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When the AAUP speaks, it is the voice of the profession. Read a sampling of what the media is saying about the AAUP.
Some professors are objecting to the lack of public health protections, with protests, petitions, and resignations.
AAUP and UCW rallied Tuesday before the chancellor's flagship address. Over 850 people have signed a petition demanding better campus COVID-19 safety.
The hard fought contract agreement proposes a lump sum salary increase in the deal's first year and an additional 4.25% increase in base pay over the final two years of the contract.
Some professors feel stripped of their ability to determine what’s best for their students and themselves.
Beginning Monday, Georgia faculty from at least 16 colleges will begin week-long demonstrations in hopes of pressuring administrators to institute mask and/or vaccine mandates.
As the Georgia conference of the AAUP plans a week of protests demanding a mask mandate and more options for teaching students in quarantine, the University System of Georgia considers disciplinary action, up to suspension, for professors who take COVID-19 mitigation into their own hands.
Matthew Boedy, president of AAUP Georgia, said that seeing his mostly unmasked class at the University of North Georgia was “an emotional hellscape.” Some instructors are finding the return to the classroom a nerve-racking experience. A few have quit — one in the middle of class.
"The decision-makers at the University of Oklahoma want to have it both ways. They want to appear to be doing the right thing when it comes to scientifically-backed COVID-19 mitigation strategies. But they also appear to want to please certain donors, politicians, parents and others who want an "in-class experience" without 100% indoor masking and COVID-19 vaccination requirements as is strongly recommended by the CDC."
“We would like to thank all our members for the amazing outpouring of solidarity and support."
Columbus State University's AAUP chapter will hold a demonstration Friday protesting what they call unsafe working and learning conditions after faculty and staff petitioned the University System of Georgia asking for more COVID-19 protocols.
"Female faculty members are submitting papers at a much lower degree than they did prior to the pandemic, and that's going to make it much more difficult for women to get tenure."
"It is a fundamental denial of civil rights at OU to be put at heightened risk of infection due to someone else choosing not to be masked and vaccinated."
The Wright State AAUP chapter sent a letter to the president asking the university to require all students, faculty and staff be vaccinated as well as increased social distancing and remote teaching options. "If we don't plan for this surge in COVID now, we will find ourselves in a worse position than in Spring 2020."
“It feels especially insulting after we’ve made these sacrifices, and again, made them because we were asked to do so, we were called to service and we stepped up,” said AAUP President Cathryn Bailey
Advocates for academic freedom and frank open inquiry on the issue of race rejoiced Friday after the Board of Regents for the University of Nebraska voted down a resolution opposing the “imposition” of critical race theory on curriculum. The resolution, backed by the state’s Republican governor, Pete Ricketts, was proposed by Regent Jim Pillen, a Republican who is running to succeed term-limited Ricketts as governor.
College faculty, staff, and students are becoming more willing to confront vaccine hesitancy and hostility and defy the public officials that give cover to them. They’ve reached a tipping point.
There is "broad frustration and deep anger among faculty at Twin Cities that has been building over the summer about the unsafe reopening policies put forward by the administration," the University of Minnesota chapter of the AAUP wrote in a statement.
The saga of Nikole Hannah-Jones and Cornel West highlight the importance of tenure in academic freedom and the fight for racial justice and equity in higher education.
The AAUP's Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession shows university faculty pay dropped nationwide last year for the first time since the great recession.
“This is more evidence that those without tenure, or at least opportunity for tenure, their livelihood is at risk,” said Glenn Colby, senior researcher with the AAUP.
"Black people make up 13.4% of the US population but accounted for less than 6% of faculty at public and private nonprofit four-year colleges in the USA in 2018, according to federal data analyzed by the AAUP."
The university's work to get accredited "could be undone after a scathing report by the American Association of University Professors, which put NU on its sanctioned list for a “trinity of egregious violations of widely accepted governance standards.” . . . .“These actions should trigger an investigation by WASC,” said Adrianna Kezar, Dean’s Professor of Leadership and director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education. “The Board [of Trustees] needs to take seriously AAUP sanctioning and possible implications for their accreditation.”
“By whatever measure one chooses,” the American Association of University Professors said in an assessment of the topic earlier this year, “campus police have not made campuses safer”.
“There is no question that many colleges and universities are in financial distress, and many more will face daunting challenges in the next decade,” the report says. “The question is whether robust shared governance will survive those challenges. For that to happen, governing boards, administrations and faculties must make a conscious, concerted, and sustained effort to ensure that all parties are conversant with, and cultivate respect for, the norms of shared governance.”
“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."
"Shared governance means continuous faculty engagement in academic decision-making. When administration reserves the right to unilaterally cut faculty and entire academic programs, professors are being shut out of our voice in determining short and long-range priorities," says the Marquette University AAUP.
