Cary Nelson
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Cary Nelson (b. May 15, 1946), professor of English and Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is the current president of the American Association of University Professors and a prominent scholar-activist. He reviced his Ph.D in English from University of Rochester 1970. He is a 1967 graduate of Antioch College. In the words of Alan Wald, "With the appearance of Manifesto of a Tenured Radical in 1997, Cary became the national exemplar of the committed scholar who conceived of the advance of his own career in the context of the amelioration of the rank-and-file of the academic community; more specifically, graduate students, part-time employees, and campus workers." [1]
Nelson was elected to a two-year term in April of 2006. For the previous six years, he had been the second vice president of the AAUP. In April 2006 he was arrested, along with over 50 others (including Jane Buck, the outgoing president of the AAUP), as part of a unionization effort by New York University's graduate teaching assistants. [2]
Nelson has been an outspoken critic of the corporatization of university education in general and has also been involved in various local interventions; he has recently been involved in the widespread academic response to the Five Year Plan for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida.
He is the author of twenty five books, including Manifesto of a Tenured Radical and Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left. His academic focus is on modern American poetry. [3]
