In March, the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom and the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College released a joint report on academic freedom and collective bargaining. The report analyzes the contractual codification of academic freedom protections negotiated by higher education institutions of all types and nationally affiliated unions representing tenured, tenure-track, and contingent faculty members as well as postdoctoral scholars and graduate student employees. Using examples from forty-five collective bargaining agreements with academic freedom provisions, the report demonstrates the wide range of ways academic freedom is defined and enforced in such agreements, including whether the definitions incorporate, quote, follow, or deviate from the principles set forth in the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure. For each contract, the report includes the applicable provisions and analyzes the negotiated procedure for the enforcement of academic freedom.
The report provides an extensive overview of scholarly literature on academic freedom and collective bargaining, along with a legal review of administrative agency decisions and arbitration awards that address academic freedom issues. In addition, it includes a link to each contract, thereby permitting the reader to contextualize the excerpted provisions within the terms of the entire agreement. The report illustrates that significant differences exist in the forty-five excerpted academic freedom provisions. In so doing, it sets the stage for future research into and analysis of the National Center’s complete dataset of 615 negotiated agreements that include academic freedom provisions.
“In these challenging times for higher education,” the report concludes, “collective bargaining remains a valuable tool for preserving and defending academic freedom.” Its findings demonstrate a need for the development of a nationwide training program on the principles of academic freedom set forth in the 1940 Statement and on the best practices for enforcing those principles through collective bargaining and other means.