2025 AAUP In the News

“The reason why the United States of America has the most advanced research infrastructure in the world is because of its relationship to the federal government, and if we want to stay the most important nation in the world … there is no way forward without the federal government being intimately involved in the support of, not control over, but support of our research infrastructure,” said Todd Wolfson, national president of the American Association of University Professors.

“The workers and the unions, faculty, students, staff are leading and developing the fight in how to respond to the Trump administration, and we’re sort of dragging the universities along with us, slowly,” said Todd Wolfson, the president of the AAUP, which has led faculty organising efforts on many campuses and filed four separate lawsuits against the administration over its attacks on universities.

Harvard’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, which filed a lawsuit earlier this month to block the Trump administration’s cuts, praised the university for taking legal action.

“It is high time for leading civil society institutions like Harvard to refuse and resist this federal government overreach and abuse,” said Kirsten Weld, a history professor at Harvard and president of the AAUP Harvard faculty chapter.

“College campuses have historically been the places where these kind of conversations, these kind of robust debates and dissent take place in the United States. It’s healthy for democracy. And they’re trying to destroy all of that in order to enact their vision and depraved agenda.”

“Institutions that stood up are remembered for standing up to that power & that coercion, they're remembered for their acts of bravery. Institutions that capitulated are remembered for their willingness to cave to autocratic demands.”

— Risa Lieberwitz, president of the Cornell chapter of the AAUP

"Researchers are receiving a stop work order for wanting to understand things like differences in infant mortality in ubran and rural communities. That's being labeled as DEI. The slash and burn approach to our research is unfair, unlawful, and fundamentally wrong." — AAUP president Todd Wolfson

"Look, this is going to be a long fight. We need everyone on board. This is why we’re developing a multi-pronged approach and building alliances with students, other unions and the public. This is the only way to stop the anti-worker and anti-union policies that are being promoted by Trump and his administration." - AAUP Vice-President Rotua Lumbantobing.

“Billions of dollars in research has been frozen, and that’s research on things that every American depends on,” AAUP President Todd Wolfson said. “Our members  having to lay people off, having to close their labs, having to ask for special circumstances to be able to keep rare supplies, like animals, alive. It’s been a complete, utter, destruction of the United States research infrastructure.”

Labor for Higher Ed, a coalition of unions and advocacy groups, sponsored events that mobilized 10,000 demonstrators across 18 different U.S. cities. The message, AAUP president Todd Wolfson said, was clear: “Impacts [of cuts] for everyday Americans will be deadly. We will lose funding for crucial medical research that can save people’s lives. Treatments for diseases like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s and so much more are being gutted so that billionaires can get more tax breaks. They are intent on making America sicker so they can pad their pockets.”

Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors, described the letter as “a deep political intrusion into the operations of higher education institutions” that “must be responded to with absolute conviction and force.” 

“I would stand with every inch of my soul against every one of these intrusions and bring all my members with me and put our bodies on the line to stop it,” he said.

“That is textbook viewpoint-based discrimination,” the judge wrote of the Trump administration's order, which the AAUP and partners sued to stop. “The government’s threat of enforcement is not just targeted towards enforcement of federal law. Rather, the provision expressly targets, and threatens, the expression of views supportive of equity, diversity and inclusion.”

“The version of university life depicted in the letter is a gross distortion intended to undermine the public’s faith and confidence in colleges and universities,” AAUP President Todd Wolfson said. “In fact, education is not toxic indoctrination that smuggles illicit topics into the classroom. It is a process of inviting students to reflect on what we think we know.”

Even though there is no clarity on the new policies yet, some projects already have been put on hold amid uncertainty over the future of research touching on issues related to diversity, said Todd Wolfson, president of the AAUP.

Some of the studies already being halted include research on artificial intelligence and how racism can be coded into systems, he said. Other projects Wolfson has heard about getting stopped include research on health equity and studies on the urban literacy rate as it relates to class in places with large concentrations of Black people.

For all its many flaws, the U.S. system of higher education has become well-known across the world for its reputation of research and teaching without government interference. The cornerstone of such a system is “academic freedom.”  And this is what SB 1 would destroy.

“We need our colleges and universities to stand up and fight for their long-held commitments and not fold like deck chairs,” AAUP president, Todd Wolfson, said. If colleges don’t do that now, they “may not be around in four years.”

 “The elimination of DEI programs and initiatives at public academic institutions are a threat to the democratic purposes of higher education as a public good. The AAUP is proud to stand up and defend our campuses and communities from this vague and destructive executive order.”

A coalition of professors, diversity officers and restaurant worker advocates filed a federal lawsuit Monday in a bid to block President Donald Trump’s executive orders that target diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in the U.S. government, the private sector and academia, alleging that he exceeded his authority in issuing them.

Sanders’ proposal to fire professors over “indoctrination” drew criticism from civil liberties and faculty groups. Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors, called it a “grossly hypocritical false narrative.”

“Sanders is doing a disservice to Arkansas students by suggesting she will deny due process for faculty with ideas she disagrees with,” Wolfson said. “Maligning a system that is an engine of innovation and bedrock of our democracy hurts Arkansas students.”

The American Association of University Professors gets it. In a recent statement, the AAUP explained why DEI statements need not conflict with, and often fortify, academic freedom. Albeit less of a focus, the AAUP also surfaced why anti-DEI laws—including DEI statement bans—exact a double toll on academic freedom.

With power dangerously centralized, the defense of our institutions now hinges on the moral strength of a few wealthy individuals.

That’s a thin shield. Restoring a balance of power on American campuses would be more effective. As our Founders understood, power diffused in a system of checks and balances helps guarantee democracy. Centralized power, on the other hand, is always susceptible to abuse.

"They think there are too many teachers," said CSU-AAUP president Louise Williams. "We know, if you are a teacher in the system, that we are already overworked and stressed out. You need more teachers, not less teachers in order to really serve our students well."

"This is not a moment to shrink or back off. It’s a moment to grow and build power," said Todd Wolfson, AAUP president. "We in the AAUP are ready to fight for what we need — fully funded higher education, an end to student debt, and respect for every worker on every campus. This is just one moment in a long struggle. The AAUP is here to remind people that higher ed is the bedrock of democracy."

“Regardless of their intent, the UNT administration conducted a campaign of censorship of content in more than 200 courses,” said Brian Evans, president of the Texas Conference of the American Association of University Professors. “It’s censoring what topics students can discuss and think critically about. In order for students to have the freedom to learn, faculty need to have the freedom to teach.”

“The unilateral and secretive decision-making that produced these policies is indicative of Penn’s unaccountable system of governance,” the Penn chapter of the AAUP said. “It underscores the need for faculty, staff, and students to work together to create legitimate, transparent, and democratic forms of decision-making. Those of us now subject to these rules had no part in creating them.”

“I decided to run for president of AAUP because I felt like we need to be able to respond to this,” Wolfson said. “We need to be able to fight back. There may have been a time when it was OK for us to pretend like we were in the ivory tower and the outside world didn’t matter. This is not that time; 2024 is not that time.”

“We have to, as faculty, organize and demand the sort of shared governance that gives us a right to review and challenge these policies,” said Todd Wolfson, a journalism and media studies professor at Rutgers University and the president of the American Association of University Professors. “They’re not made by people coming out of the academic arm of our institutions.”

“The most powerful response to the university administration’s actions is the collective power of organizations opposing the university’s actions,” she said. “When we act collectively to push back, then the university is in a position to have to respond to us. That kind of collective solidarity is essential to assert academic freedom, freedom of expression, rights of job security, [and] respect for governance.” - Risa Lieberwitz, professor of labor and employment law at Cornell and president of Cornell's AAUP chapter.

“Workers were asked to dream big for PSU this year,” PSU AAUP president Emily Ford said. “I don’t understand how workers, how the faculty can dream big when they might not have a job in June.”

“This is the first case that we’ve seen,” said Anita Levy, senior program officer at the AAUP, an organization that advocates for faculty rights and academic freedom and seeks to hold higher education institutions accountable when standards are violated. “The apparent violations of her academic freedom are quite egregious, especially because they appear to primarily involve her posts on social media, what we would call her extramural speech.”

“We are taking this case seriously.”

Florida professors are still eyeing jobs in other states, and those who remain say it’s getting harder to fill vacant positions at their universities, according to a recent survey of faculty in Southern states administered by several state conferences of the AAUP.

A 2023 AAUP report found that 68% of all college and university faculty were on contingent appointments in 2021, compared to 47% in 1987. Among faculty with full-time appointments, 24% held tenure in 2021, a substantial decrease from 1987 when 39% were tenured. As the conversion from tenure-track faculty to contingent instructors continues, the rate of faculty unionization can be expected to increase as well.

“We are seeing multiple schools adopting new restrictions on speech without respecting governance procedures. They will discourage protests, have a chilling effect on freedom of speech and threaten harsh sanctions without due process.”

As Nelson Mandela told the African National Congress: “In some cases … it might be correct to boycott, and in others it might be unwise and dangerous. In still other cases another weapon of political struggle might be preferred. A demonstration, a protest march, a strike, or civil disobedience might be resorted to, all depending on the actual conditions at the given time.”

Both the 2006 report and the 2024 statement cite that quotation approvingly. Cary Nelson nonetheless thinks otherwise. Between the two Nelsons, the AAUP sides with Mandela.

It is Nelson, not the AAUP, who has politicized the question of academic freedom by objecting to its extension to faculty and students who, for principled reasons, might support academic boycotts in the name of those systematically denied it. Careful, thoughtful AAUP policy is still “the gold standard for academic freedom.” The alternative Cary Nelson offers — a selective principle, an exclusionary practice, driven by a hardline Zionism — is a corruption of that enduring standard.

“By suppressing academic freedom and the free speech rights of students and faculty and inviting punitive discipline and a brutal police crackdown on student protests at Columbia, Shafik failed to protect basic tenets of higher education and capitulated to a new McCarthyist witch hunt against the Academy,” AAUP President Todd Wolfson said Thursday. “This is her legacy.”

The AAUP issued a statement  condemning “overly restrictive policies” that could discourage free expression. “Our colleges and universities should encourage, not suppress, open and vigorous dialogue and debate even on the most deeply held beliefs,” said the statement, adding that many policies were imposed without faculty input.

“I think right now we are seeing a resurgence of repression on campuses that we haven’t seen since the late 1960s,” said Risa Lieberwitz, a Cornell University professor of labor and employment law who serves as general counsel for the AAUP.

“This is extremely alarming for academic freedom,” said Anita Levy, a senior program officer in the AAUPs’ Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure and Governance. Faculty members who lack tenure “teach in precarious positions,” she said, and don’t “have economic security and may feel that they need to either self-censor or revise their curricula or their teaching methods.”

Todd Wolfson, president of the AAUP, called for greater transparency, including student, faculty and staff involvement.

“This should be an open, transparent process,” he said. “We don’t think Florida has done a good job with transparency. … No one knows if Ron DeSantis put some candidates on a dartboard and threw a dart.”

“We need [the new UF president] not to be a political hack who knows nothing about higher education,” he said. “If you don’t understand it, you don’t value it.”

For an industry that employs four million Americans and attempts to educate 15 million more, higher education is, strangely, routinely ignored in presidential elections. But there’s hope for 2024, though not for the best of reasons. IHE asked a range of higher ed leaders, thinkers, reformers and skeptics what they’d ask Biden, Trump or both candidates if CNN magically handed them the microphone.

Here are some of their sharpest questions: 

An attorney defending Florida's STOP WOKE Act argued that a state can “insist that professors not offer—or espouse, I should say, and endorse—viewpoints that are contrary to the state’s.”

But AAUP Risa Lieberwitz, general counsel for the AAUP, says: “the state of Florida is making an extreme argument about the First Amendment that would eliminate academic freedom completely in the classroom, and that is an argument without merit under the First Amendment.”

"What this sends is a very strong message that OU is going to do minimal and certainly doesn’t seem to have anybody’s back," Michael Givel, an OU professor and member of the OU chapter of the American Association of University Professors, said. 

"DEI, the words need to be reinstated. We’re engaging in cancel culture here. We need to reinstate all the programs that have been canceled."

“The message is that these politicians are entitled to have authority over what happens on a college campus,” said Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors. “And that’s just unacceptable in a free society. It’s really … political repression.”

Mulvey condemned antisemitism but said it is being weaponized by bad actors to delegitimize higher education as a pillar of democracy.

"Our goal on college campuses is free and open inquiry and debate. What we’ve seen is immediate silencing of speech, without any genuine attempt to talk to the students and understand the concerns that led to the protests, to think about and hear their demands. I’ve spent my entire career on college campuses, and this silencing of speech feels like a crisis of repression," said Irene Mulvey, AAUP president.

Despite the uphill battles to reach agreements on campuses, open dialogue with student protesters is what the American Association of University Professors has promoted as the best route forward in this heated moment, said Irene Mulvey, president of AAUP.

It’s one thing to see university presidents fail to defend academic freedom” in front of Congress, and it’s “quite harrowing to see that cowardice followed up by the sanctioning of police violence on campus," said Isaac Kamola, Director of the AAUP'd Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom.

Today, university leaders are twisting themselves in knots to appease angry donors and legislators. But when Columbia University President Minouche Shafik called in the NYPD to quell protests, she was met with a firm rebuke from the American Association of University Professors.

“Wednesday, before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, President Shafik threw academic freedom and Columbia University faculty under the bus instead of providing what higher education and democracy require: a robust defense of academic freedom and its essential protection of extramural speech,” AAUP President Dr. Irene Mulvey said.

At the hearing, Dr. Shafik divulged that two of the professors — Dr. Massad and Ms. Franke — were under investigation for making “discriminatory remarks,” and said that Dr. Abdou “will never work at Columbia again.” Such responses drew a sharp rebuke from some professors and the American Association of University Professors, which said she capitulated to political grandstanding and, in the process, violated established tenets of academic freedom.

“We are witnessing a new strain of McCarthyism in the U.S. where instead of going after Hollywood, it is professors and higher education that are under attack,” said AAUP president Irene Mulvey. “Like the original McCarthyism, people’s lives are being upended, their careers are being ruined, and they are losing their livelihoods based on narratives being pushed to further a political agenda that have no basis in reality.”

Dr. Brian Evans, the interim president of the Texas Conference of the AAUP, said he’s heard from at least 66 UT faculty members who said they received a notice of termination. He thinks that number could grow. "They lost staff who provided the academic advising, the scholarships, connections with internships, counseling, health services, food pantries, and ways to connect with other students," said Evans.

“If it’s being done through an anonymous complaint process, then that indicates to me that it’s a political hit job,” said Isaac Kamola, director of the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom at the American Association of University Professors.  “It’s a mockery of academic peer review.” An allegation of plagiarism “needs to be evaluated outside of a right-wing ecosystem that is committed to destroying the careers of Black scholars,” he said.

Alice Pawley, a professor of engineering education at Purdue University and president of the univeritity's AAUP chapter, said that many faculty members in Indiana were angered by the new restrictions, and that “nobody trusts that this is actually going to be fairly applied.” Many felt discouraged about their job security, believing it would be at the mercy of trustees who are not experts in their fields and would be making decisions on the basis of highly subjective criteria.

The bill “seems to be deeply problematic; it assigns to the Board of Regents powers that it really should have delegated to faculty,” said Mark Criley, a senior program officer for the American Association of University Professors’ Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance. A faculty member’s right to assign the grades he or she believes a student deserves is considered a pillar of academic freedom.

"It is a blank check to fire any faculty member for any reason, at any time, regardless of tenure. I think people find that hard to believe, because it is so shocking and so radical and so un-American, but that is what the text says.”

Since 1915 and urgently since Oct. 7, the A.A.U.P. has advocated a robust concept of academic freedom. We have urged administrators to provide an environment in which no voices are silenced, no ideas are suppressed, and the most deeply held beliefs are subject to challenge.

Jonathan Rees, president of CSU Pueblo's AAUP chapter, said his hope is that the survey convinces the administration to move faculty economic concerns way up the priority list. "If we explain how bad the problem is, then maybe we won't be the last thing they worry about when they are putting together next year's budget."

“These measures would severely constrain academic freedom,” says a joint statement by the Purdue at West Lafayette and Indiana University at Bloomington chapters of the AAUP. “The security imparted by tenure is the fundamental protection of academic freedom; its loss would make university positions in Indiana undesirable. Recruiting and retaining top faculty, who will always have alternatives, will no longer be possible.”

This strike at sociology is very on-brand for the Florida GOP. We know about DeSantis’ ongoing crusade to commandeer all leadership positions at New College of Florida. Elsewhere, a proverbial Florida Man (with the checkered past and absence of relevant credentials that such an identity entails) has been installed as the leader of South Florida State College. The American Association of University Professors chronicled this and other outrageous Sunshine State power grabs in a report so full of absurd details that it reads like a campus novel.

There is no more important place for colleges to spend their money than hiring the best instructors they can find and providing fair pay, benefits and reasonable working conditions.

“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."

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.

“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.

They are abusing their political and administrative positions by seeking to limit the ideas to which Floridians will be exposed, and by doing so, controlling not just people’s actions in the present but also their thinking in the future.

"The State University System of Florida, which has more than 430,000 students, is under intense political assault by the state’s Republican government. The AAUP recently released a report titled “Political Interference and Academic Freedom in Florida’s Public Higher Education System,” which details a takeover of key administrative and oversight positions by partisan appointees and growing pressure on faculty members to avoid teaching anything that might be considered woke.

“We believe the best path to uncover truth is through open inquiry and robust debate,” Dr. Gay wrote. “Harvard understands that hatred is a symptom of ignorance. The cure for ignorance is knowledge. But the pursuit of truth is possible only when freedom of expression is protected and exercised. At Harvard, we will not allow discomfort or disagreement with opinions fairly expressed to impede this pursuit.”

Risa Lieberwitz, professor of labor and employment law at Cornell University and general counsel for the AAUP said Magill’s resignation is an example of the effect of undue influence by both donors and politicians who are seeking to have control over what happens on campus and in classrooms.

That, she said, can have a “chilling effect that can occur on general discussions within universities about issues that are controversial or maybe difficult to discuss. And that’s part of academic freedom to be able to have those discussions.

The report lays out in disturbing detail the extent of the damage done to a once-great system by Gov. Ron DeSantis, the Legislature and their allies in the higher education bureaucracy, which has been politicized to unprecedented levels, with disastrous results. As much as anything, this will be the destructive legacy DeSantis leaves behind when he leaves office in a few years.

Conscientious conservatives have taken note of how dangerous DeSantis’s crackdown on academic free speech is. The AAUP’s preliminary report features this observation from one dissenter: “I’m the faculty advisor for the Federalist Society, for the Law School Republicans, and for the Christian Legal Society. If they find me threatening, the rest of you are dead in the water. Be wary and be aware. If I don’t have academic freedom, neither do you. If you don’t, neither do I. We are in this together.”

Penn’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors released an Oct. 28  letter citing concerns about trustee influence and harassment, asserting that “our university leadership has intensified fear and animosity by associating antisemitism and terrorism with an overly broad range of academic programming and political speech.”

Polly Strong, president of the UT chapter of the AAUP, told Rufo that she believed in intellectual diversity but that a commitment to the concept wasn’t what she heard from him. She said her personal hero is John Dewey, the pragmatist philosopher who advocated for academic freedom, due process, and neutrality in higher learning and asked if Rufo supported those values.

Speech against Israel and its actions does not constitute hate speech or antisemitism. Calls to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel, as well as structural analyses of Israel through the lens of apartheid or settler colonialism, lie in the realm of free speech and academic inquiry regardless of whether or not they are popular, and must not be the subjects of bans in an open society. - Op Ed by the Executive Committee of the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities AAUP Chapter.

Southern Miss is one of the nation's top research facilities, yet its faculty are paid well below the average of similarly rated institutions. The AAUP at the University of Southern Mississippi along with the United Campus Workers, and USM Faculty Senate, held a rally today to draw attention to the dire need for universitywide pay increases.

The Syracuse University Chapter of the AAUP released a statement objecting to recent statements by Provost Ritter that appear to attempt to curtail free and open inquiry including expression of controversial ideas that some may consider wrong or offensive.

In a letter to UT Tyler president Kirk Calhoun, the AAUP stated that the "administration’s action to dismiss Professor Koster without having first demonstrated adequacy of cause in a faculty hearing is fundamentally at odds with basic standards of academic due process."

“As the Israel-Hamas war rages and campus protests proliferate, institutional authorities must refrain from sanctioning faculty members for expressing politically controversial views and should instead defend their right, under principles of academic freedom, to do so.”

“The administration needs to defend and protect academic freedom all the time,” said Irene Mulvey, president of the AAUP. “When an individual is attacked, the administration’s job is to step up with a robust defense of academic freedom,” Mulvey said. “Their job is to be the firewall against interference from the statehouse, wealthy donors, whomever.”

“While there has been a consistent message from the administration that we are not in a good place financially … the administrators have consistently received raises,” said Dani Hunt, the vice president of the G allaudet University AAUP chapter and a tenured associate professor in the department of interpretation and translation.

“What we want to see is a focus on academics, not administration."

“The people who run academic institutions are often embedded in corporate, neoliberal logic,” Wolfson concluded. “This is how they operate. It’s more akin to a business model than one focused on faculty or students.” This, of course, is why the AAUP-AFT is fighting back.

