2016 AAUP Updates

The Graduate Employees Union, jointly affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers and the American Association of University Professors, announced that it is now certified to represent all graduate assistants at Portland State University. The Graduate Employees Union will now represent approximately 800 graduate administrative assistants, graduate research assistants and graduate teaching assistants.

The AAUP issued an investigative report concerning the action taken by the board of curators of the University of Missouri system to dismiss Professor Melissa A. Click, an assistant professor of communication, from the faculty of the University of Missouri.  

For reporting in The Hechinger Report and The Huffington Post, journalists Jon Marcus and Holly K. Hacker are the recipients of this year’s Iris Molotsky Award for Excellence in Coverage of Higher Education.

The AAUP sent a letter to the president of George Mason University and the chair of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia expressing concern over the action of the GMU Board of Visitors at the end of March 2016 to approve renaming the university’s law school the Antonin Scalia Law School as a result of the university’s having received a combined gift of $30 million from the Charles Koch Foundation. The AAUP shares the university faculty senate’s deep concerns about the terms of the donor agreements under which the university carries many obligations, and the fact that the faculty was not meaningfully involved in the decision-making process.

The AAUP released report on unilateral actions taken by the administration and board of the College of Saint Rose in New York to reduce or eliminate twenty-seven academic programs and thereby to terminate twenty-three tenured and tenure-track appointments. The report concludes that the cuts and layoffs, “the result of a lack of responsible stewardship at the board and presidential levels,” undermined academic freedom and rendered tenure virtually meaningless.

In an election this week, the vast majority of eighty-one part-time and full-time faculty at the AFI Conservatory voted to form a union for collective bargaining with the AAUP.

Today, tenured and tenure-track faculty at Northern Illinois University filed with the Illinois Education Labor Relations Board to form a new union affiliated with the AAUP. It will represent more than six hundred faculty members at NIU.

In an election held this week, a majority of the one hundred seventy-four tenured and tenure-track faculty members at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire voted to form a union for collective bargaining with the AAUP.