2014 AAUP Updates

A new animated video raises serious concerns about the claims and promises being made by the online education industry about the quality of its higher education programs.The video is part of a national grassroots campaign to inform families, educators, higher education leaders, and policymakers about the serious concerns of faculty members and educational staff who are on the front lines of higher education.

In two companion cases the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled that religious institutions are generally bound by tenure contracts, including faculty handbooks, and that faculty members may sue if these contracts are breached, even in some instances in which the faculty member is a minister.

After nearly two years of collective bargaining with university administration, today faculty at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) overwhelmingly ratified their first labor contracts, which will dramatically improve work life and professional conditions for tenure-track and non-tenure track members.

We heartily congratulate AAUP collective bargaining chapters at the University of Cincinnati, Portland State University, and the University of Illinois at Chicago, who have reached agreements with their administrations in recent weeks, in each case following prolonged negotiations.

This spring, for the first time in its 35-year history, the Portland State University AAUP chapter voted to strike. Instead, on the scheduled strike date of April 16, chapter members found themselves celebrating a 97 percent ratification vote for a new contract.

Ballots for the 2014 national officer and council elections have been tallied. Wright State University professor Rudy Fichtenbaum has been elected to another term as president of the AAUP. 

Developments in recent decades—diversion of resources to administration, ballooning of contingent positions, and runaway spending on athletics—signal that our colleges and universities are losing focus on their academic missions.

AAUP brief urges the NLRB to look closely at claims that private-college faculty have too much managerial power to have collective bargaining rights under the National Labor Relations Act.