“It’s a really exciting moment for us. We’re sending a clear message that the faculty at ISU want a strong voice to advocate for the needs of our students, this institution, and our colleagues who are dedicated to them both.”

As the survey stated: Academic freedom was identified by over 50% of respondents, while issues related to tenure and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) were mentioned by more than 40%. Shared governance, LGBTQ+ issues, and reproduction/abortion access were also significant factors for about 30% of respondents.

The American Association of University Professors sent a letter to Gee and Willis Miller Thursday—an initial step in a process that could lead to an AAUP investigation and the placement of WVU on AAUP’s list of censured institutions. That list warns scholars and the public that “unsatisfactory conditions of academic freedom and tenure have been found to prevail.”

The survey was sponsored by the state conferences of the AAUP in Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas, along with the United Faculty of Florida and the Texas Faculty Association unions. The results, those organizations say, are proof of widespread dissatisfaction with political incursions into diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and tenure, among other areas.

Irene Mulvey, president of the AAUP, says that, “Accreditation has become a target in red states and by right-wing politicians because they’ve learned that robust and well-regarded accreditation presents a barrier to their attempts to inject partisan politics into higher education. They are dragging accreditors into this to dismantle that barrier. It’s an egregious violation of academic freedom.”

“I hope that they would show us that they value us,” Finnegan says. “I mean, that’s the whole sort of feeling. As I said, we’re just an expense to be reduced. We’re not a value.”

“In a democracy, the roll of higher education is to be a public good,” said Irene Mulvey, AAUP president. "These laws are undermining that role and replacing the expertise of scholars and experts with what the government wants you to learn. It's a really dangerous authoritarian impulse to take over higher education."

Democracies lose their legitimacy as democracies when politicians interfere directly with the running of colleges and universities. Until very recently, the idea that the state is not supposed to be in the business of telling us what to think — or what not to think — was sacrosanct among the freedom-loving cold warriors of the Republican Party for whom countries like China and Russia were cautionary tales. But these “normie conservatives,” as the activist writer Rod Dreher calls them, are no longer in charge of their party.

“The rest of the higher education sector knows that the AAUP stands for important principles and that they investigate carefully, that they make every effort to resolve issues short of (a) sanction,” said Dr. Carol Harrison, president of the AAUP’s South Carolina branch. “When the AAUP sanctions an institution, it is because there are things seriously amiss in the governance of that institution.”

No field is immune,” Irene Mulvey, president of the AAUP, said Wednesday at the Tampa Convention Center, where the Mathematical Association of America hosted a gathering called MathFest.

“The demonization of higher ed is really unfortunate and higher ed has been dragged into the culture wars, whether we like it or not.”

Karma Chávez, chair of the Department of Mexican American & Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, said she is disturbed but not surprised by the power of outside groups to influence universities.

“What we see over and over again is that institutions of higher education are absolutely willing to fold when there is conservative pressure,” said Chávez, a member of the executive committee of UT-Austin’s chapter of the AAUP.

“It’s not safe here anymore on so many levels,” Ali-Khan said. “It’s not physically safe. It’s not economically safe. It’s not professionally safe. It’s not intellectually safe. That was not true when I got here.

Ultimately, these bills threaten democracy, said Irene Mulvey, president of the AAUP, the organization that has long promoted the benefits of faculty tenure and intellectual freedom. By the AAUP’s count, there have been more than 50 such bills in 23 states.

“The bills have produced a chilling effect on academic freedom,” Mulvey said.

“The average rates that are shown on the survey are absolute poverty wages,” she said. “For many parts of the country, you’d have to teach 20 classes in order to make a living." - Dr. Rebecca Givan, associate professor in the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University, pressident of Rutgers AAUP/AFT.

“Sowing confusion and fear among faculty members about what they can and cannot teach may be the underlying and main goal of the curricular legislation as a package," says the AAUP's recently released preliminary report on academic freedom in Florida.

“It’s a red-alert emergency” for anyone who cares about academic freedom, higher education and democracy, said Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors, which has been tracking more than 50 bills in 23 states. The commonality running through the bills, Mulvey said, is “an anti-intellectual attack, demonizing faculty, weaponizing public education.”

The AAUP, which fought hard against bills in multiple states, said tenure helps shield faculty and any unpopular research they conduct from political influence. The AAUP also contended that colleges in states with watered-down tenure could face recruitment challenges, as prospective faculty would prefer to find a job at an institution where traditional tenure was an option.

In some cases, policymakers heeded these warnings, and in others just couldn’t muster the political capital to see their bills through, as many closely-watched proposals failed during state sessions.

"Our administration’s silence feels like a punch in the gut to those of us who are organizing against this anti-DEI, anti-truth legislation."

“Collin might like to pretend that the AAUP is just a little private interest club, but its principles and its good judgment about college governance has become foundational for a lot of parts of the higher education ecosystem,” Burnett said. “So, it's not only a mark against Collin College’s reputation; it can have very real consequences.”

“We're in this really strange moment where — especially for bargaining in higher ed — it seems almost a requirement that you go on strike or at least take a strike authorization vote to win any sort of cost of living pay increases.”

“It’s basically state-mandated censorship, which has no place in a democracy,” Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors, said. Mulvey called the bill in Florida and other legislation like it a “dog whistle appeal” to the conservative base, and part of a “coordinated campaign to maintain white supremacy.”

“This vote is the culmination of months of intense efforts by so many people who walked the picket lines and organized with their colleagues,” Dr. Rebecca Givan, president of Rutgers AAUP-AFT, said in a statement. “Because of this commitment by our members, we made major gains in these contracts, especially for the most vulnerable and lowest-paid of the people we represent. We didn’t win everything we wanted. But what we did achieve is a testament to all of us, and we’re proud of it.”

Tenure gives professors the freedom to speak, teach and conduct research about a wide variety of issues, including those that are potentially controversial, without having their jobs at risk, says Anita Levy, acting director of the AAUP's department of academic freedom, tenure and governance. For many, it's also a badge of authority or honor, distinguishing them in their field.

"Academic freedom and tenure are connected... Academic freedom requires tenure to exist," Levy said.

AAUP president Irene Mulvey castigated trustees’ interference in academic matters. Their efforts are “an egregious violation of widely-accepted standards of collegiate shared governance,” Mulvey said. “American higher education is organized around the principle that decisions about teaching and research must be made by academics with scholarly expertise in the appropriate field.”

The AAUP investigating committee found that the Collin administration’s actions involved “egregious violations” of all three faculty members’ academic freedom to speak as citizens and to criticize institutional policies. The report concludes that the conditions for shared governance and academic freedom at Collin College are “grossly inadequate.

The public defunding of universities, along with their seizure by corporations and the über-rich, is part of the slow-motion corporate coup d'état.

The AAUP, which has about 45,000 members nationwide, said the bills mischaracterize DEI initiatives.

"They’re dog whistling that DEI initiatives are something sinister and subversive that people should be afraid of, and that’s not true at all,” association President Irene Mulvey said.

“This framework sets a new standard. Our members have struck to transform higher education in the State of New Jersey and across this country,” Becky Givan, president of the union Rutgers AAUP-AFT, said in a statement through Murphy’s office.

“For many of us who are older, the U.S. is almost unrecognizable with how expensive the core needs of housing, education, and transportation are,” said Donna Murch, president of New Brunswick chapter of Rutgers AAUP-AFT.. “Part of the way that I see this is a response to incredible social inequality. How do we push back to make work and wages and benefits more equitable for all.”

The legislation “will have a devastating effect on recruitment of top-tier faculty, postdocs, graduate students and even undergraduates,” said AAUP president Irene Mulvey. “Top-tier faculty won’t come here.”

“The fields that are being threatened are fields that challenge the status quo, and these are well-established, respected disciplines,” said Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors. “They enrich academia. They enrich our civilization, but they’re being dragged into the culture wars now. These bills are an attempt by people in power to maintain the status quo at the expense of a free and open democratic society.”

"As bad as precarity is for adjuncts, it’s also terrible for students. So we anticipate, to the degree that we can win these demands, that we can change the relationship between adjuncts and the university, and therefore also change the relationship of a lot of students with their university."

Without tenure, and with restrictions on what content is or is not allowed to be taught and discussed on our campuses, the best and the brightest faculty — the research groundbreakers — will go to other states. Is that what we want for research in our state, and for Texas’s students?

Ohio Senate Bill 83, just introduced in the Ohio Senate, brings Florida to Ohio in terms of the vicious attacks on higher ed: bans on public university strikes, elimination of academic freedom, and restrictions on/prohibitions of ethnic studies, gender studies curricula.

“When you see elected leaders demonizing educators and weaponizing education, it’s a five-alarm fire for democracy,” says Irene Mulvey, president of the AAUP in Washington DC. “It important to understand that when governors attack DEI efforts, they completely mischaracterize them to create a straw-man demon that they now have to do away with."

“When you see elected leaders demonizing educators and weaponizing education, it’s a five-alarm fire for democracy,” says Irene Mulvey, president of the AAUP in Washington DC. “It important to understand that when governors attack DEI efforts, they completely mischaracterize them to create a straw-man demon that they now have to do away with."

Over the last decade at Rutgers, intensive rank-and-file organizing translated into significant gains for our non-tenure-track faculty, who are part of the Rutgers AAUP-AFT along with tenured and tenured-track faculty. They won a decent base salary, a promotion process with corresponding salary increases, long-term contracts of up to seven years, and a robust grievance process. Now we are fighting for tenure to become accessible to non-tenure-track teaching faculty.

Irene Mulvey, president of the AAUP, warned that the legislation — especially the bill that would prevent students from majoring in certain topics — threatens to undermine academic freedom.

“The state telling you what you can and cannot learn, that is inconsistent with democracy,” Mulvey said. “It silences debate, stifles ideas and limits the autonomy of educational institutions which made American higher education the envy of the world.”

"This is a gut punch to anyone who values academic freedom and higher education's role in our democracy," said Irene Mulvey, president of the AAUP.

Faculty on temporary contracts are effectively muzzled. They fear losing their jobs if they speak up. When the people doing the teaching can’t speak up, students lose out. Maryland legislators should allow faculty and graduate assistants the right to choose collective bargaining.

Although the Montclair and Bloomfield administrations have expressed an aspiration to hire as many Bloomfield faculty members as possible, no clear information or offers have been extended, and the faculty isn’t due to be notified until March 1, which is four months before the closing of Bloomfield and the loss of our current jobs.

It's a pretty devastating announcement for a lot of people. The response to that in terms of how our community has kind of resisted that has been fantastic. And it means so much to all of us to feel that we have this community here because that’s what we really ultimately want to preserve. We really value the importance of this institution and our different respective roles in it. And to be able to work together to try to ensure that future is something that is really valuable to us.”- Douglas Edwards, Vice-President, AAUP-Utica

Irene Mulvey, president of the AAUP, said she believes DeSantis is targeting diversity programs for political advantage, which she called “extremely dangerous.”

This could result in Florida colleges struggling to retain students and recruit faculty, Mulvey said. People pursuing graduate degrees might opt for schools in other states that support academic freedom, she said.

“The consequences for students are enormous,” Mulvey said. “They are denied the opportunity to learn and grow, students are denied the opportunity to hear important perspectives. That’s the real tragedy.”

The gravest threat to academic freedom comes from a legal argument Florida has advanced in defense of the Stop WOKE Act. The legislation is part of a wave of “educational gag orders” banning the teaching of “divisive concepts.” Violations can trigger disciplinary action against faculty and enormous fines for their universities. In a brief filed in federal court, Florida’s lawyers contend that faculty at public universities are government employees, in-classroom speech is “government speech” and the state “has simply chosen to regulate its own speech” with the Stop WOKE Act.

Irene Mulvey, president of the AAUP, said the statement fails to "defend academic freedom or challenge the false narrative put forth by DeSantis and others that discussing important topics in the classroom is somehow akin to indoctrination."

By the year 2050, tenure will be either the purview of a few scholars at elite schools, or it won’t exist at all. Academic freedom will be as good as gone.

"We felt a duty to unite and do something to try to save the institution. That's why we then voted for a formal censure of the Board of Trustees.," said Leonore Fleming, a philosophy professor at Utica University and the president of the Utica University Chapter of the American Association of University Professors.

In a statement Friday, the American Association of University Professors condemned Florida’s college presidents for committing this week to root out course content promoting “critical race theory or related concepts” by Feb. 1.

“The hypocrisy is glaring, as has been the case so often recently in Florida,” the statement said. “But the danger is very real. Censorship of ideas has absolutely no place in a democracy.”

“The campus is thriving, but many faculty are not,” Nicole Nguyen, a member of the union’s bargaining team and associate professor of criminology, law and justice said. “We have spent the past three years scrambling to mitigate the effects of the pandemic, and our whole community — students and faculty — are exhausted. Management needs to invest in resources that strengthen our entire community.”

“Tenure is what protects academic freedom for faculty in higher education – it’s necessary so faculty can promote the free and vigorous open exchange of ideas … without fear of being fired,” said Irene Mulvey, president of the AAUP. “Trying to take away tenure from faculty is an age-old strategy from the totalitarian playbook to attack education to stop students from learning ideas the state disagrees with.”

Traditionally, tenured professors can be terminated only under extreme circumstances, such as professional misconduct or a financial emergency. Advocates for tenure say it is a crucial component of academic freedom — especially as controversy grows over scholarly discussions about history and identity.

Without tenure, faculty are “liable to play it safe when it comes time to have a classroom discussion about a difficult topic,” said Irene Mulvey, president of the AAUP.

Community colleges across the country are struggling to recruit and hire new people after losing faculty and staff members in droves during the pandemic. The number of community college faculty members dropped 8.6 percent, from fall 2019 to to fall 2020, according to a report from the American Association of University Professors. Faculty members in career and technical education fields have been particularly difficult to retain as private sector employers offer higher pay to fill their own workforce gaps.

As fewer faculty members are protected by tenure, they’re finding it harder to resist laws that ban certain racial topics. Their students suffer the consequences.

“I’m completely unprotected…Somebody sees the course catalog, complains to a legislator — next thing I know, I’m out of a job.” “This is what I teach. This is what I study. There’s tremendous value in students learning about these things.”

Teaching faculty who don’t have tenure are at the breaking point at Colorado’s public universities. They say their base pay and the huge pay gaps between faculty with similar credentials, between departments, and between women and men aren’t right or sustainable. Surveys show rampant feelings of financial insecurity and resentment on the part of some faculty members who feel mistreated.

United Academics of the University of Kansas pointed out several issues that it said prompted the organizing campaign: KU’s recent attempt to suspend tenure and its over-reliance on short-term contracts for many teaching faculty, no voice in major decisions about academic programs, stagnant wages that are not competitive with other flagship universities, and a decline in state funding that hinders the kind of world-class research that benefits all Kansans.

In order to stem the mass exodus of professors leaving the field, universities must strike a balance between easing the burden on current faculty and hiring new talent. By maintaining virtual course offerings and expanding access to online learning resources, universities can help professors manage their current workload while they work to invest in new faculty and revise academic policies to be clearer and more applicable to advancing technology.

It’s time that institutions own up to what these jobs really are — a means of extracting cheap labor by ruthlessly exploiting the dreams of the most vulnerable academics.

Since Republicans gained control of both the state House of Representatives and the Senate more than a decade ago, leaders at the system and university levels have generally become more partisan and conservative-leaning, and are generally seen as exerting more political influence on the universities, according to an April report by the American Association of University Professors.

“It is difficult not to construe what has happened at Emporia State as a direct assault on tenure and academic freedom with grave implications for tenure and academic freedom not only at Emporia State but throughout the Kansas system of public higher education.”

Irene Mulvey, president of the AAUP, said in an interview that she’s never seen evidence to support the “draconian cloak of secrecy” the new law created. “A nontransparent process is an illegitimate process in our view,” she said. “Faculty have to be meaningfully involved in every step of the process and that does not appear to have happened here. It makes it extremely difficult for the person to lead the community.”

In the United States, tenure has long served as a safeguard for academic freedom. Tenure prevents professors from being fired for discussing controversial ideas. And it's the tenure system that insulates faculty from undue influence by university donors, administrators, and politicians.

That's exactly why tenure has become a frequent target of right-wing lawmakers and pundits.

Now is not the time to let up on any aspect of building power in the academic labor movement. Now is the time to demand genuine academic freedom for all who teach and research in higher ed.

A recent survey of professors at Georgia colleges and universities showed an overwhelming number want a reinstatement of tenure protections. According to the survey, 93.5% of the 972 faculty who responded agreed that the USG Board of Regents needed to re-instate the ability of tenured faculty to receive a hearing from their peers prior to a dismissal.

"If they will just do that simple thing of moving the post tenure policy back under the for-cause policy, we would be happy," said Georgia AAUP President Matthew Boedy.

The deal between Eastern Michigan University and its faculty union was made official Monday in a special Board of Regents meeting. The regents approved a new contract for the Ypsilanti-based university’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors. This move comes about a month after the union went on strike after the previous contract expired Aug. 31. The four-year agreement, which applies to EMU’s 506 full-time faculty, starts with faculty members seeing a first-year raise of 4% or $4,000, whichever is greater

The Eastern Michigan University chapter of the American Association of University Professors said Friday that 96% of its members voted in favor of the deal which would include pay raises and more favorable health care coverage.

“What’s happening at Emporia State University in Kansas is incredibly important,” said Irene Mulvey, AAUP president. “By getting rid of tenure, they’ve gutted academic freedom. This is part of a larger attack on education, which is part of the attack on democracy we are witnessing in this country.”

If Oakland is going to become “a university of choice” it must identify problems facing the faculty and attempt to resolve them.  And yet, the university has failed to even ask faculty why they leave.

The AAUP wants to understand why our faculty leave Oakland; that way we can improve the working environment for those who remain.

Last week UNC-Chapel Hill’s Faculty Council passed a resolution affirming the right of faculty members to speak freely and the university’s duty to protect their speech.

“[Faculty members] should be encouraged to provide thought leadership, to be public scholars when their work gives them meaningful insight,” said Mimi Chapman during the meeting. “This is what faculty at a great research university does. They weigh in. They share their knowledge and experience. We shouldn’t be intimidated into hiding our light under the proverbial bushel.”

Tenure serves the public interest because society benefits when teachers and researchers are free of control by corporations, religious groups, special interests, and the government. Free inquiry, free expression, and open dissent are critical for student learning and the advancement of knowledge,” the association says. “Therefore, it is important to have systems in place to protect academic freedom. Tenure serves that purpose.”

"We took a stand to maintain and strengthen quality education at EMU, and this agreement moves us forward," Kirkpatrick added. "This was a challenging set of negotiations. Our goal now is to work together, all across the campus, to deliver the best possible options and opportunities for EMU students."

"The lengthy negotiations concluded days after thr chapter hosted the largest meeting in its history," said David Dewberry, president of the Rider AAUP chapter. "Members were adament they get a fair contract and go on strike if necessary."

Members of EMU's chapter of the American Association of University Professors voted 91% in favor Tuesday of authorizing the strike by more than 500 tenured and tenure-track faculty.

The union claims the administration has threatened to remove their collective bargaining rights, if members don't agree to do more work for less pay and will formally petition the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to bar all full-time faculty from being represented by the AAUP.

The members of the EMU-AAUP voted to inform EMU administrators of possible strike action on Saturday. Negotiations have stalled and the faculty union reports that administrators refused to respond to bargaining proposals, even after meetings assisted by a mediator from the Michigan Employment Relations Commission.

“In many ways, it’s a matter of political capital,” said Georgia AAUP President Matthew Boedy. “It’s a question of whether state legislators recognize that we have leverage.”

A former chairman of the UNC Board of Governors has alleged that he was pressured by Republican Senate leader Phil Berger to remove a UNC System president.

“I’m really reconsidering whether or not I actually want to apply to jobs in the state of Florida,” Hartnett said. “I know that if I were to get a job, even a tenured job, that tenure is not necessarily secured.”

"It's not just the wallet that hurts," Colby explained. "Actually, working conditions have been a problem as well, and ultimately we worry about the morale of faculty who have, for the last couple of years, been in constant crisis mode putting out one fire after another."

In one example of how this may be contributing to faculty departures, Vickie Shields, provost at Nevada State College, recently told The Nevada Independent that while faculty searches at the ever-growing college used attract 40 to 50 applicants, now, depending the discipline, some attract “maybe one applicant.” Several faculty members reportedly attributed this trend to inflation, especially rising housing costs, outpacing faculty pay.

The 2022 report shows that 53.5 percent of higher education institutions have replaced tenure-eligible positions with contingent faculty appointments, compared with only 17.2 percent of colleges in 2004. In 2019, just 10.5 percent of faculty positions in the U.S. were tenure-track and 26.5 percent were tenured, according to the AAUP. Nearly 45 percent were contingent part-time, or adjunct, roles. One in five were full-time, non-tenure-track positions.

Taking 40-year-high inflation into account, real wages for full-time faculty members fell 5 percent. This is the largest one-year decrease on record since the AAUP began tracking this measure in 1972.

In a statement released Monday, three Purdue chapters of the American Association of University Professors criticized the selection process. West Lafayette chapter president Leigh Raymond said his first reaction to the announcement was complete surprise.

“The additional reaction is a sense of alarm about the lack of any public engagement with the faculty or campus community about how such an important leadership decision was made,” he said.

