2017 AAUP Updates

We believe that the travel ban is at odds with fundamental AAUP principles and our nation’s historic commitment to the free exchange of ideas. We plan to remain engaged around the continuing legal fight. We have also partnered with the Knight First Amendment Institute to look closely into the search of electronic devices at US borders.

Yet another faculty member, Johnny Eric Williams of Trinity College, has become the target of a flood of threats following reports about his social media postings by the right-wing media outlet Campus Reform. We condemn the practice, becoming all too common, of bombarding faculty and institutions of higher education with threats. We support and stand with our colleagues and campus communities whose academic freedom is threatened. 

No educator—at any academic level, anywhere in the world—should be told by outside forces what to say or how to think.

We note with sadness the death of Evelyn Miller, a member of the AAUP staff from 1961 to 2002, who provided essential support to the Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure.

Delegates to the 103rd annual meeting of the American Association of University Professors voted today to remove the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and Phillips Community College of the University of Arkansas from the AAUP’s list of administrations censured for violating principles and standards of academic freedom. The vote recognized that both institutions had successfully amended problematic policies and addressed the conditions that had brought about the original censure. Delegates also voted to impose censure on Spalding University (Kentucky) and the Community College of Aurora (Colorado), based on investigations conducted this year that revealed serious departures from principles and standards of academic freedom at those institutions.

In conjunction with the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, the AAUP is seeking information from any faculty members who have had their cell phones or other electronic devices searched by US border patrol officers at the nation’s borders while traveling internationally.

We join with others in condemning the wave of intimidation and threats that have swept campuses and the country this year, including, very recently, in the case of Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, an assistant professor of African-American studies at Princeton University.

Cutting education funding to pay for tax cuts for millionaires, billionaires, and corporations, as proposed by the Trump administration, is grotesque.