Cary Nelson , 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 received his Ph.D in English from University of Rochester 1970 and is a 1967 graduate of Antioch College. His scholarship of the 1970s and 80s worked to expand the canon of modern American poetry, and since the 1990s he has increasingly focused on issues in higher education. 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." Nelson has also played an important role in promoting cultural studies in the American academy, and in 1981 he founded the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. Nelson was elected to a two-year term as president of the AAUP in April 2006.
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