Raymond said the board and Daniels should have conducted an open presidential search that allowed an opportunity for faculty input.

"This is a significant moment for faculty at Miami and for collective bargaining in Ohio. The Miami University union drive builds on a national wave of higher education organizing in recent years."

If Miami would agree to certify a teachers union, the school, said FAM officials, "would join the 10 out of 14 other four-year Ohio public universities with collective bargaining agreements and would be the largest bargaining unit to file since Bowling Green State University in 2010."

Less faculty input in presidential-search processes can engender votes of no confidence in a president’s performance down the road, says Mark Criley, a senior program officer in the AAUP's Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance.

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.

“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.

Enabling legislators to identify violations “basically guarantees inappropriate interference in higher education, said Irene Mulvey, president of the AAUP.  HB7  is "a complete violation of academic freedom for instructors” that “basically legislates ignorance in higher education," she said.

"And who loses there are the students, who are really going to be denied the full, fair and honest education they deserve.”

"What we are seeing is an assault on the core attributes of higher education in America – autonomy and academic freedom – that make ours the best higher education system in the world. Politicians have far more important things to do than question the expertise and motives of tens of thousands of committed faculty and their institutions.

About 120 new faculty union chapters have won recognition since 2013, with more than 36,000 members, according to the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College.

“Collective bargaining is an essential right for all workers,” said Irene Mulvey, president of the AAUP during Monday morning’s roundtable discussion, describing current working conditions among adjunct faculty as “abysmal.” She cited low pay among adjunct professors in the Colorado Community College System, where statewide pay averages about $2,500 per lecture course.

“(Students) deserve a stable faculty with decent working conditions and a voice in institutional decision-making and are not scrambling to make ends meet,” she said.

“Collective bargaining is an essential right for all workers,” said Irene Mulvey, president of the AAUP during Monday morning’s roundtable discussion, describing current working conditions among adjunct faculty as “abysmal.” She cited low pay among adjunct professors in the Colorado Community College System, where statewide pay averages about $2,500 per lecture course.

“(Students) deserve a stable faculty with decent working conditions and a voice in institutional decision-making and are not scrambling to make ends meet,” she said.

“I don’t have to worry about someone looking over my shoulder,” said Smolen-Morton, president of South Carolina’s AAUP. “I don’t have to worry about being censured. I don’t have to worry about being gagged. I just need to be professional and do my research and keep the students conversing within the bounds of academic discourse.”

The American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers on Monday announced plans to expand their affiliation and become a stronger faculty voice in national, state and campus-based discussions about the future of higher education.

Ripple effects of Texas’ CRT crackdown may soon be felt outside academia, said Hank Reichman, the former vice president of the American Association of University Professors. If the quality of faculty in vital areas such as nursing and engineering programs starts to deteriorate, then it could ultimately affect the state’s economy, he said.

Democratic societies build in protections for university faculty so that we are not at the whims of whichever party is currently in power. When Patrick threatens tenure, he threatens those protections...

Losing it would mean the partisan political control of knowledge — which is precisely what partisans like Patrick are after.

The AAUP slammed Patrick's idea and referred to his speech Friday as being "littered with disingenuous political theater and blatant falsehoods." AAUP President Irene Mulvey said in a statement that the proposal represents a danger to higher ed by suggesting that government entities can censor "entire fields of knowledge in service to an ideology." Mulvey also said that the effects on Texas colleges' recruitment would be devastating.

Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick of Texas said Friday that he would see to the end of tenure at the state’s public colleges and universities. The AAUP fact-checked Patrick’s “disingenuous” speech and warned that changing the law to make teaching CRT a fireable offense is “an extremely dangerous authoritarian precedent.”

Jeffrey G. Blodgett, president of the Texas conference of the AAUP, condemned Patrick’s proposal in an email to The Chronicle. “Eliminating tenure most certainly would discourage prospective faculty from accepting a position at any public university in Texas. I cannot imagine that the chancellors and presidents” of the state’s public-university systems “would be in favor of eliminating tenure, as we would certainly lose out on top talent and our flagship universities would eventually drop out of the top rankings,”

“Professor Xi and his family deserve justice, as do all other victims of this discriminatory targeting,” said Risa Lieberwitz, general counsel for the AAUP. “The courts must hold the US government accountable for its unconstitutional racial profiling and persecution of scientists and researchers of Asian descent.”

“The search for a chancellor must be conducted in the open and must include meaningful faculty participation,” the American Association of University Professors wrote in an open letter to the regents Monday. “The USG system deserves and demands a chancellor who understands higher education, who has the confidence of the faculty who work in the system, and who will work to enhance the entire Georgia system to ensure Georgia students have the best educational experience.”

“This is yet another attempt to control the truth,” she wrote. “To enable them to make a decision on a new president without any of the requisite and valuable input from the faculty and staff that the new president will lead," said president of the AAUP. "UF is again in a position to stray away from the mission of higher education to serve the common good"

“Dell’Omo’s poor management has cost Rider University millions and millions of dollars. To remedy this, he plans on layoffs and buy-outs, but the only person who should receive a pink slip is Greg Dell’Omo. If Rider is to survive, Dell’Omo must go,” said AAUP President Barbara Franz.

“I think there are ways that we can work well together. There are ways that the union currently works well together with administration but I think we can do more. That’s what we’re trying to do. And to not have the other side be part of the conversation with us is frustrating.” -Amy Pollard, OU AAUP Director.

"As a faculty member at Miami for the last 16 years, I've seen the relationship between upper administration and faculty deteriorate,” Todd Edwards, a professor in the Department of Teacher Education, said. "Too many colleagues have had their lives upended by misguided policies that put the institution before its people. We need a union to ensure all faculty are treated fairly and with dignity.”

“When universities search for a new president, it’s one of the most important things that they do. Any kind of search needs to have faculty input throughout the entire process. This is a longstanding practice and widely accepted norm of higher education,” said Irene Mulvey, president of the AAUP.

“The apparent motivation is to avoid transparency, and to deny faculty and other members of the campus community opportunities to meet with the candidates applying to lead their institutions during these challenging times,” AAUP president Irene Mulvey wrote. “This is yet another attempt to control the truth, to enable them to make a decision on a new president without any of the requisite and valuable input from the faculty and staff that the new president will lead.”

The University of Minnesota Faculty Senate passed an academic freedom resolution that protects the ability of staff and faculty to teach about concepts such as critical race theory and gender in the classroom. The resolution endorses the “Joint Statement on Legislative Efforts to Restrict Education about Racism in American History” that was jointly authored by the AAUP, the American Historical Association, the Association of American Colleges & Universities, and PEN America. 

AAUP President Irene Mulvey was interviewed on the history, status of, and threats to academic freedom in the US. (Interview begins at 34.00).

AAUP Georgia Conference leader Matthew Boedy: "People — like me — see a troubling legislative trend happening: banning books, creating ahistorical curriculum and trampling tenure rights. What is the Board of Regents doing about these serious issues that affect the daily working of our campuses?"

“These actions constitute bad faith bargaining, violating the Faculty Agreement as well as both the National Labor Relations Act and the Michigan Public Employment Relations Act. In an ethical and transparent organization, this type of behavior would result in employee termination," wrote Karen Miller, OU AAUP President and Associate Professor of History.

“Any efforts to promote justice and equality in higher education and in society should be applauded,” said Irene Mulvey, president of the merican Association of University Professors. “Initiatives like this one at the University of Memphis which enable faculty to take a fresh look at their own subject and view it through a lens of social justice, are essential if higher education is to fulfill its promise as a public good.”

“It’s a black eye for us and a hit on our reputation,” said University of North Georgia professor Matthew Boedy, president of the Georgia Conference of the AAUP. Boedy expects the AAUP to move to censure the University System in early 2022, a dreaded status that marks Georgia campuses as operating outside recognized principles of academic freedom and tenure.

The U.S.'s most prominent college faculty association is threatening to censure the University System of Georgia if it does not reverse recent changes to tenure policies that the organization said flout academic freedom.

AAUP deemed the bill "misguided" and said it would irreparably damage the educational quality of the University of South Carolina system by undermining academic freedom. It said that "tenure is not a perk for one class of employees" but rather a safeguard against scholars being dismissed for controversial views or research.

Eight Southern state conferences of the AAUP are asking the University System of Georgia to rescind changes in tenure policies that would essentially abolish the tenure system.

The attacks on tenure are part of a broader pattern of actions in Republican-led states that includes the University of Florida trying to forbid its faculty from testifying in court cases against the state government and blocking faculty attempts to include racial equity content in curriculum.

The AAUP has voted to remove the University of Nebraska-Lincoln from its list of censured administrations. UNL was sanctioned by the national organization in June 2018 after administrators removed a graduate student lecturer from her part-time teaching position without affording her a hearing before an elected faculty committee. This terminal suspension followed a viral video recording of a confrontation between the faculty member and an undergraduate student recruiting on campus for the right-wing organization Turning Point USA.

The point of tenure is to prevent political, corporate or other interests from interfering in research or steering the curriculum, said University of South Carolina professor Carol Harrison, who serves as the president for the university’s AAUP chapter. “This is not a tenure reform bill. This is a tenure abolition bill,” Harrison said. “It would transform university education and research in really terrible ways.

“I support the no-confidence measures as a way of sending a message that the relationship between faculty and the administration is damaged and needs to be repaired,” said Jim Brown, associate professor of English and president of the Rutgers-Camden chapter of the AAUP-AFT union.

After 131 days of negotiations, Northern Michigan University’s-AAUP chapter votes to ratify five-year contract. 

Irene Mulvey, president of the AAUP, said the restrictions placed on the three professors were "completely inappropriate." The organization issued a statement condemning the move "in the strongest possible terms." Public universities exist for the common good and professors should be able to testify on the findings of their scholarship, Mulvey said. 

The issue at the University of Florida raises further questions about politicizing an institution of higher education. College administrators are supposed to “stand up and push back” against political intervention in academia, but that clearly wasn’t the case at the University of Florida, said Irene Mulvey, AAUP president. 

“They weren’t the firewall,” Mulvey said. “They lit the match.”

The University of Maryland’s chapter of the AAUP is creating its own strategic plan in response to an upcoming university-led strategic plan that the group says does not prioritize the right goals. Strategic plans need to "really began with what we consider to be the most important part of the university, which are the people,” said Karin Rosemblatt, the AAUP chapter’s vice president.

"Who's to say that this is not going to also allow these faculty members to be removed from these historically Black colleges and universities because of their scholarship, because of their research?", said Glinda Rawls, Chair of the Racial Equity and HBCU committees at the American Association of University Professors.

Northern Michigan University’s AAUP chapter continues to work towards a fair contract as days now cross over the 100-day mark of working without a contract.

"The NMU-AAUP has no confidence in the ability of the Board of Trustees of Northern Michigan University to oversee and carry out the general supervision of the institution and the control and direction of all expenditures from the institution’s funds."

“Georgia is a canary in the coal mine,” says Matthew Boedy, an associate professor at the University of North Georgia and the president of the American Association of University Professors’ Georgia conference. “This is unique in what has happened in higher education, and it could easily spread to other states.”

The AAUP's latest report on faculty governance finds over all, faculty representation is up over time, but faculty participation in presidential searches is down, as is full participation of part-time faculty members.

The Board of Regents has given its universities the power to fire tenured professors without faculty input. “There should now be a new word for it in Georgia, because tenure will not mean tenure there,” said Irene Mulvey, president of the AAUP.

In the pandemic world of academia, many institutions are struggling to keep enrollment up and costs down, but there is still a distinct awareness that moves must be made to bring faculty diversity closer to student diversity. Data released in fall 2020 by the AAUP show that, while underrepresented minorities comprise 32.6% of the U.S. population, they make up only 12.9% of full-time faculty.

Opponents say the plan infringes on tenure, undermines faculty involvement in peer reviews and provides a shortcut for firing professors that could be abused. More than 1,000 faculty members across the system signed a petition against it.

“They have an intent and it is clear as it ever was: give us tenure in name only,” wrote Matthew Boedy, a University of North Georgia professor who is the president of the Georgia Conference of the AAUP.

The AAUP has vowed to launch an investigation if the regents adopted the changes.

“At most reputable institutions of higher education, tenured professors can be dismissed only for reasons related to professional fitness and only after a hearing before a faculty body,” wrote AAUP President Irene Mulvey.

"We're just at a level of frustration that I've never seen before," AAUP president Irene Mulvey. "Everyone's fighting the same battle, and that is for common sense rules to end the pandemic and keep people safe." Mulvey said she couldn't think of another unified uprising of professors across the country like this since McCarthyism threatened academic freedom in the 1950s.

The university said it has made efforts and will continue to address gender pay equity in the future. The disparity in gender pay gaps for faculty has been well-documented in higher education. An AAUP study showed that full-time female faculty members earn close to 20% less than men.

Harry Zarin, president of the Montgomery College's chapter of the American Association of University Professors, said full-time faculty strongly support the mandate.

"In general, we want to be safe when we come back to campus," Zarin said. "If we pick it up, we're bringing that home to our families, and that's not a good thing," .

The AAUP's concerns are similar to those recently made by UNC faculty who called attention to longstanding and widespread frustration over systemic problems across UNC campuses. 

“The agenda of USG is clear -- to create a short-cut to firing tenured professors outside of the established and totally adequate processes, which are more deliberative, and in the control of local institutions. USG wants to take power away from its constituent colleges and exercise it themselves.” said Janet Murray, Ivan Allen College Dean’s Professor in literature, media and communication at Georgia Institute of Technology and one of many faculty members opposed to the changes.

Rutgers’ AAUP-AFT which has been pushing for changes since New Jersey’s pay equity law went into effect in 2018, said the salary adjustments shortchanged professors by at least $750,000, possibly as much as $1 million.

The mishandling of the tenure case of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah Jones was just one of several issues that has prompted the AAUP to launch a special committee to report on issues of structural racism & violations of shared governance at UNC.

Several state conferences of the AAUP, mostly in Southern conservative states, are urging federal lawmakers to help implement stronger coronavirus safety measures on campus including expanding President Biden's recent executive order mandating vaccines for certain employers to include all higher education institutions receiving federal funding.

"During a deadly pandemic, decisions need to be made with compassion and they need to be based on science and not on this magical thinking that we are returning to normal.” -Dr. Irene Mulvey, AAUP president. 

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 decision by the Mississippi Board of Trustees is a slap in the face to all faculty and students calling for basic public health protections to ensure safe learning environments in their classrooms and on campus.: -AAUP president Irene Mulvey

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. 

“It’s our job to get students to learn,” said Wargo, who also serves on the executive board of Temple’s American Association of University Professors chapter. “And when our students are stressed from other things like social isolation or living at home that interfere with their learning, we are stressed.”

Women and people of color make less money and have less job security than their white, male counterparts in academe, according to a new “snapshot” analysis of 2018 federal data by the AAUP. “That these data sets predate the advent of COVID-19 is cause for true alarm and also a clear call to action,” Rana Jaleel, chair of the AAUP’s Committee on Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies, said.

"These developments strike at a most basic level against tenure and the academic freedom it has protected for almost as long as universities in the United States have existed," John Carroll University's AAUP said in an open letter to the student newspaper.

"This is a victory for transparency at a public institution that needs to be responsible to its students, its workers, and the people of New Jersey,” said Todd Wolfson, president of Rutgers AAUP-AFT, which represents more than 5,000 full-time faculty and graduate workers, in a statement.

Gerry Canavan, a professor of literature and secretary-treasurer of AAUP Marquette chapter, said the cuts are being presented to the faculty, "as a done deal," and that association feels the university has not adequately consulted the Faculty Council, as is required by the Faculty Handbook.

The University of Akron is demanding the AAUP end its "interference" in the university's operations following the layoffs of dozens of faculty members this summer.

Andrew Ross, a professor of social and cultural analysis at NYU who organized the event in conjunction with the AAUP - NYU chapter, called the situation “absurdist.”

The administration of The New School has sought the services of a firm founded by alumni of Enron-affiliated Arthur Andersen is detailed in an article written, in part, by the AAUP-TNS Media Collective.

CSU-AAUP President Patty O’Neill said members of the school communities should be celebrating that they’ve made it to midterms. Instead, they met on the steps of Davidson Hall at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain because “the core mission of the four state universities is being threatened.”

Henry Reichman, chair of Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure explains that, "tenure has never been about rewarding achievement, but about protecting academic freedom." The new proposal "reflects the notion that business is a model for everything, including education," and the AAUP does not agree, he said.

The American Association of University Professors last month called on institutions to provide adjunct professors with paid sick leave, eligibility for unemployment benefits, paid training for online teaching, contract extensions, and other better working conditions during the pandemic, calling adjuncts “the tiny and invisible lines of connection between institutions and students” and warning that “the future of the profession is at stake.”

The Georgia Southern University AAUP chapter released an open letter asking its administration to take steps to demonstrate its commitment to prioritize the health and safety of its university, but also of the state's residents.

Glenn Colby, senior researcher for the AAUP, said that “at its worst,” remote instruction might resemble something like Skype. But that’s when professors take a "banking" approach and try to "deposit" facts into students. When remote instruction is working right, faculty members treat their students like “co-investigators” -- and use new technology to foster communication among everyone in the class.

AAUP Purdue Chapter Leader Alice Pawley, told the Washington Post that faculty instruction, “should be about student learning, and not about the optics of ‘teaching face to face no matter what."

The AAUP survey garnered 304 responses which indicated faculty felt discriminated against during the administration’s cost-saving measures: 78% said the university failed to provide the union with objective criteria used to identify which employees’ positions would be eliminated.

Faculty and staff of Tulane University are voicing concerns about resuming in-person classes. “There has been messaging that everybody is on board,” said Tulane professor Carola Wenk, who heads the AAUP Tulane chapter. That's not the case, she said, citing an AAUP-backed survey.

Caprice Lawless, an adjunct faculty member at Front Range Community College in Colorado and the chair of the AAUP's Committee on Contingency and the Profession, said that every principle in the committee's statement is necessary, "as our colleagues are terrified of being forced to work or die, or maybe work and die."

The AAUP chapter of Virginia Commonwealth University called on President Michael Rao to “immediately declare that classes for the Fall 2020 semester should be held exclusively online, except in cases where in-person education is deemed absolutely necessary."

The faculty letter originated from the Chapel Hill AAUP, which, along with the Faculty Council, also has expressed serious misgivings about UNC’s plans to reopen. “The belief that we can safely return to campus together with 30,000 students is quickly eroding,” said the letter from the chair of the Faculty Council to the UNC Board of Governors.

“For years, the university has disinvested in academics while simultaneously losing millions on its athletics programs," Akron University's AAUP chapter wrote in a position paper about proposed cuts earlier this month. “In the spirit of shared sacrifice, we believe that it’s time to move to a responsible and sustainable model of funding for athletics.”

In a statement the University of Chicago's AAUP chapter said it was concerned about staff who can’t work remotely — such as those in libraries, dining halls and maintenance — who might not be allowed to stay at home. They also wanted to ensure that adjunct or tenure-track faculty don’t feel pressured into offering in-person classes.

Purdue University president Mitch Daniels told CNN that Alice Pawley, associate professor of engineering education and president of the main Purdue campus’s AAUP represented a “very tiny minority” of the Purdue faculty and that she was “frankly, not from the most scientifically credible corner of our very STEM-based campus.”

“We’re very excited about having this removed,” said Aubray Orduña, interim president of Clarkson College. “Having that censure was not in alignment with our mission ... values and the legacy that the college has here.”

The Washington Post speaks to three AAUP chapters, Wright State University, Purdue University and the University of Tulsa, for their perspectives on safely reopening campuses.

Inside Higher Education covers the AAUP's Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession.

"Suspending or ending OPT makes no practical sense — it solves no problem, it reduces the quality of America's higher education system, and it threatens the international exchange of ideas so vital to academic freedom," said Julie Schmid, executive director of the AAUP.

The OU AAUP chapter has called for the administration “to cut from the top” first before faculty and staff cuts, as well as rescind and halt layoffs during the pandemic.

The Ohio University AAUP chapter introduced and passed a resolution of no-confidence in University President Duane Nellis and Vice President of Finance Deb Shaffer after demanding that layoffs of the faculty and staff involved be reversed "until a process of true shared governance and transparency can be established and implemented."

The mounting death toll from COVID-19 among professors is tragic for all those whose lives are touched. And the loss of valued colleagues brings with it a loss of the institutional knowledge that helps faculty govern their institutions and departments.

Inside Higher Ed covers the annual Faculty Compensation Survey, noting that the AAUP’s data, collected before the disruption of US higher education by the COVID-19 pandemic, "will serve as important benchmarks when institutions look at faculty pay in reassessing their budgets."

The AAUP announced agreement last week with the attorneys general, stating that the COVID-19 crisis “severely constrains the ability of educational institutions’ administrations, faculty, staff and students to engage in meaningful shared governance to address new and complex Title IX regulations.”

UNH Lecturers United-AAUP and the University of New Hampshire jointly announced they have reached an agreement on a new contract. The new collective bargaining agreement runs through June 30, 2022. Lecturers had been working without a contract for the past couple of years.

The AAUP’s Hans-Joerg Tiede on exposés of liberal bias: “For all the concern these days that conservatives are expressing for free expression in universities, activities such as these seem to indicate a different interest in the suppression of views.”

