Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the AAUP Redbook But Were Afraid to Ask

Photo by AFT's Neal Thomassen

The twelfth edition of the AAUP’s Policy Documents and Reports, a compendium of up-to-date versions of the Association policy documents deemed most useful to AAUP members and the higher education community, was published on April 22, 2025, fifty-seven years after its initial appearance.

The Redbook from 1968 to 2015

The first edition, published in 1968 by the AAUP’s Washington office, was an eighty-eight-page collection of documents printed on 8½-by-11-inch paper, gathered between red paperboard covers, bound with a comb binder, and titled Policy Documents and Reports, the red covers giving rise to the informal title by which it is still commonly known. Sixteen of the included documents were policy statements and reports of special committees photocopied from the AAUP Bulletin (the previous title of Academe magazine), and four were typescripts of draft policy statements, making twenty policy documents in total. The twelfth edition, by comparison, contains seventy-nine policy documents and runs to 389 pages. Also included (but not in any subsequent editions) were a list of AAUP staff members and officers, an essay by staff member Louis Joughin about how the staff conducted its academic freedom and tenure casework, and twenty-four sample “advisory letters from the Washington Office.”

The second through fifth editions (1969, 1971, 1973, 1977) employed the same format as the first, the number of policy documents having increased to thirty-six by 1977. The sixth edition (1984), however, was the first to be formally published as a book. Edited by longtime AAUP staff member B. Robert Kreiser (the first editor to be named), the 1984 Redbook featured a general introduction, introductions to all ten sections, an appendix on relevant court cases, and an index. Bob went on to capably edit four more editions (1990, 1995, 2001, 2006).

The eleventh edition—issued in 2015, the one hundredth anniversary of the AAUP’s founding—was the first to be published by Johns Hopkins University Press rather than the AAUP. The editor of the centennial edition was former AAUP staff member Hans-Joerg Tiede, at the time a professor at Illinois Wesleyan University who while editing the Redbook was completing a book about the AAUP’s early history, University Reform: The Founding of the American Association of University Professors. Joerg made several changes, most significantly contributing fresh introductions to each of the fourteen sections that outlined the historical development of the topics encompassed in them and a new general introduction on how to incorporate Redbook policy standards into faculty handbooks and collective bargaining agreements.

The Twelfth Edition

The 2025 Redbook preserves Joerg’s contributions, including his introductions, though the present editor has revised, updated, and, in several instances, expanded them. While each edition of the Redbook has incorporated new materials and has reflected the profession’s evolving concerns, it is indicative of both the perennial nature of the issues faced by faculty members and the continuity of the AAUP’s fundamental positions that the twelfth edition includes thirteen of the twenty-four policy documents printed in the first Redbook: the 1940 Statement on Academic Freedom and Tenure, Committee A Statement on Extramural Utterances, Joint Statement on Rights and Freedoms of Students, On Preventing Conflicts of Interest in Government-Sponsored Research at Universities, Standards for Investigations in the Area of College and University Governance, Standards for Notice of Nonreappointment, Statement of Principles on Leaves of Absence, Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, Statement on Procedural Standards in Faculty Dismissal Proceedings, Statement on Professional Ethics, Statement on Professors and Political Activity, Statement on Recruitment and Resignation of Faculty Members, and The Role of the Faculty in the Accrediting of Colleges and Universities.

While most documents from the eleventh edition remain in the twelfth, thirteen have been removed,¹ and nine documents never previously printed in the Redbook have been added.² And eight statements and reports carried through from the previous edition have been revised.³ As with the eleventh edition, documents are arranged into twelve major sections: academic freedom, tenure, and due process (containing twenty-three documents); college and university government (ten); professional ethics (four); faculty status (nine); evaluation of faculty members (three); faculty work (three); intellectual property, copyright, and outside funding (six); budgets, salaries, and benefits (seven); collective bargaining (five); work and family (two); discrimination (four); and students (three). More than 40 percent of this Redbook, like its predecessors, consists of material related to the Association’s historical mission to advance academic freedom, tenure, and governance.

