The AAUP office reopened on September 7, 2021. Contact information for all staff, including those working remotely or on a hybrid schedule, is available here.
About two hundred faculty members and other higher education professionals gathered at Roosevelt University in Chicago from July 26 to 29 for the AAUP’s Summer Institute, cosponsored by the AAUP’s Collective Bargaining Congress and Assembly of State Conferences. The event is geared toward both unionized and nonunionized faculty activists at all types of institutions.
In November 2005, the AAUP Council endorsed the adoption by the Collective Bargaining Congress of the following document as a statement of principles. (The AAUP Collective Bargaining Congress was a sister organization of the AAUP that operated from January 1, 2013 until December 31, 2019, after which its programs were folded into the AAUP.)
The main principle behind successful organizing, and behind the formation of AAUP chapters, is collective action. When faculty speak and act with one voice, we demonstrate a large-scale commitment to the issues around which we organize.
This page provides a short overview of the common challenges that academic workers face when they seek unionization. It then describes the special legal and ideological challenges that some faculty and graduate students face in their bids to form higher education unions. It concludes with a primer on strategies that academic workers have used to overcome some of these challenges.
In June, the AAUP submitted a friend-of-the-court brief to the National Labor Relations Board on the question of whether faculty members at private colleges and universities who are seeking to be represented by a union are employees covered by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) or excluded managers. In the case Point Park University v. Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh and Communications Workers of America, faculty members petitioned for an election and voted in favor of representation by the Communications Workers of America, Local 38061.