2024 AAUP Updates

Aaron Nisenson will serve as interim executive director of the AAUP while a search for a director is underway. Aaron has served as senior counsel and director of the legal department at the AAUP since 2013 and speaks and writes extensively on higher education, faculty rights, and constitutional, labor, and employment law. Aaron has litigated labor, employment, and First Amendment cases in federal and state courts and has directed the litigation and representational work of dozens of attorneys. He has authored amicus briefs submitted in the US Supreme Court, and in federal and state appellate courts on constitutional, labor and employment law issues.

The AAUP will conduct an inquiry into the case of Professor Maura Finkelstein, who was first summarily suspended from her tenured position at Muhlenberg College and then dismissed because of a student complaint regarding her extramural speech and conduct related to the war in Gaza.

The dismissal raises serious concerns about academic freedom at Muhlenberg. It also appears that the Muhlenberg administration has not followed its own regulations regarding dismissal, or incorporated a crucial element in the AAUP’s understanding of academic due process—that a dismissal action must be preceded by an adjudicative hearing before an elected faculty body in which the administration bears the burden of demonstrating just cause for dismissal.

The State University System of Florida’s recent decision to require campuses to identify all courses that might have “antisemitic material and/or anti-Israel bias” is the latest step in the state’s ongoing attack on academic and intellectual freedom and the autonomy of higher education.

It is the faculty’s responsibility to teach in accordance with the state of their disciplinary knowledge, not in accordance with the whims of the state, boards of trustees, or powerful outside forces. That may include discussion of controversial materials, and will inevitably include both topics and materials relevant to the course subject. To insist that courses and materials that touch on certain subjects must be subject to extra scrutiny because of their controversial nature is to impose a political litmus test on what should be professional judgment.

The Nonpartisan College Voter Registration and Education Project aims to increase student voter registration and turnout by asking faculty to devote five minutes of class time to voter education and on-the-spot voter registration. Sign up and project leaders will connect you with a local, experienced, nonpartisan presenter to come to your classroom to do the presentation.

The AAUP has joined several national unions and labor organizations, including AFSCME, AFT, CWA, HELU, NEA, OPEIU, SEIU, UAW, and Unite Here, in issuing a Statement of Unity calling on Kamala Harris to ensure a renewed federal investment in higher education.

As an apparent reaction to student protests since last October, a number of college and university administrations have hastily enacted overly restrictive policies dealing with the rights to assemble and protest on campus. These policies, which go beyond reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions, impose severe limits on speech and assembly that discourage or shut down freedom of expression.

AAUP president Todd Wolfson sent a letter to University of California president Michael Drake urging the administration to settle a fair contract with UC system librarians represented by University Council-AFT (UC-AFT), unit 17.

The AAUP has released a new Statement on Academic Boycotts, which reconsiders the AAUP's prior categorical opposition to academic boycotts set forth in the 2006 report On Academic Boycotts. The AAUP's revised policy maintains that academic boycotts are not in themselves violations of academic freedom and can instead be legitimate tactical responses to conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education.