The approval history of Redbook documents appears in the headnotes that precede each of them in every edition. A review of the headnotes in the twelfth edition indicates that most of its included documents were originally produced by AAUP committees of various descriptions—special committees, subcommittees, joint subcommittees, and, mainly, standing committees—with every document carrying the imprimatur of at least one AAUP entity. The AAUP’s standing Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure has contributed the most, but the Committee on College and University Governance; the Committee on Gender and Sexuality in the Academic Profession; the Committee on Teaching, Research, and Publication; and the Committee on Contingency and the Profession have contributed a large share. A handful originated with the AAUP’s governing Council. Ten were developed in cooperation with other national organizations, and two originated with other organizations.⁴

The Redbook and "Official AAUP Policy"

By indicating which AAUP body or bodies have approved it, the headnotes also reveal something about the authority of each document. Most documents (sixty-seven) in the new Redbook were approved by their parent committees; twenty-nine were approved only by their parent committees. Less than half (thirty-six) of the documents with committee approval were also endorsed by the governing Council, and only eleven of those were subsequently endorsed by the annual meeting. (Since Association restructuring in 2020 replaced the annual with a biennial meeting, adoption by the Council is now the last action that can be taken.) What Ralph S. Brown and Matthew W. Finkin, in their AAUP Bulletin article “The Usefulness of AAUP Policy Statements,” observed with some understatement almost fifty years ago is thus still true: “The policy statements of the Association enjoy varying levels of institutional endorsement.” Given the careful deliberative process that typically preceded committee approval, often entailing multiple revisions and, at times, publication for comment before a final draft appeared in print, approval by at least one AAUP entity and publication in Academe or one of its predecessor publications seems to have been deemed sufficient for a document to acquire the status of “AAUP policy.”

Finkin and Brown regard the fact that the Association has never defined what constitutes official AAUP policy as a virtue, not a vice, arising from its preference for this scholarly approach to developing policy: “It is precisely because the Association generates policy through deliberation rather than through pronouncement—because it prefers the slow crystallization of opinion in the academic community to the instantaneous response of elected leaders—that it publishes proposed standards before it votes on them and that it lets them pass through various stages of ratification, assessing their worth and reliability by slow and careful means.”

Given the “varying levels of institutional endorsement,” not all Redbook documents carry equal authority. The most authoritative are those that other AAUP statements cite as foundational. By far the most thus cited is the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, followed at some distance by the Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities (1966), both of which the AAUP developed in cooperation with other national organizations. Lending even greater authority to the 1940 Statement is the list, which accompanies its publication in the Redbook, of scholarly societies and higher education associations that have endorsed it. Former staff member Bob Kreiser, who in addition to his many other staff responsibilities had been in charge of soliciting new endorsements for the 1940 Statement, assisted current staff in updating the list and reaching out to potential new endorsers prior to the publication of the twelfth edition. As a result of his efforts, the list of endorsers accompanying the 1940 Statement grew by thirty, bringing the new total to more than 280.

It may seem obvious that authority is conferred on a document merely by its inclusion in the Redbook. That is certainly the case, but no Redbook has ever included even the majority of policy-containing AAUP documents—of which the Association has issued hundreds. The 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure, not only the Association’s first but arguably its best policy statement, was not included in the first eight editions. None of the several hundred published reports of AAUP investigating committees, which advance the “case law” of the Association, have ever been included in the Redbook. It is therefore important to keep in mind that exclusion from the latest edition of the Redbook does not banish a document from the realm of AAUP policy. Documents no longer in the Redbook still exist in print and online, and those who need to consult them can still do so.

