizations has a membership of 44,000 faculty and was created in 1915.

Its primary role, he said, is as the defender of academic freedom. Academic freedom means professors can profess their points of view and be involved in community action without fear of retaliation of political forces that would like to direct and control the university from outside, he said.

"She's controversial, she's abrasive," Downing said about Bernstein's practice of defending faculty rights, "but she's got an agenda." Downing said Bernstein's agenda is academic freedom and faculty rights.

"In the history of academic freedom attacks at the UA, Bernstein has been an outspoken advocate and has taken action," Downing said.