In an article about the impact of COVID-19, AAUP president Rudy Fichtenbaum said he is hearing from members that decisions about closing campuses or moving instruction online “are being made without adequate faculty involvement in decision-making.”

Inside Higher Ed cites the AAUP Council's statement of support for striking graduate student workers at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Ohio State University’s presidential search committee intends to keep the names of job finalists concealed until it has a final candidate. "We think it’s a terrible development,” said John McNay, president of the Ohio Conference of the AAUP. University boards have adopted a more corporate style of management favoring private searches, said McNay, but as public institutions, “we’re not corporations, we’re not producing widgets. We’re trying to educate students.”

The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee's University Relations department informed the UWM-AAUP chapter that an image promoting an upcoming sponsored talk, Academic Freedom in the Age of Trump, was too "partisan." But after being widely condemned by multiple groups and people on social media, the department reversed its decision a day later. 

The Ohio Conference of the AAUP has opposed the Open and Robust Minds Act, in testimony submitted to a Senate committee. “If legislation like this would be approved, thus taking these decisions out of the hands of the institutions, we would expect that the legislature would also provide funding to cover the costs of the crowds and necessary security that hosting controversial speakers would entail.” 

Loyola University's AAUP chapter releases a report countering the university's justification for major cuts to its English Language Learning Program, writing that the cuts “have harmed our financial bottom line and fiscal vitality . . . and this dramatic reversal of course has taken place outside of the established channels for academic decision-making laid out in Loyola’s own procedures."

Colorado AAUP leaders write in an op-ed about the financial dire straits faced by adjunct faculty who do most of the instruction in community colleges.

The editorial board of the Kansas City Star quotes the AAUP's 2014 report on Confucius Institutes including our warning that “occasionally university administrations have entered into partnerships that sacrificed the integrity of the university and its academic staff."

Politico's newsletter covers the AAUP's submitted comments to the National Labor Relations Board scrutinizing a proposed rule that would not allow many graduate assistants to form unions.

Inside Higher Education writes about our statement, In Defense of Knowledge and Higher Education.

Bethany Letiecq, a professor of family science and president of the Mason AAUP chapter said faculty and students had worked with the university to craft new policies that would create a public record of gift agreements going forward. However, she said older agreements were still shrouded in secrecy.

Nicholas Fleisher, president of AAUP's Wisconsin state conference, noted "It’s hard for anyone to think of positive change when we have a feeling of deep distrust," voicing concern that the board has cut the faculty out of the process of the searching for the UW system's next president.

AAUP general counsel Risa Lieberwitz tells the New York Times that Indiana University's administration is right to be careful about punishing professor Rasmusen for views he expresses outside of his job.

The AAUP has weighed in on the question of diversity, generally, in recent admissions-related lawsuits, taking the position that "a diverse student body is essential to the educational objectives of colleges and universities." And so his organization has recognized diversity as connected to education, said Hans-Joerg Tiede, senior program officer and researcher at the AAUP.

Nick Fleisher, president of the AAUP Wisconsin Conference, said the exclusion of faculty, students and staff follows years of policy changes within the UW System aimed at diluting the power of shared governance groups. "Whether it’s intentionally sending a message or not it means that they simply do not value the input from those groups, and they are not willing to make people from those groups full voting members of the search committee," he said.

A professor at the U.S. Naval Academy who says he was unfairly fired has had his position on the faculty restored by an administrative judge’s ruling.The AAUP had objected to the way the Naval Academy fired tenured faculty member Bruce Fleming last year. 

“The mission of the university is a public mission, and part of that mission is to protect free speech and the right of students and faculty to engage in vigorous and heated debate. That might be very loud, and some might view it as disruptive, but just because of that, doesn’t mean the student should be silenced," said Risa Lieberwitz, general counsel at the AAUP. 

Years of labor organizing at the University of New Mexico culminates this week as faculty members vote on unionization to join the United Academics of UNM, which is jointly affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers and the AAUP.

The University of Akron will open a national search for an executive vice president and provost, doing away with the approach of splitting the duties of the Office of Academic Affairs. Returning to the provost structure was one of the changes the University of Akron chapter of the AAUP said it wanted to see when it released the results of a member survey back in August.

The proposed changes, if approved by regents, would go a long way to removing UNL from the AAUP’s Censure List, said Julia Schleck, an associate professor of English and member of the Nebraska chapter of the AAUP.

Henry Reichman, the chair of AAUP's Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, described the department’s inquiry into the Duke-UNC Consortium for Middle East Studies’ use of federal Title VI funds as “a chillingly inappropriate political intrusion into curricular decisions best made by faculty.”

"This current NLRB has a strong majority of very conservative board members; … [it’s] shown itself to be extremely political and quite focused on overruling precedent that had expanded employee rights to unionize,” noted Risa Lieberwitz, AAUP's general counsel. 

If Kirkwood Community College rebuffs demands from the AAUP, over the termination of faculty member for his Facebook posts, the college could face censure. “I can’t rule it out,” Gregory Scholtz, director of the AAUP’s Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance, told The Gazette in an email.

“The legislation is part of a concerted effort by right-wing groups to portray higher education as hostile to conservatives, when there is very little evidence that this is actually the case,” said Gwendolyn Bradley, the senior program officer for the AAUP. 

Emory University is seeking to terminate a tenured faculty for his use of the n-word in his classroom. The AAUP sent a letter to the university, writing that his words are protected under academic freedom, "notwithstanding any repercussions of that speech."

The Registered Nurses Association, representing 1,700 nurses at University of Cincinnati Medical Center, says the hospital is stalling a grievance on the actions against nurses. In response, the union has called for an informational picket line Sept. 10. The Ohio Conference of the AAUP wrote a July 11 letter on the nurses’ behalf to the chairwoman of the board of directors for UC Health, the nonprofit that operates the hospital.

AAUP's Greg Scholtz, director of the department of academic freedom, tenure, and governance tells the Chronicle that while multiyear contracts provide more stability than the one-year contracts that many adjuncts contend with, they still deny professors a "presupposition of competence." "The problem with any kind of term appointment is that you’re always on probation."

Unfortunately many university policies leave faculty who are targeted by strategic lawsuits against public participation to fend for themselves. However there are concrete steps institutions could take to protect faculty, including some recommendations from the AAUP.

The AAUP chapter at the University of Akron is raising concerns after a survey of members showed a lack of confidence in administrative leaders and policy initiatives.

Inside Higher Ed fact checks a misleading op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on faculty work and pay.

The agency that accredits universities in Alaska is warning legislators that a 41 percent cut in state funding for the University of Alaska could lead to the loss of accreditation.

Rider University announced it will not sell Westminster Choir College. Rider’s AAUP chapter was the main opponent of the plan, and took the university to federal court last year seeking an injunction to the sale. 

Idaho State University proudly touts to media the institution's removal from AAUP's sanctioned list. 

Vermont Law School, St. Edwards University, and Nunez Community College are asked for comment on their placement on the AAUP's sanction/censure lists as is Idaho State University, which was just removed from the sanction list.

A recurring scene played out at local college campuses this year: picket lines. One explanation for the surge in campus labor activity is that unions have grown on college campuses since the 1970s, according to a position paper from the AAUP.

All future private gift agreements signed by George Mason University officials will now be treated as public records subject to the Virginia Freedom of Information Act. GMU’s AAUP chapter was part of a six-person gift acceptance policy implementation task force that provided guidance to administrators as they revised the policy that outlines the university’s processes regarding private philanthropy.

A tenure-track faculty member from the University of Mississippi tweeted about national politics. His tenure suddenly seemed at risk. AAUP reminded the school's governing board that denying tenure for political speech violates academic freedom. He was granted tenure. 

AAUP investigation finds Vermont Law School violated shared governance norms when it suddenly stripped tenure from most of its faculty.

The Wright State Chapter of the AAUP has ratified a contract agreement reached earlier this year with the school’s administration. The agreement came after a 20-day strike by members of the union ended in early February when a tentative deal was reached.

The University of Illinois at Chicago administration has announced a tentative contract agreement with UIC United Faculty, which represents about 1,200 teachers at the Near West Side campus. Faculty union members have been working without a contract since August and have been in negotiations with the administration since last summer.

A strike has been averted at New Jersey’s largest public university after Rutgers AAUP-AFT faculty union, which had been working without a contract for nearly a year. The proposed four-year contract includes pay hikes for faculty members, pay equity measures for female and minority instructors, and better job security for some non-tenured professors.

If the Rutgers University faculty union AAUP-AFT decides to call a strike after marathon bargaining sessions with the university for a new contract, union members are ready: Official picket signs have been printed, picket line captains trained, and students prepared to provide support.

Our annual faculty-compensation survey provides a snapshot of the earning power of full-time and part-time faculty members. The long and short of it: Pay raises were modest, faculty buying power has eroded, and many different factors are rolled into faculty pay. But the data, from nearly 1,000 two- and four-year colleges, also tell us three things about the academic workplace.

A new "free speech" law in Iowa will require public universities and community colleges to uphold the "fullest degree of intellectual freedom and free expression." Katherine Tachau, Iowa AAUP president, said freedom of expression is at the heart of universities. It's not clear how the law will change their campus, but her organization worries about "undesirable unintended consequences."

In a joint statement, higher education groups including the AAUP and the Association of American Colleges & Universities called the order “a dangerous solution to a largely nonexistent problem” that is “more likely to stifle than encourage free expression and diversity of opinion.”

Rutgers AAUP-AFT, the bargaining unit representing full-time faculty and graduate employees at Rutgers University has its members’ blessing to call a strike if contract negotiations aren’t successful. Eighty-eight percent of its members voted to authorize union leaders to call a strike.

Many organizations, including the AAUP, are opposing President Trump's plan to issue an executive order to cut off federal research dollars to institutions determined not to be supporting free speech.

Purdue University Global confirmed it has eliminated forced arbitration agreements for students, scoring a major win for the Indiana chapters of the AAUP, which advocated against clauses. 

Collective bargaining has emerged as a path to improving working conditions for adjunct faculty. Higher ed administrators shouldn't look at this as a threat to their industry--the real threat is a workforce that is seen as "disposable." 

AAUP report says Nunez Community College fired a longtime professor of English when he asked too many questions about how it would meet reaccreditation requirements on assessment.

AAUP sent a letter to Augsburg University after it suspended professor Phillip Adamo because he quoted a passage by James Baldwin which contained the N-word.

Wright State University administration filed an unfair labor practice complaint with the State Employment Relations Board, asking it to declare the faculty strike unauthorized. But the SERB ruled against university’s complaint, allowing the faculty strike to continue.

On the fourth day of a faculty strike at Wright State University, Ohio U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown released a statement in support of striking faculty. "I'm proud of the faculty and students demanding better benefits for those who've helped make it [Wright State] the premier institution it is today," said Brown. Brown went on to say he supports the rights of workers to band together and "fight for better working conditions."

Great coverage of AAUP-WSU strike. Explains: "Years of overspending, combined with declining donations and enrollment, caused Wright State’s financial problems to snowball." It shouldn't be on faculty to pay for mistakes.

After controversies involving two professors, Fresno State University is considering creating a set of principles that “exemplify what we can and should be.” But Henry Reichman, chair of the committee on academic freedom and tenure, said that documents such as Fresno State’s are at best "anodyne" and quickly forgotten but at worst “used to justify censorship and conformity.”

The termination of two tenured faculty members at Simpson College has created concern the college has violated national standards for dismissals. Greg Scholtz, director of the department of academic freedom, tenure, and governance, has contacted the Simpson College administration and urged the college “to rescind the notices of termination."

Online program managers, or OPMs, are becoming increasingly common as they can help schools develop, recruit and market online degrees with less financial risk to the university. But as the industry grows, so have faculty concerns about schools that are partnering with OPMs.

Washington Post cites AAUP's Hans-Joerg Tiede, a member of the AAUP’s department of academic freedom, tenure and governance, on academic freedom, about Temple University board chair remarks.

Chapel Hill is the latest campus to dust off old bylaws and resurrect a chapter of the AAUP, the longtime advocacy group for academic freedom. Groups at Dartmouth College and Syracuse University have revived their chapters within the past year or so, and faculty at Cornell University are in talks to do the same. Organizers reviving the chapters say academic freedom is under attack as college “corporatization,” state politics, and an overreliance on adjunct labor threaten to stifle the faculty’s voice.

Since the NLRB ruling in August 2016 which extended bargaining rights to graduate workers at private universities, graduate unions have spread quickly in the two years since.

Drawing parallels between the Trump administration and others around the world that have sought to diminish the rights and status of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people of late, AAUP's Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure and its Committee on Women in the Academic Profession released a statement on the administration’s reported plan to narrow the definition of gender under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits gender-based discrimination.

In late August a federal appeals court rejected a challenge to Texas' controversial campus carry law, the 2015 statute allowing gun owners with legal permits to bring their weapons to campus—and the classrooms—of public colleges and universities. The three University of Texas–Austin professors who filed the case did so on First Amendment grounds. Classroom discussion, they argued, would be "dampened to some degree" by concerns that a gun owner who was "moved to anger and impulsive action would open fire." The AAUP agreed.

AAUP union members at Wright State University plan to vote against the university's fact-finding report related to issues unresolved in current contract negotiations. Noelenn McIlvenna, a WSU professor and member of the AAUP-CBC's Executive Committee, said that proposed furlough days would result in faculty members doing their usual work without pay.

Faculty members' hackles have been raised in several recent cases over the terms of their institutions’ agreements with online program management providers -- and over their involvement in setting those terms. Now the AAUP wants to empower instructors in those debates with the help of a tool kit of resources under the umbrella of “Education Not Privatization.”

Our Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure and Governance sent a letter to the University of Michigan’s president expressing concern that the university did not seem to have followed AAUP standards in punishing a tenured professor who refused to write a letter of recommendation for a student who wanted to study abroad in Israel. Additionally, the Middle East Studies Association's Committee on Academic Freedom also sent a letter expressing its concerns about John Cheney-Lippold's punishment.

The Maricopa Faculty Association has filed a 13-page complaint with an accreditation body after AAUP announced opening an investigation to “formally investigate apparent departures from widely adopted standards of academic governance at Maricopa County Community College.” But Hans-Joerg Tiede, the Associate Secretary of the Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance at AAUP, said neither MCCC's administration or board acknowledged his previous inquiries about the elimination of the "meet-and-confer” provision of the faculty policy manual.

Betsy DeVos criticized actions taken by some college administrators regarding campus free speech. But Michael Behrent, author of report on campus free-speech legislation, says that the overall problem on campus speech issues is that they’re really about defending particular political positions rather than considering the full scope of free speech on campus.

Two weeks after AAUP called out Purdue Global over questions of academic freedom, the online university announced that it would scrap the four-page confidentiality agreements faculty at the former Kaplan University are required to sign before they may teach.

So far, no other online institution has been found using broad nondisclosure agreements of the type Purdue University Global requires. And while Kaplan educators have spoken at consortium meetings while the NDA was in effect, that doesn’t take into account how such policies make faculty members feel about their own professionalism. What information are faculty not sharing because their employer considers that bit confidential?

Rutgers University is walking back its finding that James Livingston, a professor who posted antiwhite comments about gentrification in his neighborhood on Facebook last spring, violated Rutgers's discrimination and harassment policy. An advisory letter sent to the Rutgers University AAUP chapter dissected the Office of Employment Equity's report in light of AAUP and Rutgers policies on freedom of speech

The Century Foundation used a public records request to pursue details about Purdue University Global has now released details of a “policy guide” that reveal an unusual demand: the new public university forces students to arbitrate “all disputes, controversies, and claims” and to waive their right to a jury trial.

Confidentiality agreements at Purdue Global are causing a stir over academic freedom. As Purdue profs protest, Purdue Global chancellor says: ‘It’s just not a big deal’

Vice President of Indiana’s AAUP conference and Purdue Northwest professor David Nalbone says Purdue Global's NDA limits the way faculty share items as simple as a class syllabus. "By extension it’s going to harm students, because if faculty are not free to do their job they might be delivering substandard academic quality."

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln has a black eye after being placed on the censure list. So two committees -- one by the Faculty Senate and one from UNL administrators -- are being created to examine what policies led to their censure and how they might get off the list.

Online instructors at Colorado Mesa University get paid per student for overtime hours. Now the institution is tweaking a model that's enticing to instructors but may not be best for students. But Howard Bunsis, professor of accounting at Eastern Michigan University, points out; "Higher education should always be about the learning experience. When you pay people this way, it really doesn’t coincide with that mission and what we’re really trying to accomplish."

In defending its policy allowing the concealed carry of handguns in classrooms, the University of Texas has taken a surprising position in a federal appeals court — that individual professors do not have academic freedom.

Attorneys for three University of Texas professors asked a federal appeals court to revive their challenge of a law allowing people with concealed-handgun licenses to carry weapons on public university campuses. Attorney for the professors said national studies and the views of national professional organizations, including the American Association of University Professors, attest to the harm guns in a classroom can do to academic freedom.

The Chronicle spoke with William B. Gould IV, a former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board who is also an emeritus law professor at Stanford University, about what the ruling could mean for public colleges and the labor movement broadly. 

UNL now is one of 56 institutions on the AAUP’s censure list. A censure means the AAUP believes a college’s leaders have failed to live up to principles of tenure and academic freedom formed in 1940 by the AAUP and the Association of American Colleges and Universities. UNL Chancellor Ronnie Green said Saturday that he was disappointed by the AAUP’s decision.

“The big irony is that their solution is right-wing social engineering,” said Michael Behrent, an associate professor of history at Appalachian State University in North Carolina and a co-author of a new report, for the American Association of University Professors, on speech legislation. “They’re supposedly against the idea of speech codes and authorities regulating what can and cannot be said,” Mr. Behrent added. “But they really are in fact advocating that.”

In spite of objections by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s administration to AAUP’s report on Courtney Lawton’s dismissal from teaching duties, the AAUP’s Committee A will recommend placing the university on its list of censured administrations. AAUP senior counsel Aaron Nisenson in a letter to UNL wrote: "The AAUP will not revise the Report or its conclusions in the Report and intends to continue with its censure process with respect to actions taken by the UNL administration."

A statement on the liberal arts by the AAUP and AAC&U comes at a time when some public and private colleges and universities are eliminating or scaling back long-established programs and majors. Michael Bérubé, who worked on the statement and serves on the AAUP's Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, said, "Distasteful as it may be to some people in the humanities, it seems about time to be making the case not only for the intellectual value but also for the economic value of degrees in the humanities."

Outsized publicity about a small number of incidents on campuses has provided a pretext for state laws regarding free speech that aim to undermine the authority of universities and colleges and mandate penalties for student protestors. A recent AAUP report documents the proliferation of campus free-speech legislation modeled on templates developed by the Goldwater Institute, a think tank advancing a conservative agenda.

Evidence of bias in student evaluations of teaching and a lack of relevance to learning outcomes led the University of Southern California to stop considering them for tenure and promotion decisions. USC and some other institutions are shifting to a lower-stakes approach to evaluating teachers. The findings of a 2015 AAUP survey on teaching evaluations demonstrated the need for institutions to rethink their evaluation methods.

A new AAUP investigative report examines the University of Nebraska–Lincoln's dismissal of instructor Courtney Lawton after a video circulated of her protest against a student recruiting for Turning Point USA. UNL faculty member and AAUP Nebraska conference past-president Julia Schleck said, “I am appalled by the elected representatives who for partisan reasons pressured the university to break its own rules,” and "deeply disappointed in our leadership for having capitulated to this pressure.”

The release of donor agreements that George Mason University signed with the Charles Koch Foundation and other benefactors revealed provisions allowing for donor involvement in decisions regarding faculty and curriculum. AAUP president Rudy Fichtenbaum expressed particular concern about undue influence in hiring faculty and the problem of "promoting a political agenda" through a designated focus on free-market principles. 

The AAUP's Committee on College and University Governance has voted to recommend the University of Iowa's removal from the AAUP's list of sanctioned institutions because of improvements in shared governance in the two years since the secretive hiring of president Bruce Harreld led to a sanction vote. AAUP members will vote on the committee's recommendation at their June annual meeting. AAUP senior program officer Hans-Joerg Tiede said, “Every time an institution is removed from the sanction or censure list, it confirms the importance of the standards that we advocate for.”

Contingent faculty in Illinois are responding to instability and inadequate compensation with union activism. AAUP executive director Julie Schmid disagrees with claims that graduate student instructors should not have collective-bargaining rights because they are primarily students rather than employees.

The Labor Department has added online adjunct instructors and postdoctoral fellows to the category of academic workers ineligible for overtime pay. AAUP president Rudy Fichtenbaum said, “This is just a continuation of that rolling back [of protections for workers] and making sure that adjuncts continue to receive the same shitty pay they’ve been getting.”

A rise in the cost of living chipped away at salary gains by full-time faculty members in the 2017-18 academic year, according to new survey data published by the AAUP.

Each year, AAUP’s analysis touches on different aspects of faculty pay. The new report discusses salary compression, or when professors at lower ranks are paid close to what higher-ranked professors are paid due to market and other differences at their points of hire.

AAUP Council member and EMU accounting professor Howard Bunsis explains how Eastern Michigan University's controversial plan to cut four sports teams to save money will actually end up costing money. He says the only way for EMU to save money on sports is to switch the expensive football program from Division 1 to Division 2.

