Join us for the 2010 Summer Institute!
July 29 – August 1
San Diego State University
The annual Summer Institute is the AAUP’s premier resource for sharpening members’ leadership skills and training them in the arts of faculty advocacy. For four days every July, faculty and other academic professionals from across the country meet for a common goal: to learn how to create and implement strategies for improving shared faculty governance at their institutions.
While faculty and academic professionals have myriad opportunities to attend conferences and workshops to improve their scholarship and teaching skills, formal training in exercising the faculty’s role in shared governance is scarce. Packed with interactive workshops and seminars led by policy, financial, legal, media, and organizing experts, the Summer Institute provides attendees with tools and resources to help them protect and strengthen professional standards and improve the terms and conditions under which they conduct research and teach classes. There’s simply nothing else like it in American higher education.
The 2009 Summer Institute included workshops on:
• staking faculty’s leadership role in times of financial crisis
• analyzing institutions’ financial documents
• strengthening faculty handbook language
• creating winning campaigns and targeted communications
• organizing a successful membership drive
• negotiating contracts and administering grievances
• building a better tenure process, and more.
Photos from the 2009 Summer Institute, hosted by the Minnesota AAUP state conference on the campus of Macalester College in St. Paul, MN, are posted below. Read the article about this year’s institute published in the Sept/Oct issue of Academe.
Details about the 2010 Summer Institute will be posted here as they become available. For more information, contact Jenn Nichols at jnichols@aaup.org.
At the opening night banquet, guests were treated to a bluegrass performance by The Ad-Hoc Post-Tenure Underappreciated Band, whose song lyrics struck some chords of their own. The Band includes Dave Witt, Joe LaRose, and Steve Aby, all faculty members at the University of Akron.
AAUP member Todd Price, a faculty member at National Louis University, interviewed AAUP leaders and staff at the institute. Watch a video and hear their thoughts on the Summer Institute, the AAUP's role in higher education, and the future of the profession.
Institute attendees didn't let their work keep them from enjoying the summer weather.
Although the topics are serious, the Institute is informal and hands-on. There’s plenty of room for roundtable discussions among participants.
On a labor history tour led by Peter Rachleff (shown), a labor historian at Macalester College, and Dave Riehle, a local labor activist, participants stopped at the St. Paul Labor Centre to view a labor mural painted by Minnesota-based artists Keith Christensen and Ta-Coumba Aiken.
A record number of first-time participants attended this year’s Summer Institute. Cheryl Tromley, a professor at Fairfield University, joined three of her colleagues at the Institute.
Macalester College in Minneapolis hosted the 2009 Summer Institute. Dave Witt, AAUP-CBC Vice Chair and professor at the University of Akron, was one of many AAUP leaders and faculty activists who led this year’s workshops.
A vintage bus, commandeered by Phil Epstein of the Minnesota Transportation Museum, carried tour participants to important Twin Cities’ labor history sites.
Workshops run the gamut from negotiating contracts to strengthening faculty handbook language to analyzing institutional data and financial statements. Cat Warren, an associate professor at North Carolina State University, led a session on working with the media.