AAUP

An AAUP Chapter Can Transform Your Campus

Big or small, established or fledgling, an AAUP chapter on your own campus can accomplish a surprising number of things that even the most committed faculty member can’t do alone.

One Historian’s Perspective on Academic Freedom and the AAUP

It’s our brand: academic freedom. Whatever else the AAUP does, the defense of academic freedom is what distinguishes it from every other organization. As the American system of higher education has evolved, so, too, has the Association’s mission, but despite embracing collective bargaining and the provision of other services to the professoriate, the AAUP has not abandoned its central concern with protecting the professional autonomy and intellectual integrity of the nation’s faculties.

Academic Boycotts Reconsidered: A Response to the AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom, Volume 4

The limit case is always Nazi Germany. Would I have supported a boycott of German universities during the Nazi period? I cannot of course place myself back in that historical moment—before I was born—and be certain how I would have felt. But I can respond in principle. And I believe my answer at the time should have been “No,” but not, as it happens, because of the AAUP’s policy against academic boycotts. When the Nazis criminalized their institutions of higher education they ceased to be universities. Thus I would argue there was fundamentally nothing “academic” left to boycott.

Remembering Mary Burgan

We note with sadness the death of Mary Burgan, who served as the general secretary of the AAUP from 1994 until her retirement in 2004. Burgan died in Washington, DC, on January 12 at the age of eighty-one. Her years heading the Association’s national office—a position now filled by an executive director—followed a decades-long career as a professor of English at Indiana University.

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