2020 AAUP Updates

The AAUP sent a letter today to the administration of Babson College regarding the case of Asheen Phansey, a part-time faculty member who was summarily dismissed on January 9 after posting a jocular comment on Facebook concerning President Trump’s tweeted threat to bomb Iranian cultural sites.

The AAUP released a report on the dismissal of Jane Harty, a part-time faculty member with forty years of service in the Department of Music at Pacific Lutheran University. The report found that the PLU administration had acted in violation of the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure when it summarily dismissed her and then acted in bad faith by conducting a dismissal hearing the report calls a “sham exercise.” 

The AAUP submitted comments to the National Labor Relations Board opposing a proposed rule that would bar many graduate assistants from engaging in collective bargaining. The AAUP’s comments clearly demonstrate that graduate assistants have the right to unionize because they are employees under the National Labor Relations Act and that unionization advances their academic freedom. We urge the National Labor Relations Board to reject the proposed rule.

The American Association of University Professors joins scholars in India and around the world in condemning the violent assault on faculty and students January 5 at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. We support the right of students everywhere to peacefully protest injustice. Attempts to crush their protests with violence are nothing short of a blatant attack on academic freedom and democracy itself.

The AAUP grieves the loss of life resulting from the crash of Ukrainian International Airlines flight 752 soon after its departure from Tehran airport in Iran. These deaths are an international tragedy, affecting people across the globe and we offer our sincere condolences to the families and academic communities affected by this tragedy.

The AAUP has issued In Defense of Knowledge and Higher Education, a statement that advances an impassioned argument for the importance of expert knowledge and the institutions of higher education that produce and transmit it. Addressing an ongoing movement in the United States to attack the disciplines and higher education institutions, the statement defends the critical role these institutions perform in producing the knowledge that sustains American democracy, especially in this moment of intense global instability.

The AAUP and the Scholars at Risk Network (SAR) have arranged an AAUP member discount for the SAR 2020 Global Congress in March 2020 at Johns Hopkins University.