AAUP in the News

“This is an anti-democratic attack unfolding, not just at Penn, but all across the country, including at public universities in Florida, in Texas, Ohio and beyond,” said Offner, the president of the university’s chapter of the AAUP, a professional faculty organization. Penn, she said, had become “ground zero of a coordinated national assault on higher education, an assault organized by billionaires, lobbying organizations and politicians who would like to control what can be studied and taught in the United States.”

what makes the labor movement in higher ed different from the larger labor movement is that in addition to bread-and-butter issues, there’s always demands for academic freedom and often racial justice, equity issues, mental health issues, social justice issues,” Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors, told The Hill.

“Universities don’t exist to serve private interests. They are not tools for the business interests or political agendas of donors and trustees." - AAUP Penn president Amy Offner

"Given how quickly the focus of the people claiming to be concerned about antisemitism on our campuses shifted to plagerism, it certainly appears that the focus was never really about antisemitism and protecting students," Irene Mulvey, the president of the AAUP told Salon. "It's part of a long-running, well-funded effort to create a false narrative for the public that higher education is broken." Mulvey argued that the month-long pressure campaign carried out by Republican lawmakers and conservative social media pundits is just part of another strategy to discredit the institution of higher education and "quash academic freedom."

“It is creating a chilling effect on people of color and queer students and our allies who want to come to places like UT-Austin. Why would you come to an institution that makes you hide parts of yourself or does not give full dignity to all parts of yourself?” The confusion and despair on campus is profound, said Karma Chavez, a UT Mexican American and Latina/o Studies professor and an executive committee member of the UT chapter of the AAUP. “I've been on university campuses for over 20 years, and I've never been on one where the morale is as low as it is right now at UT-Austin,” she said. Faculty members, she said, are “exhausted.” “A lot of professors are on the job market right now."

This plagiarism charge was never about integrity. “If the plagiarism accusations didn't stick, they would’ve dropped them and moved on to something else,” Irene Mulvey, President of the AAUP, told Salon. There's something illegitimate about these accusations, mainly because of the way they were entered into the “public sphere,” she added. The unfairness of what happened to Gay is visible for everyone to see, but faculty of color have always navigated extra challenges in academia.