Colleges are meant to be a home for free inquiry. But these days, not all professors feel that freedom. Across the country, in the past year and a half, university professors have been targeted via online campaigns because of their research, their teaching or their social media posts. The AAUP's Joerg Tiede said no matter what side you're on politically, it's clear that academic freedom is under assault, as it has been many times in the past. The AAUP has been tracking this latest wave of targeted harassment and issuing recommendations for policymakers.

Late addition to budget bill would allow dismissal of tenured professors due to program changes or eliminations, ending protections previously adopted by college boards. Nancy McKenney, a faculty member at Eastern Kentucky and president of the Kentucky Conference of the AAUP said, "Introducing uncertainty about tenure and job security will make recruitment and retention of faculty even more problematic."

As public confidence declines, university budgets and investments face growing scrutiny. Caprice Lawless, second vice president of the AAUP said faculty are used to researching issues and publishing findings. To raise awareness, her chapter of part-time faculty in Colorado have even woven financial figures — some obtained through public-records requests — into a tongue-in-cheek coloring book with puzzles challenging readers to match the six-figure salary with the community college president who earns it.

AAUP Governance Committee chair Michael DeCesare weighs in on events at Syracuse University.

University faculty around the state are raising red flags over proposed legislative language that appears to let administrators ignore tenure protections as they downsize because of financial cutbacks. The AAUP's Anita Levy said, “This is very far reaching and over-reaching on the part of the Kentucky Senate. It’s obviously very disturbing in that it completely supplants the role of faculty governance, and supersedes all governing policies.”

With EMU cutting its softball, wrestling, women's tennis and men's swimming and diving programs, football was a primary topic of discussion. Faculty and students have called for EMU to drop to Division II football or cut the program all together in the past. Howard Bunsis, accounting professor and treasurer of the EMU-AAUP, suggested to the board in April 2016 that the university consider making the shift.

It wasn’t much of a welcoming party. In January 2017, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) released a statement urging the U.S. Senate to reject Betsy DeVos’ nomination as Education Secretary, writing that “in both ideology and practice she has violated the principles of quality education that the AAUP has defended for over a century.” They weren’t alone in their objections.

Amid news that Eastern Michigan University plans to cut nearly 60 positions to erase a deficit between $4.5 and 5.5 million, faculty and staff are arguing the university isn't looking closely enough at its athletics programs for budget cuts. Around 70 faculty and staff were joined by Michigan gubernatorial candidates Abdul El-Sayed and Bill Cobbs on Thursday, March 15, outside of Welch Hall, asking EMU to look closely at its "sacred cow" - the athletics budget - that was subsidized by $27.3 million in 2015, according to NCAA financial disclosure forms.

Dr. Angela Colistra cites AAUP data regarding women holding more lower-ranking academic positions than men and encourages mother scholars to be an advocate for equity within their institutions. 

More than 200 students and faculty gathered at the quad in front of Kirk Douglas Hall at St. Lawrence University just before 10 a.m. Wednesday to participate in the national and international walkouts to protest gun violence. AAUP chapter officer Christopher Buck spoke on the issue of firearms and academic freedom, saying that keeping firearms off campuses allowed free discussion without fear of violence. He said, “(The Trump administration) would rather militarize educational institutions than pursue more sensible gun laws.

The AAUP has joined California State University faculty in their criticism of sweeping changes to classes ordered last year by Chancellor Tim White.

Academe’s Me Too movement has thus far focused on professors harassing students, or senior professors harassing junior professors. Yet a recent case highlights the fact that professors, too, may be vulnerable to abuse by students. The AAUP's Joerg Tiede says sexual harassment “should not be tolerated by members of either group,” and both accused professors and students should receive appropriate due process following a complaint.

Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt offers strategies for when the right wing attacks. Practical tips include forwarding your administration AAUP’s recent publications on targeted online harassment and “What You Can Do About Targeted Online Harassment.”

Faculty at the University of Tennessee are concerned about proposed changes to the post-tenure review process that they say will essentially eliminate tenure. The AAUP's Greg Scholtz said, "It's strange and we've never seen it before."

Out of the roughly 66,000 students on UCF’s campus, only two have an official role in the search for the next president – a figure that’s worrying to some students. Michael DeCesare, chairman of the AAUP's Committee on College and University Governance, said having only one student in presidential search committees is not unusual, though the association recommends proportional student representation. DeCesare emphasized however that “each member should be selected by his or her own constituency by election,” which was not the case in UCF’s search committee.

Union members, activists, and community members will take part in a day of action on February 24 to focus attention on a Supreme Court case with profound and threatening implications for the labor movement. On February 26, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Janus v. AFSCME Council 31. Sherry Wolf, with Rutgers AAUP-AFT, and others discuss the current situation and possibilities for the future.

Rachel Ida Buff, AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom editor and a member of the AAUP Committee on College and University Governance, writes about how the president of the University of Wisconsin System is trying to reconcile a well-funded assault on public institutions with the state’s deep blue sea of support for accessible education.

AAUP Council member Howard Bunsis discusses budgets and fear. He says to faculty, "You can’t just put your head down, teach your classes, do your research, and go home. If you want to change the place, you have to act collectively. ... We’re always better off when we act together.”

Another faculty backlash is brewing against University of Wisconsin System President Ray Cross because Republican lawmakers got a heads-up about his far-reaching plans to restructure the two-year colleges while faculty, staff and students were kept in the dark. Several emails obtained by Wisconsin Public Radio revealed the UW System president intentionally kept his plans a secret from campus governance groups so they wouldn't be thwarted.

U.S. Senator Marco Rubio wrote to four Florida colleges and universities Monday asking them to close their Confucius Institutes, centers of Chinese language and cultural education that are housed in U.S.

Far from the comfort of an ivory tower, the world of academia has led many Bay Area part-time college instructors into secret lives of hardship. The AAUP's Howard Bunsis said, "I see this at institution after institution," he said. "The number and salaries of instructors is flat or down; the number and salaries of admins goes up."

The Daily Tar Heel examines the practice of assigning texts with their authors and cites an AAUP statement that says, "The right of individual professors to select their own instructional materials, a right protected under principles of academic freedom, should be limited only by such considerations as quality, cost, availability and the need for coordination with other instructors or courses."

The AAUP's Greg Scholtz said keeping faculty in the dark early in the process was wrong. "If you don’t have the right process, you’re not going to get the right product, and we don’t believe that you can get a good decision-making product if you leave the faculty out of the equation," he said.

The AAUP is looking into the case of a University of Illinois professor accused of videotaping members of a pro-Chief Illiniwek group. The AAUP, which placed the UI on its "censure" list for two years because of the Steven Salaita case, wrote to Chancellor Robert Jones about his decision to place Professor Jay Rosenstein on paid administrative leave while the campus reviews the Jan. 22 incident. The letter suggests that the campus may have violated Rosenstein's right to academic due process and raised the prospect of future censure.

An associate professor and educational psychologist, Joshua A. Cuevas detailed his harrowing experiences in an essay for the AAUP's Academe online and in print. He said he’s been amazed at the number of fellow academics this week who contacted him to say, “Me, too.”

Wright State University’s faculty union is rallying this morning for a better contract with the school’s administration. Contract negotiations are expected to move into fact-finding at the end of the month. Rudy Fichtenbaum, AAUP President and Professor Emeritus of Economics, at WSU said that he will recommend to the AAUP-WSU’s executive committee to initiate a strike process in case the administration or the union reject a fact finder’s report.

The University of Texas at Austin became one of the most prestigious research institutions to join a faculty rebellion against Academic Analytics, a data company that promises to identify low-performing professors. The AAUP issued a statement in March 2016 urging extreme caution toward Academic Analytics. Among other issues, the AAUP said, "While such services promise ‘objective’ data about faculty productivity, some of the firm’s metrics lack any qualitative dimension."

Over the course of the last year, targeted online harassment of faculty has emerged as a significant threat to academic freedom. Fueled by websites such as Professor Watchlist, Campus Reform, and College Fix, campaigns of threats and harassment are directed against faculty members for what they are reported to have said in the classroom or posted on social media. The AAUP's Joerg Tiede points out efforts to silence faculty members who speak out on matters of race are not new and summarizes recent cases.

Former Drexel University professor George Ciccariello-Maher, who drew controversy last year for his tweets, has been taken on as a visiting scholar at NYU Tisch School of the Arts’ Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. He resigned from Drexel on Dec. 31 after facing harassment for his online presence and being placed on administrative leave in early October for what Drexel described as security concerns. This response led some academic groups, such as the AAUP, to criticize Drexel’s condemnation.

A three-person committee with the AAUP will investigate whether or not the University of Nebraska-Lincoln violated the due process rights of a graduate student lecturer dismissed from her teaching duties in November. Joerg Tiede said, “Due process is tied to what kind of power someone has over you. We, as citizens of the United States, are entitled to due process when it comes to government prosecution. Faculty are entitled to due process when it comes to disciplinary actions against them.”

A Florida university posted campus police outside a sociology class titled "White Racism" after the professor was flooded with harassing emails and messages -- some of them openly racist. Thornhill's experience is not unusual. Last year, the AAUP documented more than 100 incidents of harassment targeting professors were reported on college campuses around the country.

Drexel University professor George Ciccariello-Maher resigned after a year of enduring unrelenting harassment and death threats for his controversial tweets. He stated, "They will continue to attack me and many others, but from these attacks new unities spring dialectically forth: an upsurge in new AAUP chapters and the establishment of the Campus Antifascist Network (CAN), among others." Dozens of incidents of harassment against professors have been reported on college campuses in the past year, with African American professors among those most targeted, according to the AAUP.

Dan Lieberman speaks with professors George Ciccariello-Maher and Johnny Williams about targeted harassment and academic freedom. The AAUP has tracked more than 100 incidents of targeted harassment against professors have over the past year.

Sixty-one words detail the bill for UCLA to fire the coach without cause: "Eighty percent of the Base Salary and Talent Fee remaining to be paid ... " David Teplow, a UCLA neurology professor and president of the school's AAUP chapter said, "there is something quite bizarre about athletic coaches being paid millions of dollars in salary each year while those whose jobs are to educate young men and women, and in my case, to make breakthroughs in medicine and science, must struggle to run our laboratories..."

For most of the instructors at Colorado's community colleges, the holidays offer not a respite, but a time of great anxiety and financial strain, with no cash coming in and looming uncertainty over the number of courses they might be hired to teach in the months or years to come. AAUP's second vice president Caprice Lawless said, "We're getting less than a living wage, and winter breaks are especially tough. ...

This in-depth article discusses how at Savannah College of Art and Design, a cult of personality benefits its president, who in 2014 made $9.6 million. The AAUP censured SCAD's administration in 1993.

A committee from the AAUP will conduct a site visit next month to investigate whether or not the University of Nebraska-Lincoln violated the academic due process of a lecturer removed from the classroom.

A leadership struggle at the top of the College of Saint Rose, in Albany, N.Y., has been thrust into the spotlight after several members of the small private college’s Board of Trustees, including its board chair, resigned in recent weeks. The AAUP censured the institution in June of 2016.

The AAUP says in a new report that it finds “troubling threats to academic freedom” in the physical and natural sciences that have been exacerbated by the Trump administration.

The AAUP's new report says that science has been increasingly politicized in the Trump era and questions, among other things, various Trump administration appointees to federal agencies founded in science, Congressional moves to curb research on climate and other topics, and President Trump’s various travel bans. Such bans “create a chilling environment for the international exchange of scholars, including scientists whose work may have no obvious political implications,” the report says. It also notes six instances in which Chinese or Chinese American scientists based in the U.S.

Visits to college campuses include conversations with faculty and a profile of Turning Point USA, creator of the Professor Watchlist. One Nebraska professor says, "Turning Point USA is not a grassroots movement. It's a billionaire-funded astroturf movement."

Diana Vallera, board member of the Illinois AAUP and part-time professor at Columbia College Chicago writes, "Columbia was founded upon the idea that students "learn to do by doing" and that faculty should be well-versed in the requirements of their profession rather than abstract theory. ... The administration must value students enough to funnel resources into experienced faculty and a well-developed curriculum, not administrators' salaries. We are fighting to return Columbia to an institution that focuses on students rather than profits."

Over 200 University of Nebraska faculty members have taken a stand against what they see as an attack on academic freedom. In an open letter written by a group of concerned faculty members from across multiple academic departments, it alleges that “improper exertions of influence by the legislative and executive branches of the state government” have shaped decisions that will impact the future of the University of Nebraska system.

University of Nebraska professors want board to defend them against Republican politicians who, after incident with lecturer, have launched a series of salvos against English faculty members and the entire institution. “We insist that all levels of the administration respect the governance structures currently in place, and categorically reject political interference in the good work being done at our state’s flagship institution," reads an open letter to the regents signed by more than 100 faculty members with the AAUP from the university’s three campuses. 

A group of Penn State students, alumni and State College residents met in front of the Allen Street gates as part of a nationwide rally to protest the graduate student tax, hosted by the American Association of University Professors. The proposed tax plan includes a $1.5 trillion corporate tax cut and a giant tax hike on graduate students and would double or even triple many students’ taxes, making graduate school an unaffordable proposition except for those already independently wealthy, said Michelle Rodino-Colocino, who organized the event and acts as the president of Penn State's chapte

A group of Penn State graduate students and members of the university’s chapter of the AAUP gathered at the Allen Street Gates on Wednesday to rally in opposition to the GOP tax bill.

Proposed changes to policies that govern tenure, promotion, and faculty dismissals within the University of Arkansas system included language that moved professors there to quickly mobilize in opposition last month. Among the concerns is what faculty see as a thinly veiled attempt by the Board of Trustees to use collegiality as grounds for terminating a tenured professor. The AAUP has long opposed using collegiality as an explicit factor for evaluating faculty and makes the case that it poses a threat to academic freedom. 

The AAUP filed a joint amicus brief this week in support of a legal challenge to a Texas law permitting handguns on public college and university campuses, including classrooms.

Professors at Eastern Michigan University are pushing back against an arrangement between EMU and the for-profit company Academic Partnerships, raising questions about shared governance, corporatization, and quality education.

In the face of mounting opposition to a closed search for the University of Louisville’s next president, the school’s board doubled down on its decision Monday. Susan Jarosi, president of the U of L AAUP, opened discussion on the topic during a meeting Monday with a review of 18 letters she said constituents sent to the board. She said there have been missteps in the search so far, warning the decision to keep the search closed would be divisive.

The new chancellor of Southern Illinois University at Carbondale has big plans to eliminate all departments across campus, in the name of “synergy” and cost savings. Many professors question his motives and doubt it’s the right move. Joerg Tiede, associate secretary of academic freedom, tenure and governance at the AAUP, said Montemagno’s plan appears to be a “rather serious governance concern.” Under widely accepted principles of institutional governance, he said, any important decision about departmental structure should be made “in concert with the faculty.”

Professors have long been political targets. But a spate of recent threats against scholars — including two that have led to campus closures — is raising fresh concerns about safety and academic freedom.

Howard Gillman, chancellor and professor of law and political science at the University of California at Irvine, and Erwin Chemerinsky, dean and professor at the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Law write, "With so much attention focused on whether controversial speakers such as Milo Yiannapoulos or Richard Spencer should be allowed to appear on campus, an even more basic issue has been obscured: universities punishing faculty who, outside of professional settings, express views that are considered controversial or even offensive." They reflect on earlier purges of faculty l

The House Republican tax bill is up for a vote this week and it's got the attention of several groups who are opposed to the legislation. One group that may be particularly impacted: graduate students.

Workers in the AAUP's Wright State University faculty union unanimously voted to adopt an amendment creating the option to call for a strike if a deal on a contract is not reached with the school’s administration. AAUP-WSU president Martin Kich said before this week, there was no reason for a procedure to exist, and it remains a last resort.

AAUP governing Council member Jonathan Rees discusses social media harassment and academic freedom. 

Dana Cloud, one of many professors targeted by right-wing groups and harassed online, encourages faculty to get organized, joining with the AAUP and faculty unions, as well as other field-specific, national and international organizations and national and international organizations.

Faculty at Westminster Choir College joined together Thursday to express their frustrations after receiving layoff notices from Rider University in the midst of the school’s negotiations with an unnamed third-party buyer to take over the Princeton campus next year.

Amid criticism from faculty, Virginia Tech Provost Thanassis Rikakis is resigning to accept a university role as Presidential Fellow for Academic Innovation and as a tenured professor, the school announced Monday. The local AAUP chapter was one strong critic. They conducted a survey that concluded, “Faculty confidence in the provost’s leadership has reached an alarmingly low point. This negatively impacts morale, motivation, and retention efforts.”

In a formal election, the University of Chicago graduate workers affirmed Graduate Students United (GSU) as their collective union. This outcome “means that a strong majority of the students want a say in decisions on campus,” says Daniela Palmer, a sixth year University of Chicago evolutionary biology graduate student, Legally, [it] means that we now have the power to bargain collectively in good faith with the university.” AAUP-CBC chair Paul Davis said, "It should be a message to graduate students everywhere that it is possible."

As the nationwide observation of Campus Equity Week begins, the UConn-AAUP works to raise awareness about the working conditions of adjunct faculty members.

The Board of Directors of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges released a statement reminding trustees of the importance of shared governance. "In higher education’s volatile environment, shared governance is essential," the statement says. "It adds substantial value to institutional progress and innovation.

Cheryl Greenberg, co-president of the Trinity College AAUP, discusses the value of working together on campus. She said, "We have already seen the power of both a unified faculty voice and of a national organization in the reassertion of academic freedom at Trinity. All over the country, the national AAUP and its local chapters protect faculty interests when we cannot do so as individuals.

University of Chicago graduate employees, who teach and research while earning advanced degrees, voted to affirm their union. They have joined together with the Illinois Federation of Teachers (IFT), AFT and the AAUP. 

University of Chicago graduate workers have voted to unionize by an overwhelming margin, a result that validates Graduate Students United (GSU)’s years of organizing and deals a major blow to the administration’s anti-unionization efforts. “Everyone is just so pumped and happy today. It feels great,” sixth-year evolutionary biology student Daniela Palmer said after the votes were counted.

Bill Moyers and Joan Scott, member of the AAUP's Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure, talk about the thorny issue of free speech on campus. Scott said, "It’s up to those of us in the academy who care about the universities and who love the teaching that we do, to somehow keep open that space of critical thinking and the pursuit of knowledge and the search for truth — to keep that space open and protected from the forces that would destroy it."

Howard Bunsis presented to Northern Illinois University and said, “There is no doubt in my mind that tuition is higher than it should be, and staff salary is lower than it should be, and athletics is the No. 1 problem.”

Many of the students who take George Ciccariello-Maher’s classes don’t care what he posts on social media, though many people on the internet do. Those outsiders are so passionate that they have threatened to attack the associate professor of politics at Drexel University over his comments about race and the mass shooting in Las Vegas. Students express feelings that their academic rights have been violated by the action of suspending the professor. The AAUP is in touch with the university about these academic freedom concerns.

Tenured Drexel University professor George Ciccariello-Maher comments on having been placed on administrative leave after the media "outrage machine" that publicized his social media posts about the Las Vegas mass shooting generated a large volume of hate mail and death threats. He writes, "By bowing to pressure from racist internet trolls, Drexel has sent the wrong signal: That you can control a university’s curriculum with anonymous threats of violence."

Despite budget cuts at public universities, sluggish endowment growth at private ones, and falling enrollments everywhere—colleges and universities have continued to build new facilities at record-setting rates. Howard Bunsis, professor of accounting at Eastern Michigan University and AAUP Council member said, “Borrowing is not necessarily bad. What matters is what you’re borrowing the money for.”

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case that could limit the ability of public-sector unions to collect fees. AAUP president Rudy Fichtenbaum said, "We are facing unprecedented attacks, through the courts and through legislation, on our freedom to join together in union and work together to set standards that create better universities and colleges. We anticipate submitting an amicus brief arguing that fair-share fees are constitutional. And our chapters will continue to organize to defend higher education as a public good."

The shamefully low wages paid to adjunct faculty can lead to precarious living situations. “Most of my colleagues are unjustifiably ashamed,” says AAUP vice president Caprice Lawless. “They take this personally, as if they’ve failed, and I’m always telling them, ‘you haven’t failed, the system has failed you.’”

Attorney General Jeff Sessions spoke at Georgetown Law regarding free speech.

Non-tenure-track faculty members contribute to their colleges and universities in many ways, and they should not be excluded from serving on faculty senates, say Neal Hutchens and Willis Jones. The AAUP and the AGB have both called for increased participation of non-tenure-track faculty in institutional governance, including those with part-time appointments.

Faculty members find their words and actions the subject of scrutiny and, increasingly, targeted harassment. “You have First Amendment rights in the state of Connecticut . . . but you also have, in academia, academic freedom,” said Johnny Eric Williams, a sociology professor at Trinity.

The best way for Rutgers to keep its qualified employees is to provide for them. This includes being more flexible with paid leave. The AAUP-AFT recognizes that there are many advantages to the policies already put in place, but has expressed the concerns that certain aspects can be improved greatly.

National and local experts refute Elon University’s argument for secrecy, saying it should publicly announce the names of its presidential finalists.  The AAUP's Jim Bissett and Michael DeCesare weigh in.

