Due to concerns about COVID-19, the AAUP office has transitioned to telework. Please contact staff by email.
After a strike lasting more than a week, faculty in the Oregon Tech AAUP chapter reached a tentative agreement with the administration early this morning.
The revelation that the Penn Museum and the University of Pennsylvania have been keeping and using human remains recovered from the 1985 police bombing of the Black liberation group MOVE is deeply troubling. We call on faculty and academic staff in disciplines that involve using human remains in research and teaching to work with their institutions and disciplinary associations to ensure that they are following disciplinary standards, institutional regulations, and current law.
A new report gives a brief history of campus police forces; details how campus police forces exist in tension with the AAUP’s core principles and perpetuate structural forms of racist violence; and gives guidance for AAUP chapters that wish to organize to transform campus safety.
It appears that the termination of Daniel J. Pollack-Pelzner's tenured appointment at Linfield University was in flagrant violation of both AAUP principles and the institution's own policies.
A free community college degree is a good first step. As this proposal moves through Congress, we encourage our leaders to expand financial support to more kinds of institutions, and ensure fair pay and workplace protections for faculty.
As part of our broader push for a New Deal for higher education, we’ve endorsed two potential paths toward increased funding for colleges and universities—and, hopefully, more equitable policies to better serve faculty, staff, and students.
Our relief at learning that the jury returned a verdict of guilty on all counts is tempered by the realization that we were worried this would not be the case even after Mr. Floyd’s death was captured on a video that was seen around the world. The AAUP today pledges to continue our work on rooting out systemic racism in our Association, and dismantling institutional racism in higher education.
The AAUP issued a statement today opposing legislation passed in Florida that purports to protect "intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity" on public college and university campuses. The legislation mandates annual surveys; aims to prevent institutions from "shielding" students, faculty, and staff from offensive speech; and allows students to record classroom lectures surreptitiously.
“We have a lot more work to do with fewer faculty,” said Evelyn Stiller, a professor of computer science and the president of the AAUP chapter at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire.
AAUP member Isaac Kamola has tracked more than 1,570 stories posted on Campus Reform since 2020 and surveyed the 338 individuals they targeted, many of whose official profiles and contact details were linked to in stories about them. The survey, the results of which will be published by the AAUP’s Academe magazine, found that at least 40 percent of respondents received “threats of harm” following a Campus Reform article.
Average faculty pay fell by 0.4 percent this year, adjusting for inflation, the first such decrease since 2011-12, according to preliminary data from the American Association of University Professors’ annual Faculty Compensation Survey.
This top-line figure doesn’t tell the full story of how academic salaries have fared during COVID-19. Just as the pandemic has had an outsize effect on certain parts of society and the economy, it’s affected faculty compensation at certain kinds of institutions, at certain ranks, more than others.
This is a national imperative, requiring New Deal-level funding and focus, write Irene Mulvey and Randi Weingarten.
How does making all workers contingent and expendable drive “systemic change that dismantles the status quo”? Why must so many college and university administrators insist that the only way to be fair is for everyone to expect less?
AAUP president Irene Mulvey says she gets that administrators want flexibility and nimbleness for hiring, “but it’s tenured faculty with academic freedom that make a great institution.”
On behalf of AAUP chapters in Iowa, where a proposed bill would abolish tenure at public universities, Lois Cox and Katherine Tachau write, "Tenure is indispensable to academic freedom. It allows professors the independence to do the best work they are capable of doing without fear that they will be fired for their opinions or conclusions."
The new AAUP chapter at Penn plans to "fight for more faculty involvement, better working conditions for all employees — including equitable pay for all ranks and a redress of inequities in salary and promotion for women and faculty of color — and “to advocate for the most vulnerable members of our community.”
AAUP program officer Mark Criley raised numerous concerns about the new policy, and told the Chronicle that existing financial-exigency procedures are supposed to give faculty members an ample role in determining if that condition exists and whether there are less-drastic means of dealing with it than terminations.
David Nalbone, president of the Indiana AAUP, argued the school is bound by certain governance guidelines, appearing in the Faculty Manual, which he says the administration appears to be violating in its push for "realignment."
The AAUP will hold its shared governance conference online in June, and we are now accepting proposals for paper presentations on topics relating to academic governance.
At-large chapter officer elections for President, Vice-President, Secretary-Treasurer, and two board members will take place this spring and conclude by the end of June 2021. Nominations will run through Thursday, May 13.
The Journal of Academic Freedom invites applications for a faculty editor or faculty coeditors for the next two volumes of the journal. Applications are due by June 1, 2021.
Due to concerns about COVID-19, the AAUP office has transitioned to telework until further notice. The best way to reach staff members is to write to the appropriate email address for the staff member or department you need to contact. Please consult the AAUP staff page for guidance.
Did you know that the AAUP has an online career center to help colleges and universities connect with qualified applicants?