Creating a New Edition

Work on a new edition of the Redbook commences years in advance. Soon after the publication of the eleventh edition, Joerg began thinking about changes to be made for the twelfth. In October 2020, the governing Council appointed Joerg and me coeditors of the next edition, so we began meeting regularly to discuss every document listed in the 2015 table of contents to ascertain which ones had undergone revision, which needed revision, which required legal and statistical updates, and which were no longer current. In that work, we consulted frequently with other staff members, especially Mark Criley, Michael DeCesare, and Anita Levy of the AAUP’s Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance, whose familiarity with the Redbook comes from using it daily in advising faculty members seeking Association assistance.

Although a dozen or so Redbook documents are so foundational as to be virtually timeless (as noted previously, thirteen of the twenty policy statements in the first edition are printed in the twelfth), the AAUP is constantly issuing new statements and reports as new challenges arise. For the same reason, existing Redbook documents typically undergo regular revision; the Recommended Institutional Regulations on Academic Freedom and Tenure, which contains language meant to be incorporated verbatim into faculty handbooks and collective bargaining agreements, has been modified twelve times since its initial publication in 1958. If more than a few central documents in a particular Redbook have been subsequently revised, that edition no longer reflects current AAUP policy (besides the Recommended Institutional Regulations, other core documents significantly revised since 2015 were the Statement on Collective Bargaining and On Collegiality as a Criterion for Faculty Evaluation). Documents that depend on statistical information, like Contingent Appointments and the Academic Profession, require updates to their statistics; documents that contain numerous references to court cases, such as Protecting an Independent Faculty Voice: Academic Freedom after Garcetti v. Ceballos, require similar attention to their legal references. A few Redbook statements are so much a product of their time, even if the underlying principles are not, that they must be omitted; an oft-cited example is the Statement on Instructional Television, which was dropped after the fifth edition.

By spring 2023 Joerg and I had come up with a tentative list of documents that had been superseded or were no longer timely as well as of documents that required updating or revision. The second category contained sixteen policy statements and reports, which the Council agreed would not be included in the twelfth edition if necessary revisions were not completed by fall 2023. Various standing committees, joint subcommittees, and staff members agreed to undertake the task of revising most of them. By the October 2023 Council meeting, eight of these documents had been successfully revised and had obtained committee And Council approvals, and two had been replaced by one new statement. The most thoroughly revised documents were Academic Freedom and Outside Speakers (by Committee A), Contingent Appointments and the Academic Profession (by the Committee on Contingency and the Academic Profession), and the Statement on Online Education (by the Committee on Teaching, Research, and Publication), the last not so much a revision as an entirely new statement. Two statements, Affirmative Action Plans: Recommended Procedures for Increasing the Number of Minority Persons and Women on College and University Faculties and On Processing Complaints of Discrimination, were replaced by On Eliminating Discrimination and Achieving Equality in Higher Education, a new document prepared by a joint subcommittee of Committee A, the Committee on Historically Black Institutions and Scholars of Color, and the Committee on Gender and Sexuality in the Academic Profession. As the twelfth edition’s introduction to the section on discrimination notes, this statement was the product of the Association’s racial equity initiative, which began in 2020 and has “brought new emphasis to discrimination based on race, particularly to the persistence and systemic nature of such discrimination.”

It seems likely that the decisions about the contents of the first seven editions of the Redbook were entirely within the purview of the staff. But in 1994 the Council adopted a policy giving itself the responsibility for approving “the inclusion in and removal from the Redbook of specific policy documents and reports” prior to the preparation of a new edition. Beginning, then, with the eighth edition (1995), whenever a new edition was undergoing preparation, the Redbook editor has presented to the Council for approval a list of documents to be added and documents to be removed. At the November 2023 Council meeting, I presented such a list (Joerg having stepped down as coeditor), and the Council voted to approve removing thirteen documents previously included in the Redbook and adding nine not so included.⁵