The AAUP, AFT and AAC&U say a “disturbing trend” has emerged in higher education involving individual faculty members have been singled out for campaigns of harassment in response to remarks they made — or are alleged to have made — in public speeches, on social media or in the classroom. They call on university leaders and members of governing boards to reject outside pressures to remove or discipline faculty members whose ideas or commentary may be provocative or controversial and to denounce in forceful terms these campaigns of harassment.

The AAUP, AFT and AAC&U ask college and university presidents, members of governing boards, and other academic leaders to endorse their stance and “resist” harassment campaigns by “making clear to all in their respective institutions that threats to individual members of the academic community, to academic freedom and to freedom of expression on campus will not be tolerated.”

As the school year begins at most college campuses, three major academic organizations are making clear their commitment to free speech for university professors.

WMU faculty reached a tentative agreement for a new contract after negotiations.

Working men and women at Rider University negotiated a contract with the administration.

The university and lecturer Storey came to some agreement Thursday after the AAUP stepped in and raised the obvious question about academic freedom. "It's an unsettling end to a manufactured crisis made worse by the university focusing on public relations instead of an individual's free speech rights."

The AAUP urged the administration of the University of Tampa to rescind the firing of Kenneth Storeyafter a controversial tweet. They did this and he resigned.

A Dartmouth lecturer has reportedly been receiving death threats after a right-wing organization accused him of endorsing Antifa violence, and his colleagues are coming to his defense after the university disavowed him. The AAUP also weighed in on the controversy and said that Dartmouth should stand behind it's faculty.

Dr. Mark Bray, a lecturer at Dartmouth University quickly emerged as the expert on ANTIFA and spoken on a number of cable news outlets and Sunday talk shows.

Visiting assistant professor of sociology, Kenneth Storey, sparked controversy with a tweet and was swiftly dismissed. The AAUP's Joerg Tiede said, “We would expect a visiting faculty member, a tenure-track faculty member or a tenured faculty [member] to receive a faculty hearing prior to a dismissal."

The AAUP union chapter at Rider University comprised of about 600 professors, librarians and coaches is preparing for the possibility of a strike if negotiations with the administration are unsuccessful.

Without tenure, it’s easier for universities to dismiss you outright or choose not to rehire someone. Still, according to the AAUP and principles that are widely adopted across higher education, the expression of an opinion is not grounds for firing unless “it clearly demonstrates the faculty member’s unfitness for his or her position.” That goes for tenured and non-tenured professors.

For years, Penn State graduate students have been working together to achieve good working conditions and working for formal union recognition. On Monday, the Penn State chapter of the AAUP sent Penn State President Eric Barron, Provost Nick Jones, Vice Provost Dean Regina Vasilatos-Younken and the university trustees a letter supporting the Coalition of Graduate Employees. The letter says that the CGE should be permitted “to hold elections without interference from the university administration.”

Under pressure from Cuban exile leaders worried that a research institute known for taking a hardline stance toward the Castro regime might change focus, the University of Miami announced that it will not enter into any institutional agreements with Cuba's government or its universities. The AAUP's Greg Scholtz said, “What troubles me is there’s no trace of any faculty involvement in any of these decisions. One of the ways in which the quality of higher education is preserved as we understand it is by preserving institutional autonomy.

Social media has been a boon to academics but has also put them at risk of harassment. Many academics of color who experience the cost of sharing their views and scholarship on social media. The AAUP has spoken out about harassment as an issue of issue of free speech and academic freedom and calls for colleges and universities to take a stand in protecting their faculty members from the consequences.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's opinion column points out the right-wing media is obsessed with the supposed stifling of “free speech” on college campuses, but it seems to care only about protecting speech it likes. 

Robert M. O’Neil, a former president of the University of Virginia and former AAUP general counsel, considers why the protests occurred in that university town.

Conservative websites publicized and mocked a syllabus offering to let students grade themselves. Syllabus was pulled. But professor says he never intended the statement as more than a way to start a conversation. AAUP president Rudy Fichtenbaum said, "It certainly seems that the administration was more concerned about its public image than it was about insuring that faculty have academic freedom."

Senior faculty member Robert Wielgus's wolf study made national news and he found himself crosswise with ranchers, lawmakers and WSU administrators—and their lobbyists. Donna Potts, president of the local AAUP chapter, the nation’s oldest and largest advocacy group for academic freedom, said, “It was very disturbing; I had never seen anything like it."

Neal Hutchens, member of the AAUP's Litigation Committee, writes regarding affirmative action, "any effort to investigate and sue institutions over race-conscious admissions practices would needlessly wade into a well-settled area of law where colleges and universities must already satisfy a high legal burden" and the DOJ "would better serve students by focusing on legitimate threats to students’ civil rights."

Over 2,500 University of Chicago graduate workers will proceed with a union vote in October. They will work and join with the AAUP and AFT. 

Cases at California State University, Fresno, Rutgers and Essex County College are highlighted. Hank Reichman weighs in. 

The University of Louisville’s publicly funded forensic audit was meant to lay bare the scandals and secrets that have plagued the school’s nonprofit foundation for years. The audit did expose systemic problems when it was released in June, prompting promises of reform and possible lawsuits to recover misspent money. The cost of the investigation has grown to $2.2 million.

Jennifer Eagan, professor at CSU East Bay and president of the California Faculty Association writes, "The state – not the faculty – is failing the CSU and our students. The Bee’s editorial board should stop trying to distract us from the real outrage: the state’s disinvestment in the CSU, which has resulted in our students and their families suffering increased cost and more debt."

Myths about affirmative action are debunked by Risa Lieberwitz, AAUP general counsel.

American higher education and civil rights groups vowed to fight any efforts to limit affirmative-action policies in universities and colleges a day after reports said the DOJ was seeking to investigate and possibly sue institutions over some aspects of the practice. The AAUP will vigorously defend the value of diversity. AAUP general counsel Risa Lieberwitz said, “When I have a class that is diverse in many ways, it makes for a rich discussion and we have multiple ways of looking at things. It’s a better class."

The Trinity AAUP chapter responded, "Trinity President Berger-Sweeney’s recent statement confirms our suspicion that the administration's primary concern has been the bottom line, rather than the protection of scholarly inquiry and academic freedom. ... We remain troubled by the continued failure by the administration to actually defend Professor Williams from outside attack, or to acknowledge their own mishandling of the events." 

A deep dive into the Colorado Community College System, including the recent incident with adjunct Nate Bork. The AAUP's Caprice Lawless describes how an emphasis on boosting enrollment and retention at community colleges is driving veteran teachers away and Nate draws out the impact on students.

AAUP's Rudy Fichtenbaum and Michael DeCesare call on the UNC board of governors to cease its interference with the work of the Center for Civil Rights, which serves the mission of UNC and in the service of the broader community.  They write,"Such a brazen attempt ... to prevent the center from continuing to engage in litigation on behalf of North Carolina’s most vulnerable citizens, is an affront to principles of democracy. It is also a deeply troubling departure from longstanding principles of academic freedom and institutional governance."

North Carolina is the latest state to have a law on free speech on college campuses. In most cases, the passed and proposed legislation builds off a legislative framework proposed by the conservative Goldwater Institute. The AAUP's Hank Reichman said, "We don't think these legislative remedies are the way to go ... Our concern is that in many of these laws the proposals are one-sided. They are more about the restriction to demonstrate than the right to speak."

The University of North Carolina School of Law's Center for Civil Rights has long been a thorn in the side of the state government from its perch in Chapel Hill, as it sometimes files and joins in on lawsuits against the state. Sherryl Kleinman, a professor of sociology at UNC Chapel Hill and AAUP member, said, "Law clinics engage in litigation, and the Center should not be held to a different standard ... The litigation ban is against the mission of the university, which is to bring services to all North Carolinians, not just the privileged few."

TSA officials announced they will not screen and search books separate from luggage during security checks before passengers board planes at airports across the country after testing it out. The AAUP's Hank Reichman had expressed concern that, among other things, reading material that TSA deemed offensive or disagreeable could make scholars and others targets. 

Wright State faculty members wonder why the university’s athletics budget is protected, while academic funding and seemingly nothing else is. Wright State’s AAUP chapter, the faculty union, said of major concern was the university’s overall poor financial planning and misplaced priorities that ended in at least 50 layoffs.

California State University, Fullerton, reinstated a part-time faculty member it terminated this year after he was accused of hitting a student at a political rally. Our CFA chapter stood together and strongly defended academic freedom. Eric Canin told the CSU Board of Trustees “now, more than ever, we are teaching in a time of fear. This must change … You need to protect your employees from these unfair assaults on our freedom to teach and our students’ right to learn.”

The American Bar Association is mulling changes to its requirements on full-time faculty members at law schools. The AAUP opposes these changes. Michael Olivas, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center who previously served on the ABA council currently overseeing the potential rule change and voted against similar proposals in the past, said the changes pose a risk to academic freedom and to the mission and effectiveness of law schools.

The administration of Trinity College in Connecticut acknowledged today that Professor Johnny Williams’s social media posts were protected by academic freedom and did not violate Trinity College policies. The AAUP's Henry Reichman expressed this is what the should have happened from the start.

City University of New York’s 30,000-member faculty union fought for six years for a contract that ensured a handful of must-haves. Among them was more job security for adjuncts, who previously taught on semester-to-semester appointments.

Trinity AAUP chapter president Isaac A. Kamola writes about the recent controversy at Trinity College. He asks, "What does it mean that faculty, students, alumni, administrators, and society at large ... were so quick to assume the worst about our black colleague, yet willing to accept on its face the basic premise put forward by an organization like Camus Reform?"

Faculty dissenters in and outside the senate, are looking to other methods in which to advocate for change. For many, that means reactivating or creating local AAUP chapters to serve as watchdogs of the senate and the administration. At least 150 local AAUP chapters have been created or reactivated in the past five years. "Board-level and administrative-level interference in academic freedom and shared governance is not unique to Chapel Hill, but is a trend throughout higher education in the U.S.," Sherryl Kleinman, a sociology professor at UNC, wrote in an email to The Chronicle.

Recent attacks on professors raise questions about academic freedom, freedom of speech, and racism. Hank Reichman, chair of AAUP's Committee A on Academic Freedom, said, "there are clearly people just sitting around and waiting for the next incident so they can send out a bunch of email threats and what have you. Our biggest concern has been with [college] administrators, who need to have a a spine where they support faculty when this happens."

City College of New York is undergoing a closed, secret search for president, disturbing faculty and others on campus. Michael DeCesare, chair of the AAUP's Committee on College and University Governance, said,  “Locally, faculty and staff have to fight against this. So when there’s a search happening, they need to demand a role on the search committee."

Language quietly slipped into the proposed state budget would allow someone without an academic background to become the University of Wisconsin System's next president or a campus chancellor, potentially moving politics and business interests squarely into future searches for top university leaders. This is at odds with the AAUP's Statement on Government, stating a president “should be equally qualified to serve both as the executive officer of the governing board and as the chief academic officer of the institution and the faculty."

Professors who have come under intense criticism for controversial remarks. The AAUP and its chapters continue to speak out in support of academic freedom of faculty members and against targeted harassment and urge administrations to do the same.

Following the suspension of Professor Johnny Eric Williams, many have spoken out. The Trinity AAUP chapter expresses the strongest concern for academic freedom, and Trinity faculty passed a resolution Wednesday demanding the administration revoke its decision. The AAUP sent a letter to the president outlining due process and academic freedom violation concerns. First vice president Hank Reichman speaks out about the Trinity president's statement and actions.

The TSA plan to expand a program in which airline passengers will be asked to remove books from carry-on luggage attracted attention this weekend when the ACLU released an analysis of the proposal that noted concerns about passengers having to reveal what they are reading.

Faculty members and others continue to defend Johnny Eric Williams after his suspension from Trinity College in Connecticut over racially charged remarks he made on social media. The Executive Committee of the Trinity campus chapter of the AAUP released a similar statement in support of Williams, saying, “We are still troubled that, after a tenured black professor received death threats in response to speaking out against white supremacy on a personal social media page, the administration’s default response was to lend credence to a politically motivated attack specifically designed to stif

Caprice Lawless, English teacher and AAUP second vice president and Melinda Myrick, English teacher member and president of the Front Range Community College AAUP chapter discuss issues facing higher education on the Labor Exchange with Dennis Creese.

The AAUP condemned a recent pattern of threats against faculty members for their public comments. “We are dismayed that another faculty member, John Eric Williams of Trinity College, has become the target of a flood of threats following reports about his social media postings by the right-wing media outlet Campus Reform,” AAUP said in a statement. “We support and stand with our colleagues and campus communities whose academic freedom is threatened. The free exchange of ideas is incompatible with an atmosphere of fear.”

Nathaniel Bork said he feels vindicated after a censure of Community College of Aurora over the weekend and that "My concern was about the well being of the students going forward."

The AAUP updated its censure list after delegates to its recent 103rd annual meeting in Washington, D.C., voted to remove the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Phillips Community College of the University of Arkansas, and added Spalding University and the Community College of Aurora to the list. “I express my sincere appreciation to the AAUP and the Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure for reviewing and removing the censure on Phillips Community College of the University of Arkansas,” said  Dr. Donald R. Bobbitt, president of the University of Arkansas system.

The Community College of Aurora was censured by the nation’s 100-year-old association for college professors Saturday for “serious departures from principles and standards of academic freedom” over the firing of a part-time philosophy instructor last year. “Being forced to lower my standards to increase my pass rates was horrible,” Bork said Saturday. “Being fired for drawing attention to the plan out of concern for students’ well-being was worse.”

The AAUP's annual delegation will vote Saturday on whether to remove censure from UI based on the Salaita case.

The AAUP's Sam Dunietz pointed out that he increases in presidential salaries have been far outpacing faculty pay over the last 10 to 15 years. And nationally presidents earn an average of four times as much as professors.

Reflecting on controversy over whether the cancelation of a history course on college athletics that seemed to pit a department against top administrators, the AAUP's Joerg Tiede said it would be "at odds with principles of academic freedom" if a course were canceled because the subject it covered was controversial.

The AAUP's Howard Bunsis talks trends in disinvestment, contingent labor, athletics spending, and more.

Wright State faculty members sent an angry letter to university leadership, calling WSU’s 2018 budget proposal “disgraceful” and “absurd” because of the emphasis placed on athletic spending. The letter comes just days before Thursday’s WSU Board of Trustees meeting, where the board is expected to vote on the budget proposal and points to a $1.6 million proposed budget increase for intercollegiate athletics at the same time that WSU is planning $30 million in cuts, $9.5 million of it at the school’s seven core colleges.

Courses on whiteness and diversity are increasingly politicized. The AAUP's Joerg Tiede said, "Academic freedom protects the right for people to teach things that some might consider divisive."

UNI will manage to preserve many of its contractual benefits, despite a new state law that limits collective bargaining rights for professors at public institutions. The AAUP's United Faculty worked with the university to maintain contract terms.

Graduate Students United (GSU) organized for collective action ten years ago and have achieved many gains. They are formalizing their union with the AAUP to continue to have a seat at the table and a voice in their workplace and university. Undergraduate student Michael Weinrib said, “It makes me feel really powerful. It makes me feel like student workers across the campus, across the country are trying to build power to create a more equitable and fair university, a university that works for the people who are parts of it: it’s students, it’s grad students, it’s workers.”

Student protesters at Northwestern University shouted down an ICE officer who came to speak in a "Social Inequality: Race, Class & Power" class. The AAUP's Joerg Tiede said, "Whether inside or outside the classroom, we do not believe it is appropriate to shut down speakers. Students certainly have the right to protest, but not in a way that interferes with the essential educational functions of the university."

University of Chicago leaders affirm the right of graduate workers to organize and bargain collectively through whatever representative body they choose.

Wright State University said it is hitting a ‘low point’ with the announcement of 71 layoffs. Athletics received the smallest personnel spending reduction of any department. The idea that athletics would be “shielded” from budget cuts is “uncomfortable” at best and maybe even an “abomination,” said Geoffrey Owens, vice president of the WSU chapter of American Association of University Professors. He said, "It's especially egregious we’re putting money into a secondary, tertiary endeavor when…teaching, providing support services for students is subject to cuts."

The AAUP released the results of its investigation of Spalding’s actions against Professor Erlene Grise-Owens, a report that could well result in a vote of censure for the institution when the AAUP meets next month.

A wave of proposed legislation on campus free speech is making its way through statehouses across the nation. The AAUP opposes legislation that interferes with the institutional autonomy of colleges and universities by undermining the role of faculty, administration, and governing board in institutional decision-making and the role of students in the formulation and application of institutional policies affecting student affairs.

Many warn proposed legislation to ensure First Amendment rights at Wisconsin public universities say it could backfire and limit expression. AAUP member Dave Vanness told legislators last week that “In any public forum, and particularly at a public university, any attempts to limit expression must be done with extreme caution" and that there is concern "as drafted, a combination of ambiguous language and mandatory sanctions will have the perverse effect of chilling constitutionally protected expression” on campus.

Tenured faculty at Ohio’s public universities could face state mandated evaluations and minimum teaching requirements if bills in the statehouse become law. AAUP Ohio State Conference president John McNay comments on the attack on faculty in the state.

A proposed ban on litigation by the UNC Center for Civil Rights has drawn heavy opposition from students, faculty, alumni and others, who say such a prohibition would hurt the university’s teaching, research and public service missions.

University of Chicago graduate employees filed a petition with the NLRB for a formal election to form a union affiliated with the AAUP, the AFT, and the Illinois Federation of Teachers. Undergraduate library workers filed a separate petition with the NLRB for an election to join the Teamsters Local 743 union.

Faculty members across the state are voicing strong opposition to Purdue University's deal to acquire for-profit Kaplan University. The Indiana Conference of American Association of University Professors on Tuesday evening released a statement that said it "objects strenuously" to the deal for a many reasons, including lack of faculty input, no assessment of the impact on the academic quality of Purdue, and compromising the mission of non-profit institutions serving the public good.

Controversial speakers were slated and cancelled at Auburn and Berkeley. The AAUP's statement on outside speakers supports students' rights to invite speakers on campus, rejects the heckler's veto, but nonetheless states “colleges and universities bear the obligation to ensure conditions of peaceful discussion, which at times can be quite onerous. Only in the most extraordinary circumstances can strong evidence of imminent danger justify rescinding an invitation to an outside speaker."

Rider University's faculty members overwhelmingly voted "no confidence" in university president Gregory Dell'Omo, criticizing his autocratic, top-down management style and a series of rash, unjustified actions. The AAUP chapter, composed of 500 full- and part-time faculty, librarians, coaches and athletic trainers, approved a resolution this week by a tally of 305 to 100.

Stanford University told Professor Michele Landis Dauber the university wouldn’t let her print image of Donald Trump -- from a recording where he talked about assaulting women -- for an academic conference Title IX conference.

A Fresno State lecturer’s tweet sparks debate about free speech, academic freedom and more.

This year's AAUP survey and report shows that, adjusted for inflation, faculty salaries were nearly flat, and a gender-based pay gap persists at many schools.

Julian Madison, president of the Southern Connecticut State University AAUP chapter, and Stephen Monroe Tomczak, associate professor of social work at SCSU, compare the investment choices of states like Kansas, Wisconsin and Louisiana to states like Minnesota and encourage Connecticut to choose wisely.

The AAUP supports the College for All Act, introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders, that would make four-year public college free for families making less than $125,000 and make community college free for all.

Faculty members at Santa Fe Community College voted to join together in a union with the AAUP. The day of the vote, Marci Eannarino, teacher in the college's English, Reading and Speech Department said, “This is a really big day for us — it’s a defining moment for SFCC faculty."

Students may complain about courses that are too hard, but could fighting to maintain high standards actually get a professor fired? A new report from the AAUP alleges that Colorado’s Community College of Aurora terminated an adjunct because he refused to lower his expectations for his introductory philosophy class. The report sets the stage for the AAUP to vote on censuring Aurora for alleged violations of academic freedom later this spring.

The AAUP cites the firing of a Colorado adjunct instructor as evidence of a broader lack of academic freedom for part-time faculty members throughout that state’s community-college system.

Racism is rampant and foreign students or prospective students have much to consider. Rudy Fichtenbaum, AAUP president says, "The atmosphere -- the increasing attacks on Jewish centers, cemeteries, Muslim mosques and the recent murder of two Sikhs in Kansas City -- means that many international students are deciding to stay away from the US and are instead attending colleges in Canada, Australia or Europe."

Rudy Fichtenbaum discusses many problems stemming from ill-conceived policies and escalating since the November election.

While coaches and university presidents earn seven figure salaries, Howard Bunsis, AAUP leader and chair of the AAUP Collective Bargaining Congrees, points out, “Many universities have lost their way, as the core function of a university is the academic success of our students."

The Rutgers athletic department has run an annual deficit of at least $20 million since 2006 and has diverted millions in student fees and millions from its general fund to cover the athletic shortfall. In 2012, Rutgers joined the Big Ten with high hopes and low returns. David Hughes, president of the Rutgers AAUP chapter, and Mark Killingsworth, Rutgers economics professor and football fan, weigh in. The facult

On issues from immigration to climate to transgender rights, activists and organizations have been rallying against Trump and new political initiatives. The AAUP is one of many organizations partnering with the Science March on Earth Day, April 22nd.

The University of Rhode Island AAUP chapter hosted Senator Sheldon Whitehouse to discuss immigration policies, Trump’s revised travel ban, and potential effects on higher education.

