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Tools from the AAUP’s National Office
The best way to get started negotiating a fair contract is to contact your campus AAUP chapter, which can offer you access to a wealth of resources from the national organization. If you don’t have a local chapter, start one. You can get good advice on starting or building your chapter.
The staff in the AAUP’s Department of Organizing and Services can help, too. The department offers advice and assistance on tactics and strategies. AAUP staff can help you develop a campaign to put pressure on your administration to take seriously your negotiating committee and its concerns. Contact Patrick Shaw, or one of his colleagues in the department.
John Curtis, in the AAUP’s Research Office, can provide your negotiators with valuable information to take to the table. The AAUP’s annual national survey of faculty compensation, published in the March–April issue of Academe, can help you get the information you need for institutional peer comparisons. The report includes institution-specific listings of average salaries and benefits, broken down by gender, rank, institutional type, and geographic area. The Research Office can refine the information still further for you, however. If you require a customized report comparing your institution to peer institutions on the above measures and others, the Research Office can put together the numbers for you at a cost that’s substantially discounted for AAUP chapters. More information about the survey is available.
In addition, the Research Office can give your chapter access to U.S. Department of Education data that are not readily accessible to the public. The AAUP can help you gather data that will let you see, for example, the percentage of your institution’s expenditures allocated to instruction, as well as how those percentages have changed over time. The Research Office can help you determine trends in faculty status at your institution and elsewhere—what are your percentages of part-time faculty, non-tenure-track faculty, or graduate student instructors? Are more noninstructional employees (academic advisers, admissions office staff, and so on) being added than tenure-track faculty? Arming yourself with these data can help you in your negotiations, and the AAUP can help. Back to article
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