2021 AAUP Updates

“The Build Back Better Act represents a historic and long-overdue investment in higher education—as well as a meaningful down payment on the additional changes needed to aid our colleges and universities, and the people who make them run. Increased Pell Grant funding, a new college retention and completion fund, and tuition subsidies at minority-serving institutions are important initiatives that will help students at a wide range of institutions, and go beyond the free community college funding that is the signature program of this bill."

“The unmistakable aim of such efforts is to impose thought control on American education and thereby on the American people," the brief states.

The AAUP calls on campus administrations to do everything possible to ensure the highest level of health and safety, and to follow the guidance of public health experts to use every available tool to protect students, faculty, staff, and neighboring communities from further spread of COVID this fall.

The AAUP led a coalition letter, signed by national unions with locals and chapters on college campuses, asking Congress to support higher ed workers in the American Families Plan. The letter argued that the proposed free community college plan should be expanded to better protect faculty and staff, ensure high-quality instruction for students at any institution, and promote shared governance.

The AAUP condemns in the strongest possible terms the recent actions to ban, limit, or distort the teaching of history and related academic subjects.

The AAUP released the second report on data collected from the 2021 AAUP Shared Governance Survey, the first national survey on shared governance since 2001. Focusing on faculty roles in decision making areas at 585 randomly-sampled four-year institutions of higher education, the report notes that the survey presents a mixed picture of the current state of shared governance.

Since censure was imposed on the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in 2018, the AAUP has worked with the administration and faculty to remove it. Unfortunately, a proposed regents’ resolution that would prohibit “any imposition of critical race theory in [the] curriculum” of the institutions in the state university system puts the censure removal efforts in jeopardy. The AAUP has suspended a planned virtual site visit to the university pending the regents’ August vote on this resolution.

The AAUP's Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2020–21, outlines how years of unstable funding, combined with the impacts of the COVID‑19 pandemic, have created an existential threat to shared governance and academic freedom in higher education that severely weakens our nation’s ability to effectively educate our communities.