Women and men across Michigan joined those across the nation and globe rallying in support of International Women's Day and "A Day Without a Woman." An event at Eastern Michigan University drew crowds to the Student Center on campus.

The situation at Kentucky State reflects broader anxiety in higher education about shared governance. "I think this is all a part of the corporate model being brought now to universities," said Rudy Fichtenbaum, AAUP president, referring to universities’ reliance on search firms. "I don’t think that model works in an academic setting."

This moving story follows Caprice Lawless, an adjunct for the Colorado Community College system and a leader of the AAUP, through a local food bank and highlights the creative work the Colorado Conference has been engaged in trying to raise standards for adjuncts and education in the state.

On Tuesday the Arizona Board of Regents presented two candidates to replace Hart after a search committee drew on several dozen prospects whose identities are not known to the public or faculty. Rudy Fichtenbaum, AAUP president, emphasized: “The faculty should have a major role in the selection of the president. The process by which the president is chosen should be an open process.”

Petitions and open letters by academics are popular and on the rise since the elections. The AAUP delivered an open letter to Turning Point USA denouncing their Professor Watchlist as a tool to "silence free speech, chill academic freedom, and harass faculty members."

The March for Science, scheduled for 22 April, is creating a buzz in the scientific community. The march arose as a grassroots reaction to concerns about the attacks on science under President Donald Trump. The AAUP is one of many proud March for Science partners.

The AAUP is making rounds at college campuses, talking about academic freedom in the age of Trump. Joerg Tiede explains at a recent visit to the University of Louisville “These attacks [on the press and academics] are aimed at these institutions because of the roles they play in our democracy.”

Tenure has long been important to American higher education as a means of protecting academic freedom. Beginning in 1915, the AAUP was one of the first organizations of college professors to fight for academic freedom. In the 1700s, religious groups operated most colleges in the United States and, before that, Britain’s North American colonies.

The Ohio Conference of the AAUP bucks years of state higher education policy in a report stating: "The popular idea that public colleges and universities should operate more like the private sector is deeply flawed and causes more problems than it is alleviating."

The Rutgers 'Academics United' event is part of a nationwide movement of University faculty members discussing the impact the travel ban on their institutions. Deepa Kumar, vice-president of the Rutgers AAUP chapter, said academics should join the movement against those who would ban members based on a religious or ethnic background.

AAUP member leaders Lois Cox and Katherine Tachau explains why a state bill to kill tenure would hurt quality education. 

Iowa Governor Terry Branstad signed into law a large spending adjustment stripping $18 million from Iowa’s three public universities this budget year.

The AAUP issued a statement—in part crafted by Penn State University scientist Michael Mann, who has come under severe attack for his research on climate change—urging universities, governing boards, and faculties to defend academic freedom and condemn targeted harassment and intimidation of faculty. “We cannot tolerate bad-faith smear campaigns and attacks on academics whose findings or views might seem threatening to powerful interest groups,” Mann said. Drexel University professor George Ciccariello-Maher and Temple University faculty union president Arthur

Online harassment of academics is nothing new. But the increasing trend following the 2016 elections, many targeted faculty members sharing stories in recent months, and with political winds blowing in a decidedly anti-science direction, the AAUP released a statement condemning actions like those taken against professors like Joseph Palermo, a history professor at Sacramento State University.

After Kentucky becomes the nation's 27th "right-to-work" state, AAUP president Rudy Fichtenbaum writes, "Ohio is nearly surrounded by a right-to-work-is-wrong desert; states where the middle class has been decimated" and breaks down how "right-to-work" laws divide workers; lower income, benefits and retirement security; increase chances of being killed or hurt on the job; and why it's wrong for Ohio and the country.

Hundreds of thousands of people converged on the nation’s capital to show solidarity and support for those who feel their rights may be threatened in the new political environment. AAUP Executive Director Julie Schmid talks about quality education and accountability of educational institutions being “up for grabs.” She said, “We are here to fight to protect freedom of inquiry and freedom of expression. We’ll be here, and we’ll keep fighting and standing with our allies.”

The AAUP and AFT published an FAQ-style guide addressing common concerns among professors in the wake of the 2016 election. The document offers advice on scenarios ranging from an administrative ban on talking about the election in the classroom to dealing with students who express racist, sexist, xenophobic or homophobic views to how to support nontenured collegues.

One hundred forty-one UVM faculty members proudly signed on to the American Association of University Professors’ “Open Letter Regarding the Professor Watchlist.” http://bit.ly/2iWyVOW

A bill in Missouri would end tenure for all new faculty hires starting in 2018 and legislation in Iowa would end tenure even for those who already have it. The new bills come from states where the AAUP recently investigated public institutions for violations of academic freedom or shared governance norms. The AAUP's Joerg Tiede said, "This looks like the perfect storm of government and legislative attacks on higher education.”

If a bill introduced this week seeking to make it easier for the state’s public universities to fire professors by abolishing tenure becomes law, it could make Iowa an anomaly in banning the widely-accepted practice that affirms academic freedoms on campus. The AAUP's Joerg Tiede talks about the broad-based attack on public higher education by legislators.

José A. Cabranes, judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, citing central AAUP statements, writes that while academic freedom and the tenure system that protects it can seem unnecessary to the many Americans who lack job security, academic tenure is essential to democracy and threats constitute threats to our democracy. 

Ellen Schrecker, McCarthy era scholar and AAUP member, compares the current political climate to the McCarthy era. She is encouraged by professors, the AAUP and other organizations "refus[ing] to collaborate with political repression," by petitioning watchlists and joining with students to protect other groups of endangered students, saying, "Courage can be contagious."

Drexel condemned a professor for a tweet. The AAUP's Hank Reichman said, "To label these comments as 'reprehensible' or even just 'disturbing' is both to take sides in an essentially political dispute and to pass judgment on the private views of its instructors." The AAUP urges administrations to defend academic freedom and free speech at every turn, and condemns death threats against faculty.

Professor Claire Wendland said of signing the AAUP open letter to the creators of the professor watchlist, “I wanted to sign on in active solidarity with the people being put on the list ... I think the watchlist is clearly an attempt to intimidate free speech and open research. It’s important to be able to research and talk about things that are not necessarily pleasing to legislators in power or corporations who control the purse strings.” 

Wisconsin state Sen. Steve Nass spoke out against a university course in an email to his Republican colleagues and encouraged them to consider the course when deciding whether to approve the UW system’s request for more funding in the next state budget. The AAUP's Joerg Tiede said curricular decisions should be made by the faculty, not by state legislators. 

"Newly armed with the right to collective bargaining, teaching assistants, graduate assistants, and research assistants at private universities are organizing to join the ranks of the unionized." That includes those organizing with the AAUP at the University of Chicago and elsewhere. After the election, many prepare for new attacks on collective bargaining, but for now, the window is open. 

University of North Carolina faculty members joined others in raising strong objections to Republican legislative efforts to pass legislation stripping the power to appoint some local state university campus trustees from North Carolina’s governor and giving it to the state’s most powerful lawmakers. The AAUP's Joerg Tiede said, “What’s happening right here suggests that the process is being politicized. That’s certainly an unwelcome development.”

Professor Michael E. Mann, who serves on the AAUP's Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, writes, "I’ve faced hostile investigations by politicians, demands for me to be fired from my job, threats against my life and even threats against my family." His opinion piece tells his story of being a climate scientist and highlights present concerns about academic freedom and tenure.

The video recording of an Orange Coast College instructor's anti-Trump comments by a student who posted them on Facebook heightens concerns about targeting of faculty for their political views. Placing this incident in the context of the Professor Watchlist, the AAUP's Hans-Joerg Tiede said, "There is reason to be concerned that this kind of activity will be increasing in the current environment."

Petitions have been circulating to make several colleges and universities in Ohio sanctuary campuses. Commenting on the AAUP's advocacy for sanctuary campuses, AAUP President and Wright State University professor emeritus Rudy Fichtenbaum said, "We’re not going to sit silently by as people are being scapegoated."

Students at the University of Nevadam Las Vegas and the University of Nevada, Reno delivered petitions to their universities' presidents requesting their support for undocumented students at risk of deportation. Commenting on the campus sanctuary movement, Rutgers University AAUP-AFT union chapter president David Hughes said, "We’re not looking for universities to break the law, but to exercise the maximum latitude they can in dragging their feet to complying with the executive branch."

Commenting on the AAUP investigation into the firing of Aurora Community College Professor Nathanial Bork, apparently in retaliation for his criticism of weakened academic standards, the AAUP's Greg Scholtz said "When the person who is most interested in the students’ learning, and who knows most about the subject matter, can’t control the course, then what happens to higher education?”

Columnist Rebecca Schuman looks at the student media report jointly issued by the AAUP and says, "The last thing we need right now, in the creeping shadow of American authoritarianism, is an entire generation of fledgling journalists who’ve come up thinking censorship is acceptable."

University of Wisconsin Regents are proposing a revision to posttenure review policies to require an "independent review" by a dean, provost, chancellor, or designee. David Vanness of the UW-Madison AAUP warned of “enormous and unchecked power that could easily be applied to pressure faculty into behaving in a matter that is considered politically acceptable. Its use, or even threat of its use, could have a chilling effect on research and teaching activities.”

The news editor of the Miami University of Ohio's student newspaper considers the impact of the AAUP's jointly issued student media report. Commenting on the importance of high-quality training for young journalists, Ohio Newspaper Association executive director Dennis Hetzel said “With what’s just happened in our presidential election, the credibility of the media, the trust in the media has probably never been a bigger concern in American history."

Clemson University issued a statement defending the free speech of two of its faculty members, who are among three in South Carolina added to Turning Point USA's "Professor Watchlist." Brandon Inabinet, South Carolina AAUP conference president, warned about the list's impact on both faculty and students, commenting "If lists like this are used to find professors that agree with a student’s viewpoints, it really defeats the purpose of what a university is about.” 

A new website accuses about 200 college professors of advancing “leftist propaganda in the classroom” and discriminating against conservative students. The AAUP's Joerg Tiede said, “There is a continuing cycle of these sorts of things. They serve the same purpose: to intimidate individuals from speaking plainly in their classrooms or in their publications," adding the site could be used to harass professors or sabotage them from gaining jobs or promotions.

Conservative organization Turning Point USA is encouraging students to identify faculty who "advance leftist propaganda" by registering them on the "Professor Watchlist" website. AAUP associate secretary Hans-Joerg Tiede said, “The AAUP has spoken out against organizations that conduct these kinds of activities going back to the 1920s, when it was the American Legion, through the 1980s, when it was an organization that called itself Accuracy in Academia.”

Andre Perry comments on the importance of upholding AAUP standards for postsecondary education and on the threats to academic freedom for teachers at all levels after an election that has devalued truth. "Power is truth’s biggest enemy. Not only must educational institutions defend the practice of tenure, we must vigorously protect (through tenure) educators who expose America’s biggest lie – the idea of white superiority."

Faculty at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW) who objected to proposed program and governance changes have garnered support from colleagues at Indiana University-Bloomington and Purdue University at West Lafayette. David Sanders, chair of the Purdue University Senate at West Lafayette expressed concern that "almost all of the actions of the board of trustees, in fact, occur in secret" with "only a facade of open public meetings.” The AAUP sent a letter on behalf of IPFW  faculty to Chancellor Vicky Carwein.

The AAUP joined over 100 organizations in signing a letter to president-elect Donald Trump calling on him to condemn acts of hate that have increased dramatically since the election. The letter, co-authored by the American Federation of Teachers and the Southern Poverty Law Center, declares, “We ask you to use your position, your considerable platform and even your tweets to send a clear message that hate has no place in our public discourse, in our public policy or in our society.”

The AAUP expressed concern over threats to academic freedom, privatization of higher education, and more in the wake of the 2016 election. 

Instructor says he was fired, shortly after he complained to accreditor, for refusing to water down his curriculum and requirements. Another instructor quit rather than comply. The AAUP is investigating this case.

A week after the AAUP announced its investigation into the firing of adjunct professor Nathanial Bork at the Community College of Aurora, the Colorado Department of Higher Education is looking into recent curriculum changes at the college.

At Liberty University, Donald Trump's candidacy has spurred debates about free speech and free inquiry on campus. The AAUP's Joerg Tiede points out media policies that prohibit faculty from speaking with the press constitute “an interference in faculty members’ academic freedom,” and are another reason more professors should have tenure. Tiede says, “We certainly define academic freedom [to include] the freedom to speak to the press."

The AAUP is investigating the firing of Nathanial Bork, an adjunct philosophy professor at Community College of Aurora.

A book offers critiques of using big data to measure the output of professors and institutions, arguing that technique is equivalent to “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” David Hughes, Rutgers AAUP-AFT president, asks, “What consequences might flow from such a warped set of metrics?" 

Ohio AAUP leaders John McNay and Ron Jones write, "We support our student athletes and want them to have the opportunity to compete. We do not advocate the elimination of sports, but we do believe that the university must dramatically reduce the subsidy to athletics – and the sooner the better. Athletics should no longer be immune to the starvation budgets too many of our academic departments and colleges are facing."

Logan Martinez discusses the Wright State University budget crisis, its origins, its effects on faculty, staff, and students, and wider implications of the corporatization of public universities with AAUP members and leaders Adrian Corbett, John McNair, Sirisha Naidu, Tom Rooney, and WSU lecturer Andrea Harris. 

Academic Analytics, a company seeking to provide data on faculty productivity, has come under fire for providing inaccurate and insufficient data. Georgetown decided to drop the service. David Hughes, president of Rutgers AAUP-AFT, said, "Our objection, fundamentally, is that these corporate-derived measurement tools, if successful, will narrow scholarly life." 

Universities’ executive, administrative, and managerial offices continued to grow during the recession, even as budgets were cut and tuition increased. Howard Bunsis, chair of the AAUP Collective Bargaining Congress, weighs in.

The Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (AGB) asked university presidents, board members and faculty how well they feel shared governance is functioning on their campuses. The AGB's findings will be presented among many panels at the upcoming AAUP shared governance conference.

Amidst an ongoing dispute between the faculty senate and administration over the legality of the faculty salary imposition, the faculty senate sponsored a comprehensive analysis of Fordham’s financial condition directed by Howard Bunsis, professor of accounting at EMU and chair of the AAUP Collective Bargaining Congress. 

The Graduate Employees Union at Portland State University is working for a larger voice in their upcoming presidential search.

Wright State students held protests on campus calling out the administration for mishandling money and cutting faculty.

Members of the University of Iowa AAUP chapter will hold a community discussion about the association's sanction vote against the university.

In addition to its central role in protecting academic freedom, this feature looks at the critical role tenure plays in scientific research, breakthroughs and maintaining high quality higher education. It also addresses key myths. AAUP members Rebecca Roesner and Judith Burstyn join the AAUP's Joerg Tiede in weighing in.

The Kennesaw State AAUP chapter urged the Board of Regents to endorse a nationwide presidential search engaging a faculty committee, alumni, students and community leaders following of rumors that Attorney General Sam Olens is tapped for the job. 

The Wright State AAUP chapter calls on the school to avoid firing faculty because of "fiscal mismanagement by the central administration." AAUP-WSU president Marty Kich pointed out that  the school "has poured funds into entities and auxiliaries (e.g., Wright State Applied Research Corporation, Intercollegiate Athletics, Double Bowler, ad infinitum) which neither generate enough revenue to pay for themselves nor support the core mission of our university," and said, "These misplaced priorities have continued in the budget cuts (still only vaguely delineated) made this summer, in which acade

University of Iowa professor and AAUP member Loren Glass sheds light on the work of AAUP and the significance of censure or sanction.

A letter from Caprice Lawless, AAUP vice president and part-time instructor at Front Range Community College, to the Colorado General Assembly's Legislative Audit Committee seeking an audit of the college system is part of an ongoing campaign to bring attention to pay inequities faced by adjunct faculty.

Hofstra’s AAUP faculty union reached a tentative contract agreement with the university, just hours before the previous agreement expired and the chapter was set to demonstrate in response. Chapter president Dennis Mazzocco said, “All of Hofstra’s faculty is fortunate that their university respects collective bargaining rights," adding, "The university is in really good shape. This sets the stage to retain and recruit faculty.”

The NLRB ruled last week that students at private universities and colleges, working as teaching or research assistants, are employees with the right to join unions. Monday, graduate students from ten Yale University departments filed a petition to the NLRB requesting certification of a local union to represent them. "Graduate employees deserve a seat at the table and a voice in higher education. Collective bargaining can provide that," said Howard Bunsis, AAUP-CBC.

The UI administration aims to keep faculty salaries competitive, while the effects of the AAUP sanction of UI could make it more difficult to recruit new faculty. Professor Katherine Tachau, president of the UI AAUP chapter, said the last two years have seen an increased number of faculty leaving the institution.

After last week's NLRB ruling giving students at private universities the right to organize, Yale graduate students filed a petition Monday to form a union.“This is an extremely important ruling for graduate students at Yale where GESO has been working for many, many years for official recognition as a union,” said Irene Mulvey, treasurer of the Connecticut Conference of the AAUP.

Colorado State University president and chancellor Tony Frank's salary was padded by a $100,000 bonus earlier this month, though his compensation still trails the head football and basketball coaches. Tim McGettigan, AAUP member and sociology professor, previously took up the topic of administrative bloat at CSU here. 

The National Labor Relations Board ruled that graduate research and teaching assistants are entitled to collective bargaining under the National Labor Relations Act. 

Western Michigan, Eastern Michigan, and Central Michigan spent a combined $72.6 million in institutional funds to pay for athletics in 2015. "This is real money we're talking about, money that many of these students are going to pay back, with interest," said Lisa Minnick, president of WMU's AAUP chapter. "It means that students are taking out larger loans, not for educational purposes but to help subsidize the football program."

A major ruling expected soon from the NLRB may recognize graduate students as university employees and entitled to protections under US law, including those related to collective bargaining. Matilda Stubbs, a graduate worker at Northwestern and Eric Powell, member of the University of Chicago's AAUP chapter Graduate Students United, describe what the decision may mean for them.

UNI professor and active AAUP member Daniel J. Power will co-chair the 20-member committee vetting applicants to replace former UNI President Bill Ruud. Regent Katie Mulholland, who will co-chair the committee, stated a commitment to an "open and transparent process, very similar to the last UNI presidential search process, which will bring candidates to campus in November for meetings with constituent groups prior to Board of Regents interviews of the finalists in December." She added, "The AAUP guidelines for university presidential searches provided the backbone for the UNI process."

Ohio AAUP leaders Ron Jones and John McNay point out that as the University of Cincinnati spends less on students and more on athletics, students are also putting in more to the athletic program and the program's debt grows. "When UC doubles and triples down on athletics, it takes money away from students as a whole," they say. This out of control spending "deprives the students, the faculty, the city and the state of Ohio of resources that could truly bolster the academic mission of the university." 

After two years of collaboration between the University of Northern Iowa faculty union and the UNI administration, a major agreement has been reached to rectify faculty salary inequities.

Administrators and AAUP-United Faculty leaders at the University of Northern Iowa agreed to a plan to raise 51 faculty members' salaries this summer to correct for gender, race and other inequities in pay across campus. "Faculty care deeply for our students and for the university and local community and are at the heart of our institution. We are deeply appreciative of the collaboration with United Faculty to investigate and resolve an important issue," UNI interim president Jim Wohlpart said.

The rights to civil rights activist Angela Davis' autobiography were recently acquired by Codeblack Films and may result in a biopic. The AAUP successfully fought Davis' dismissal from UCLA  by the UC Board of Regents on the grounds of her political affiliations. 

After being laid off by the University of Southern Maine in 2014 amidst budget struggles, Professor Jeannine Diddle Uzzi tried to move on to the next step in her career. However, with the hiring of a new president, she was approached to become a part of the University community once again as provost.

Wright State President David Hopkins announced the university has withdrawn from hosting the first presidential debate in September. Martin Kich, AAUP-WSU president said, “If the alternative is we would be left with a sizeable financial liability because of this, then I think it’s the smart thing to do."

The 100 faculty resignations during the 2016 budget year is up 11 percent from last year and 52 percent from the 2014 budget year, marking the highest number of faculty resignations since at least 1987, according to Board of Regents records. The resignations came during a tumultuous year at the university, including the arrival of Bruce Harreld as president. The selection of former IBM businessman Harreld resulted in votes of no-confidence from faculty and student leaders in the Board of Regents and a sanction by the AAUP.

The University of Memphis has proposed an increase in minimum adjunct pay from $1,500 to $2,100 per three-credit-hour course. Though it marks the first pay raise for adjuncts at the university in three decades, some adjuncts at other universities are winning contracts with minimums more than three times higher. Under the new minimum, adjuncts at the University of Memphis who teach a full load of three courses for two semesters could still fall near the poverty threshold and below a full-time minimum wage employee.

Deferred compensation and bonuses increased Robert Donley's pay to $338,466. John Barnshaw, AAUP senior higher education researcher, said while deferred compensation plans are not uncommon in higher education, salary caps are generally made to be honored.

After the University of Kentucky lost significant state funding, announced layoffs and a 5 percent tuition increase, many were shocked to hear UK President Eli Capilouto would get a 48 percent increase in his base pay, bringing it to $790,000. John Barnshaw, AAUP senior higher education researcher, explains the ways in which university boards tend to underestimate the value of faculty, who help students stay in school. 