In January 2024, the Council vote having effectively established the table of contents for the twelfth edition, the editorial team began its work in earnest. That team included Gwendolyn Bradley, director of the AAUP’s Department of External Relations, who handles our contract with Johns Hopkins University Press (JHUP); Austin Rhea, also a member of the external relations department, who converted all the current Redbook texts from PDFs back into Microsoft Word, corrected their formatting, and noted dead URLs; and Kelly Hand, a writer-editor in the same department, who made the first pass through the converted texts, corrected obvious errors, noted problematic material, and then reviewed all the changes I had made. Kelly also interacted with the JHUP production team. In the meantime, Glenn Colby of the AAUP’s research department had updated the statistics in six documents, and Edward Swidriski of the legal department reviewed nineteen documents and made necessary updates to the legal citations in four of them. The completed manuscript was sent to JHUP in June 2024, and nine months later the first advance copies arrived in the AAUP office.

A Resource More Valuable than Ever

It seems appropriate that the proudest accomplishment of an association of college and university professors is a book encapsulating the best that has been thought and said on issues most central to their professional lives. Those of us who have relied on the Redbook will testify that its well-reasoned articulations of policy continue to persuade colleagues, administrators, and board members to observe AAUP-recommended principles and standards in areas of fundamental concern to faculty members. The wide adoption of core Redbook standards in American higher education is further testimony to the book’s continuing influence. In these difficult times, when higher education itself is under attack, such a resource is more valuable than ever.

Gregory F. Scholtz is a senior program officer in the AAUP’s Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance and the editor of the twelfth edition of Policy Documents and Reports.

Notes

1. Academic Freedom in the Medical School, Affirmative Action Plans: Recommended Procedures for Increasing the Number of Minority Persons and Women on College and University Faculties, Campus Sexual Assault: Suggested Policies and Procedures, Mandated Assessment of Educational Outcomes, On Crediting Prior Service Elsewhere as Part of the Probationary Period, On Freedom of Expression and Campus Speech Codes, On Full-Time Non-Tenure-Track Appointments, On Processing Complaints of Discrimination, On the Imposition of Tenure Quotas, Senior Appointments with Reduced Loads, Statement on Faculty Workload and Interpretive Comments, Statement on Intellectual Property, and Statement on Teaching Evaluation.

2. Confidentiality and Faculty Representation in Academic Governance (2013), Faculty Communication with Governing Boards: Best Practices (2014), Faculty Evaluation of Administrators (2006), On Academic Freedom and Transphobia (2021), On Eliminating Discrimination and Achieving Equality in Higher Education (2024), On Professors Assigning Their Own Texts to Students (2004), On the Use of Executive Recruiters in Presidential Searches (1997), On Trigger Warnings (2014), and Professors of Practice (2004). As the dates indicate, four of these statements were published after the eleventh edition had gone into production. 

3. Academic Freedom and Outside Speakers, Access to University Records, Contingent Appointments and the Academic Profession, Protecting an Independent Faculty Voice: Academic Freedom after Garcetti v. Ceballos, Statement on Online Education, Tenure in the Medical School, Use and Abuse of Faculty Suspensions, and Verification and Trust: Background Investigations Preceding Faculty Appointments.

4. The 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure was developed with what is now the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), Academic Freedom and Artistic Expression with the American Council on Education (ACE) and the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (AGB), the Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities also with ACE and the AGB, the Joint Statement on Faculty Status of College and University Librarians with the Association of College and Research Libraries and AAC&U, On Conditions of Employment at Overseas Campuses with the Canadian Association of University Teachers, On Preventing Conflicts of Interest in Government-Sponsored Research at Universities with ACE and the Federal Council of Science and Technology, Statement of Principles on Leaves of Absence with AAC&U, and the Joint Statement on the Rights and Freedoms of Students with what is now the United States Student Association, AAC&U, the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators, and the National Association of Women Deans and Counselors. The Statement on Recruitment and Resignation of Faculty Members originated with AAC&U, and The Ethics of Recruitment and Faculty Appointments with the Council of Colleges of Arts and Sciences.

5. Those documents are listed in notes 1 and 2. Of the thirteen removed, six were documents that for one reason or another had not been revised by the Council's deadline.