2024 AAUP Updates

The American Association of University Professors has joined with the Asian American community and several civil rights groups in challenging the federal government’s racial profiling and surveillance of Asian American and Asian immigrant scientists and researchers—especially those of Chinese descent.

Last Friday, the University System of Georgia (USG) Board of Regents reportedly met in secret to interview former Georgia governor and Trump-appointed Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue for the position of chancellor. Aside from a small number of “listening sessions” in March 2021, the entire search process has been hidden from public view. The American Association of University Professors condemns the closed nature of the search and calls for meaningful faculty participation in the chancellor search.

When a bomb threat is made at one of our historically Black colleges and universities, it becomes the latest entry in a long and shameful history of incidents of violence and racial terror which have resulted in the systemic and persistent racial inequity we see in US society today. The AAUP condemns the racial terrorism perpetuated by the numerous bomb threats at over a dozen HBCUs over the last several weeks.

A recent faculty senate report highlighted troubling threats to academic freedom at the University of Florida. And while a presidential search is an opportunity to affirm principles of shared governance, and to highlight transparency and accountability in public higher education, Florida appears poised again to step away from the mission of higher education to serve the common good. 

The AAUP released a report on the University System of Georgia’s dismantling of academic tenure and will likely impose censure in 2022 if the board of regents does not restore academic due process to tenured faculty. In an unprecedented action, the board of regents of the University System of Georgia in October voted to adopt changes to its post-tenure review policy that make it possible to fire tenured faculty without a dismissal hearing.

South Carolina’s House Bill 4522 is misguided legislation that would do irreparable damage to the quality of education in the South Carolina public university system by severely undermining academic freedom in the state.

On Saturday, the governing Council of the AAUP voted to remove the University of Nebraska–Lincoln from the Association’s list of censured administrations, and to add Illinois Wesleyan University to the Association's list of institutions sanctioned for substantial noncompliance with standards of academic governance.

After 50,000 public comments from borrowers and an internal audit of borrowers eligible for Public Service Loan Forgiveness, the US Department of Education has taken a series of steps to resolve long-standing issues with the troubled program. Read more about these changes and how you can potentially access debt relief.