More than fifty years after a Cold War–era firing, the Pennsylvania school Grove City College is in good standing again. “We’re immensely pleased that they took steps to apologize. No institution has ever done that before,” said Gregory Sholtz, the director of the AAUP’s academic freedom and tenure program.

Stephen L. Finner of Barre City was honored at the AAUP annual meeting for his 50 years of activism and dedicated support of AAUP principles and standards in higher education. As the director of collective bargaining services from 1979 to 2003, he visited more than 300 colleges and universities organizing faculty and AAUP chapters. One of the units Finner helped organize was United Academics, the faculty union at the University of Vermont, which he now works for part time as the senior consultant for higher education.

Carolyn Betensky, associate professor of English at the University of Rhode Island, speaks out against the two tiered system in academe and urges tenured professors to keep the pressure on to improve working conditions for all in the profession. 

AAUP membership voted to lift the censure imposed in 1984 on Metropolitan Community College in Kansas City.

Union County College (NJ) was placed on AAUP's sanction list for violating widely accepted principles of academic government. Derek McConnell, president of the UCC AAUP chapter, and William Lipkin, secretary treasurer of United Adjunct Faculty of New Jersey, speak about conditions at UCC and next steps.

This article describes a number of describing decisions made at last Saturday's annual meeting, including censure and sanctions and the removal of institutions from the censure and sanction list. 

Shaun Harper, author of Race Matters in College, discussed faculty members' role and responsibilities in classroom conversations about race.

The AAUP voted unanimously at its annual meeting Saturday to place the University of Missouri on its censure list for the third time, this time for violations in academic due process in firing Melissa Click. Nicole Monnier, associate teaching professor at MU, explains the curators’ investigation of Click was irregular and could be a precedent for unilateral action against any faculty member in the future.

The College of Saint Rose was placed on the censure list Saturday for violating principles of academic freedom and tenure.

Harreld’s selection prompted votes of no-confidence from the UI Faculty Senate and UI student government for its disregard for shared university governance. UI history professor Katherine Tachau and UI biology professor John Logsdon weigh in.

Faculty and staff from the University of Mississippi discuss how university with a reputation for historically being inhospitable to black students overcome that part of its heritage at the AAUP's higher ed conference.

James H. Finkelstein, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, presents a new study on the role of executive search firms in the process at public colleges and whether taxpayers are getting their money’s worth. He says by hiring a search firm, "governing boards are outsourcing their most important responsibilities."

A move to privatize food service operations across Eastern Michigan University is drawing criticism from some faculty and students, who are upset with how the university is describing the move and the impact the switch could have on students. AAUP members and leaders get involved.

The Illinois Labor Relations Board certified a new faculty union at Northern Illinois University.

Kean University is taking heat for the quarter-million-dollar conference table it bought in 2014. Howard Bunsis, chairman of the AAUP Collective Bargaining Congress points out that Kean is spending less money on instructional priorities and more on administrative costs, adding, "The money needs to be spent on the students. ... We need to be sure that the students can get through. All the focus needs to be is, how can we help these students and their families succeed? What kind of resources can we give them?" 

A Q&A with Sean Robinson, who will present findings and speak on this topic at the AAUP annual conference in DC. Robinson conducted a study and found that although society is becoming more tolerant of members of sexual-minority groups, many academics feel pressure to remain closeted to safeguard their careers. 

Faculty members and students worry they're paying the price for construction projects amid a focus on cutting administrative costs.

The University of Iowa approved a new policy aiming to improve working conditions for about 280 lecturers.The new policy grants non-tenured faculty members representation on the Faculty Senate, grievance rights, more transparent workload expectations, and stated pathways to promotion.

A look at college costs growing faster than inflation, states slashing funding for higher education, universities spending more on administrative salaries and campus amenities, students not always understanding how loans work, and Americans not seeing a raise in years. AAUP president Rudy Fichtenbaum says, "What is driving costs is the metastasizing army of administrators with bloated salaries, and our university presidents who are now paid as though they were CEOs running a business -- and not a very successful one at that."

In his column, Michael Hiltzik says, "What’s really at stake in the corporatization of academia is the traditional role the university as a repository of culture and training ground for open inquiry." Hank Reichman, AAUP first vice president, weighs in.

As Wright State University faces major budget challenges and plans to cut millions of dollars from the budget, raise tuition and cut staff, it also looks to host a presidential debate in September which would cost eight million dollars. Rudy Fichtenbaum, AAUP president and professor of economics at Wright State University, is not confident that the university will raise that money and feels it's a bad expenditure. 

This week, Oregon's Employment Relations Board certified PSU's Graduate Employees Union, confirming the AAUP/AFT-affiliated union for 800 administrative, teaching and research assistants.

The Post-Dispatch editorial board writes, "The demands placed on adjuncts are enormous, and they have well-founded reasons for asserting that their employment rights are being abused in the name of cost-cutting." With AAUP data, they paint a bleak picture of more and more part-time teachers paired with less and less money spent on instruction in every sector in higher education. They point out specific challenges that part-time faculty face and express support for the organizing efforts of instructors in higher ed. 

Alan Talaga explains, "Tenure ends up being a job for life for many professors because they’ve dedicated their lives" to the job.

The AAUP's governance committee convenes Wednesday to decide whether to call for sanctions over the controversial process that led to last year’s hiring of the University of Iowa president. Also Wednesday, the president of the Iowa Board of Regents is to be deposed as part of a lawsuit claiming the UI search process violated Iowa's open government laws. "The regents do now have an opportunity to improve upon their process for the hiring of the University of Northern Iowa,” said Hans-Joerg Tiede, the associate secretary for AAUP’s department of academic freedom, tenure and governance.

University of Northern Iowa President Bill Ruud said Thursday he was “recruited hard” by Marietta College in Ohio and became convinced the move was a “great next stop” for him. Joe Gorton, president of UNI’s United Faculty union and AAUP chapter, said he believes Ruud was driven out and if, so, sees it as a great disappointment. In a letter to colleagues, Gordon expressed shock over President Rudd's departure and said, “It was his ability to work with us in good faith that led (United Faculty) to withdraw our request for an AAUP censure of UNI.”

Melissa Click’s firing undermined University of Missouri administrators’ authority and was more likely a result of political pressure for her removal than her actual offenses, a report from the AAUP concludes. Because the Board of Curators voted to fire Click without engaging in the normal process for disciplining faculty, in an atmosphere of political pressure and administrative turmoil, “academic freedom and shared governance at MU are endangered,” the investigators wrote.

UW-Madison AAUP chapter president David Vanness points out that the statewide votes of no confidence in University of Wisconsin System leadership are not solely about the weakened tenure policies; in fact, educational quality concerns remain paramount.

A year after federal prosecutors accused renowned Temple University physicist Professor Xiaoxing Xi of selling secrets to China and long after charges were dropped, Xi is searching for peace of mind, concerned about the future and implications for academic freedom.

Luther Spoehr, a Brown University lecturer, reviews associate secretary Hans-Joerg Tiede's book on AAUP founding history.

The number of male tenure and tenure track faculty members is almost double the number for women at Indiana University’s Bloomington campus, according to a report from the Bloomington Faculty Council. Anne Sisson Runyan, chairwoman of the AAUP's committee on women in the academic profession points out while more women may be qualified for tenure track positions, unless there is a sudden and dramatic increase in the number of those positions, it will take a long time to erase the discrepancy. 

The non-tenure-track faculty union at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaignm, an AFT and AAUP-affiliated union, ratified its first contract late last week, after two strikes since April over stalled negotiations. Standardization of multiyear contracts for eligible instructors was one key issue of concern. Union president and English lecturer Shawn Gilmore said the contract will “stabilize the working lives of non-tenure-track faculty” and ensure the “long-term support they deserve.” 

Before the University of Wisconsin system board of regents voted on the controversial new tenure policy, system President Ray Cross wrote to board of regents vice president that the debate “has exposed the real value of removing tenure related policies from statutory language.” David Vanness, UW-Madison AAUP president said, “Under the new UW tenure policy, a high quality academic program (say, climate science) can be shut down and its faculty laid off so that other programs (say, petroleum engineering) deemed to be of higher priority can expand. Should we shut down African studies to fund a

The AAUP condemns College of Saint Rose for shedding more than 20 tenure-line faculty jobs with insufficient faculty input.

Professor Daryl P. Domning explains the value of tenure in a letter. He says, "Eviscerating unions harmed our economy and society; abolishing tenure would do the same to our universities."

The AAUP issued a report on controversial cuts made to programs and faculty positions at the College of Saint Rose and the college responds.

The Faculty Senate announced that professors at the University of Wisconsin at Madison voted no confidence in the university system’s president, Raymond W. Cross, and its Board of Regents.

Non tenure-track faculty at the UIUC reached a tentative contract agreement contract with the University of Illinois and voted to call off their 2-day-old strike.

Faculty and students at Eastern Michigan released a report calling for the university to drop Division 1 football after years of struggle and large costs to both the university and students.

University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty prepare for a “no-confidence” vote on the UW system Board of Regents and president Ray Cross after their handling of changes to tenure policy.
 

The Daily Illini connects the Non Tenure Faculty Coalition strike this week to employment trends in colleges and universities nationwide.

Non tenure-track faculty at the University of Illinois returned to work after a two-day strike, but they have further actions in mind for the future. They are most concerned with achieving guarantees of shared governance and academic freedom and multi-year contracts.

Non-tenure-track professors at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign conducted a two-day strike Tuesday and Wednesday over stalled negotiations for their first union contract. NTFC Local 6546 is an AFT/IFT/AAUP local.

This week, faculty at Plymouth State University voted to form a union with the AAUP. Professor of biology Chris Chabot says this will give faculty at PSU a unified voice. 

Howard Bunsis, chair of the AAUP Collective Bargaining Congress, and David Hughes, president of the Rutgers AAUP-AFT, discuss college sports spending and priorities.

The AAUP, concerned about violations to academic freedom and shared governance, provided a grant to from its Academic Freedom Fund to assist LSU associate professor Buchanan with litigation costs related to her firing.

The Chicago Reader looks at the AAUP Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession and recommendation for colleges and universities to adopt plans for converting part-time jobs to full-time jobs, and contingent faculty to tenured.

AAUP general counsel Risa Lieberwitz sheds light on the new report “The History, Uses and Abuses of Title IX,” which expresses concern over the conflation of sexual misconduct and protected speech on college campuses.

Eastern Michigan University accounting professor and AAUP leader Howard Bunsis visited SF State April 7 to examine the University’s financial situation, with special attention given to Ethnic Studies funding. Bunsis announced that SF State was not operating at a structural deficit like administration officials claimed, and that money should not be cut from any of the colleges. “SF State is in solid financial condition; they have sufficient reserves,” Bunsis said. Since the analysis, the CFA and CSU struck a tentative agreement postponing a strike.

For full-time, continuing faculty, salaries increased by 3.4 percent over the past year, 2.7 percent when adjusted for inflation, according to the new AAUP Report on the Economic Status of the Profession for 2015-16.

Graduate students at private universities are pushing to be acknowledged as employees with the same rights as other American workers, including organizing unions. Aaron Nisenson, AAUP senior counsel, explains that unions in higher education are increasingly important.

The Chicago Tribune Editorial Board says free expression is not faring well on American campuses, drawing heavily on the AAUP's recent Title IX report.

AAUP general counsel Risa Lieberwitz explains a new report and describes a pattern of Title IX being applied in an overly broad way on university and college campuses, leaving faculty vulnerable to complaints about classroom material.

A new report by the AAUP examines a growing federal emphasis on fighting sexual harassment on campus, combined with universities’ broadening definitions of inappropriate sexual behavior and the chilling effect on academic freedom and speech. 

KMIZ reports on the investigation into the firing of Melissa Click at the University of Missouri in Columbia, MO this week. They also look at prior AAUP censures of MU. Bill Wickersham, an MU assistant professor at the time of the last censure in the 1970s said, "Whether you're right or wrong you have to have due process. AAUP always insists that there's faculty input and you don't just go to the president, or the chancellor, or the board of curators."

Hank Reichman, AAUP first vice president and chair of Committee A, offers his perspective on the increasing numbers of demands lists coming from black students at campuses across the country. 

Delaware State University cut 23 low-enrollment academic programs, more than a quarter of its offerings, to invest in higher-growth areas expected to bring in more students and revenue. The AAUP's John Barnshaw says in the article, low enrollment does not always give a complete picture of the program's longer term viability. He advises universities to consider curtailing costs in non-academic areas like athletics and administration before cutting scholarship.

The University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents approved new tenure policies, rejecting proposals that would have maintained tenure protections.

The board of regents for the University of Wisconsin System votes today on new tenure and faculty layoff policies. David Vanness, president of the AAUP UW-Madison chapter, points out a major problem with the proposed policy on is that it permits the administration “to discontinue programs (and lay off faculty) because other programs may be considered higher priority.” 

Censure imposed on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign over the Steven Salaita case may lift this spring. UI settled with Salaita in November and is working with the AAUP on remaining conditions, including commitments from the Board of Trustees to endorsing AAUP policies on due process and academic freedom.

The AAUP announced Monday it will investigate the firing of an assistant professor at MU. Professor Melissa Click formally appealed her dismissal last week.

University presidents, like Simon Newman of Mount Saint Mary's University, increasingly come from fields outside of academia, and their approach to business frequently comes up against the principles of shared governance in US higher education. The article references AAUP data on university presidents salaries, noting an increase from 2003 to 2012 of $100,000 on average.

AAUP members Chad Alan Goldberg and Elena Levy-Navarro defend the principles of tenure, shared governance and academic freedom for the UW System in this op-ed. Next week, new recommended policies with implications for tenure and shared governance will come before the UW Board of Regents for a full board vote.

The AAUP expresses concern over the circumstances of Melissa Click's firing and plans to meet as to whether to launch an investigation. 

After much controversy, the president of Mount Saint Mary's University resigned. Although two dismissed faculty members were reinstated, as the AAUP had urged, the situation created an atmosphere of distrust at the university with large concerns about academic freedom and institutional governance.

In a letter to the MU chancellor, the AAUP says MU did not follow its own rules in firing Click and insists that Click deserved “a hearing before an elected faculty body."

Mount Saint Mary's University's firing two professors for disloyalty made national news, as did the University of Missouri's suspension and subsequent firing of Professor Melissa Click. The AAUP's associate secretary Hans-Joerg Tiede discusses a growing trend of willingness among administrators to dismiss faculty for statements seen as damaging the public image of the school. Tiede points out faculty have a right to defend themselves in front of their peers, a right denied to Mount St. Mary’s professors and Click.

UConn faculty, students and community members will attend a rally to build support for AAUP faculty working for a fair contract. After the administration’s chief negotiator said, "the university (is defined as) the Board of Trustees, the President, the Provost and the Deans,” without mention of students or the faculty, students and faculty are reasserting their voice in and role on campus.

Opponents of Texas's new campus concealed carry law, including faculty, argue it will chill academic freedom and free speech. Some recommendations from the University of Houston’s Faculty Senate on how to teach under campus carry amplifies concerns of its effects on academic freedom. Henry Reichman, chair of the American Association of University Professors’ Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, called a controversial presentation slide “ominous” on AAUP's “Academe” blog and told Inside Higher Ed that under such guidelines, “it's possible to teach but not well and not freely.” 

For graduate assistants hoping for a voice at work through collective bargaining, a lot rides on cases before the NLRB. Risa Lieberwitz, AAUP general counsel, says, "The universities are taking the position that they should be in the position of unilateral control."

The Coloradoan reports that salaries of administrators closest to the CSU President increased by an about 3.38 percent in 2015, significantly more than the average raise received by the rest of the university’s staff. This follows a trend of colleges and universities granting significantly higher raises to top administrators than to professors and other university staff. AAUP's Senior Higher Education Researcher John Barnshaw said, “Over the past five years, it’s become increasingly common."

Rebecca Rumbo, an English professor teaching at UConn since 1997 but still considered a temporary employee, said at the panel,“Despite two-thirds of the classes being taught by adjuncts, they have no share in governance, this affects quality." With concerns over the current administration, the panel repeatedly stressed unity between all types of faculty as well as with the student population.

A new AAUP alliance of faculty from six northeast Pennsylvania institutions are uniting to take on the corporatization of higher education and overuse of adjunct staff. A conference for the caucus of the Pennsylvania Division of the AAUP on February 27 will focus on “best practices” for colleges and universities. Focusing on collaborative relationship between faculty and administrators, Mark Painter, President of Misericordia's AAUP chapter, said, "We feel we are all in this together.”

One case related to education and public employee unions could have a very different outcome as a result of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's death. His death makes the likelihood of a deadlock in the case of Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association more likely, though it remains uncertain.

Two faculty members fired for disloyalty were reinstated at Mount St. Mary's University. The faculty voted overwhelmingly to ask the university’s president to resign while philosophy professor Thane Naberhaus said he would not immediately accept the college’s reinstatement proposal.

On Monday, the president of Mount St. Mary's University in Maryland fired two faculty members without notice or faculty review.

Scott Walker moved to eliminate tenure from state law. Many remain concerned about the future of tenure in Wisconsin.

Hans-Joerg Tiede, associate secretary of the AAUP, sent a letter to University of Missouri Interim Chancellor Hank Foley Tuesday calling for Melissa Click to be reinstated to her normal faculty duties. By not affording Click a hearing prior to suspending her, it appears that she has been denied academic due process under widely accepted AAUP standards and principles.

The University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents soon meets about contentious proposals on tenure policy. UW faculty members express concerns that permitting layoffs to accommodate program changes short of discontinuation increases the risk that faculty could be targeted for controversial research or unpopular speech.

The AAUP investigated the dismissal of professor Teresa Buchanan from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, which has been on the AAUP’s list of censured administrations since 2012. Henry Reichman, chair of the AAUP's Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure says in this article that the lawsuit filed on Jan. 22 against LSU administrators is not the first of it's kind, and calls it "another case in which administrators have abused harassment rules and run roughshod over students and instructors."

The Washington Post looks at campaign trail claims used by Jeb Bush to argue for higher education reforms. The AAUP's John Barnshaw provides context and responds to Bush's plea that tenured professors teach few classes and that universities do not have incentive to graduate students within four years affordably. Barnshaw points out that tenured professors at elite schools, doctoral research institutions and flagship public institutions, constituting several hundred schools, are more likely to teach fewer classes per semester but have the highest retention and completion rates.

Tenured and tenure-track faculty members of Kent State’s AAUP chapter (AAUP-KSU) voted overwhelmingly to approve a new collective bargaining agreement. 

Wheaton College professor Larycia Hawkins faces termination after stating Muslims and Christians "worship the same God." The AAUP's Hans-Joerg Tiede said, "the AAUP would prefer that institutions in general don't place these kinds of restrictions on academic freedom, but we have historically recognized the right of religious institutions to do so." Given that, the main question becomes "are faculty members aware, before they begin to work there, that Wheaton is an institution that restricts academic freedom?"

While tenure promotes academic freedom in teaching and research, the percentage of faculty that is tenure-track has shifted dramatically over time. Author Tara Garcia Mathewson argues that a rise in successful adjunct union organizing could open the field to more tenure-track positions, and that successful organizing could bring in a new, post-tenure era of negotiated working conditions.

Wheaton College, an evangelical, Protestant college in Illinois, seeks to fire a professor for violating its statement of faith. This high-profile conflict reopens debate on how statements of faith can be consistent with academic freedom. The AAUP does not object to statements of faith for faculty at religious colleges, but the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure states that limitations of academic freedom because of “religious or other aims of the institution should be clearly stated in writing at the time of the appointment.”

The Council of Independent Colleges Presidents gathered at an open forum and drafted a list of characteristics that a panel of presidents identified as "essential" for their institutions, and another list they identified as "negotiable." Tenure did not make it to the "essential" list. Rudy Fichtenbaum, AAUP president, was dismayed that college presidents did not see tenure as essential. He pointed out that tenure is the basis of academic freedom, and that the track record of colleges without tenure isn't one of preserving faculty rights.

Rudy Fichtenbaum called the lawmakers' demands a real overreach and said Click deserves due process from the university should they be concerned enough to consider termination. He said, “One of the reasons why universities have tenure is to protect academic freedom — that is to protect against what these legislators are calling for — outside interference with the running of the university. I think it would just really be the wrong thing to do to just kind of cave to that sort of political  pressure.”

Faculty groups at Iowa public universities condemned controversial University of Iowa president Bruce Harreld's comment that unprepared teachers “should be shot” and called on the Board of Regents to “revisit” its decision to hire him.

The AAUP plans to launch an investigation into faculty and program cuts at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY. Faculty members held rallies and protested lack of faculty involvement and adherence to shared governance principles.

Tim McGettigan, AAUP member and sociology professor at CSU-Pueblo, asks "Who does Colorado State University exist to serve: overpriced administrators or cash-strapped students?" He points out that while the three chancellors are paid a combined $934,500 and one pushes for a $250 million luxury football stadium, students have seen tuition costs go through the roof and food relief programs try to address the needs of starving staff and faculty. 

Following the publication of President Harker’s OpEd in the Philadelphia Inquirer, faculty members across campus were justifiably offended by its characterization of higher education in general, and, specifically, the faculty, students, and of the University of Delaware.