The 2025 AAUP-AFT Summer Institute took place July 17–20 at the historic Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. AAUP members from both advocacy and collective bargaining chapters, along with AFT members from across the country, participated in a series of workshops and plenary sessions dedicated to fighting back against the Trump administration’s attacks on higher education and the broader assault on democracy. Attendees who arrived by July 17 had the opportunity to hone basic organizing techniques in the Organize Every Campus preconference training, and those who were able to stay through July 20 participated in a mass-mobilization and direct-action training that provided the necessary tools to help build lasting movements to sustain a democratic vision for higher education.
Attendance broke records: Over four hundred AAUP and AFT members participated in the 2025 Summer Institute. A contingent from Guam even traveled nearly eight thousand miles to attend. The rise in attendance is evidence of our membership’s commitment to defending colleges and universities from the multiple crises affecting higher education today, including political intimidation and threats to academic freedom, the suppression of dissent, unprecedented funding cuts, and the erosion of shared governance.
This was the first Summer Institute to be held at a historically Black institution. Members from more than nineteen historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) were present, and many were featured in a roundtable plenary organized by the AAUP’s Committee on Historically Black Institutions and Scholars of Color. Some workshops and seminars were held at neighboring Spelman College, reflecting the interinstitutional collaboration among AAUP chapters at HBCUs. Danielle Dickens, copresident of the AAUP chapter at Spelman College, remarked that “it is an honor to be one of the institutions to host AAUP Summer Institute, particularly because of advocacy and the history of activism at HBCUs.”
The Summer Institute offered the opportunity to exchange strategies with like-minded colleagues and reenergized faculty facing protracted battles against hostile administrations and state legislatures. Pranav Jani, former president of the Ohio State University AAUP chapter, said, “To share these thoughts, these struggles, these strategies, with this group of people around the country, who are here not just to listen but to share their experiences and the actual work they have been doing. . . . This is exactly where I want to be.”
Many of the sessions connected the federal attacks on higher education to the more widespread crisis of democracy in the United States. In a plenary session on academic
freedom, Rana Jaleel, chair of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, said, “Aca demic freedom is a job condition, not a privilege. . . . This is a matter of democratic education.”
The conversations at the Summer Institute were robust and expansive. Participants discussed strategies to develop militant unions, the role of organized labor at HBCUs, the defense of undocumented and international students from federal attacks, calls for faculty control in decisions pertaining to artificial intelligence, ways to fortify protections for academic freedom, and much more.
Attendees also had time to socialize and unwind. Numerous participants attended receptions convened by AAUP-AFT Local 6741 and the Committee on Historically Black Institutions and Scholars of Color. A lively soundtrack accompanied the festivities at the latter reception, with some breaking out in dance to Teena Marie songs and other jams until the last bus returned to the hotels.
The Summer Institute’s rallying cry was “Organize, fight, win!” There is no doubt that our chapters are prepared to do just that as the academic year begins.
Photographs from the Summer Institute are available on Flickr at https://www.flickr.com/photos/aaup /albums/72177720327780247.