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.
Today, the AAUP released the 2022 AAUP Survey of Tenure Practices the first survey of its kind since 2004. The findings offer a snapshot of prevailing tenure practices and policies at four-year institutions with tenure systems.
Today the AAUP released a report of the Special Committee on Governance, Academic Freedom, and Institutional Racism in the University of North Carolina system. The report considers the influence of the North Carolina state legislature on the systemwide board of governors and campus boards of trustees. It discusses how political pressure and top-down leadership have obstructed meaningful faculty participation in the UNC system, jeopardized academic freedom, and reinforced institutional racism.
We note with sadness the death of former AAUP general counsel Michael A. Olivas at the age of seventy-one. Current general counsel Risa Lieberwitz described him as "deeply committed to the AAUP and the principles of academic freedom and shared governance."
Continuing a relentless crusade to destroy higher education in Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis staged a performative and disingenuous press conference on April 19 at which he signed into law Senate Bill 7044, further attacking professors and eroding academic freedom in the state.
Thanks to a partnership with the AFT, AAUP members will now get free access to Summer, an online platform that can help you navigate your student loan situation and simplify the PSLF application process. Learn how to access the program.
The AAUP released the report of an investigating committee on the dismissal of Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, a tenured English professor and endowed chair in Shakespeare studies at Linfield University in Oregon. The report finds that Linfield’s administration violated AAUP standards and the institution’s own regulations when it dismissed Pollack-Pelzner without affordance of academic due process.
Provisional data are now available. Preliminary findings are that average salaries for all full-time faculty members increased 2 percent, one of the smallest increases on record since the AAUP began tracking this measure in 1972. Real average salaries decreased 5 percent, after adjusting for inflation, representing the greatest decrease in real wage growth decreased since the 1979–80 academic year.
The AAUP is relaunching its investigation into the terminations or nonrenewals of appointment of faculty members at Collin College. In all three cases, the administration’s actions appear to have been for reasons that violated the faculty members’ academic freedom.
The loss of tenure lines is accelerating. So is the erosion of tenure, by extension, according to a new institutional survey of tenure policies by the American Association of University Professors.
Among community colleges nationally, the number of part-time contingent faculty members fell from 187,520 in fall 2019 to 165,322 in fall 2020, a decrease of 11.8 percent, according to data from the AAUP. Meanwhile, U.S. Department of Education data show the number of part-time faculty members in the California Community Colleges system dropped from 27,094 to 24,298 between fall 2019 and fall 2020, a loss of almost 2,800 instructors.
“Anecdotally, when I talk with community colleges around the country and districts and so forth, they tell me the contingent faculty are really being hammered the last couple years,” said Glenn Colby, Senior Researcher at the AAUP. Adjuncts already wrestle with job uncertainty every term, but especially when there are enrollment declines.
“People are burned out after two years of just being in constant crisis mode, putting out one fire after another,” he said. They’ve had to “take on extra workloads,” including covering for laid-off colleagues on committees and running academic programs with fewer people.
“Let us shine lights on these facts in this report and have a good and robust debate about them. Only a commitment to an open marketplace of ideas can cut through the fear that chilling effects instill," said Victoria Ekstrand, a professor at UNC’s School of Journalism and Media at the AAUP press conference.
UNC’s leaders should listen to their professors. They’ll learn something.
A report by the American Association of University Professors details how Republican lawmakers, after taking over the legislature in 2010, wrested control of the university system’s Board of Governors as well as the trustees of its 17 individual campuses, influencing chancellor appointments and closing academic centers dedicated to fighting poverty, pollution and social injustice.
“General conditions for academic freedom and shared governance at Linfield University are deplorable,” says the AAUP’s new report on its inquiry. The document will guide the AAUP’s Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure as it decides whether to recommend censuring Linfield’s administration for alleged violations of faculty rights at the committee’s meeting in June.
Linfield University’s firing of a tenured English professor last year without due process violated his academic freedom and the school’s own regulations, contributing to a “deplorable” campus culture, according to a report by the American Association of University Professors.
Adjusted for inflation, real average salaries decreased 5 percent year over year, representing the greatest decrease in real-wage growth seen since 1979–80, according to the AAUP. The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers, or CPI-U, increased 7 percent in 2021 and 12.5 percent in 1979, the AAUP said in a preliminary analysis of its data. Meanwhile, the average president’s salary at a doctoral university is $602,854.
The 2022 AAUP Conference and Biennial Meeting will take place in person just outside of Washington, DC. Registration is now open. An early-bird discount is available until May 20.
A meeting of the AAUP's national Council.
The AAUP will hold the 2022 Summer Institute in person at the University of Nevada, Reno, July 21–24.
The AAUP is holding elections for candidates for members of the AAUP’s governing Council at the June 2022 Biennial Association Meeting. One at-large Council member position and five regional Council member positions are open for election.
Did you know that the AAUP has an online career center to help colleges and universities connect with qualified applicants?
