2021 AAUP In the News

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.