2018 AAUP Updates

The AAUP has authorized an investigation into apparent departures from widely adopted standards of shared governance at Vermont Law School. The law school’s administration and governing board “restructured” the law school’s faculty by lowering salaries, reducing the number of full-time positions, and eliminating the tenured status of 14 of the 19 tenured faculty members without involving the faculty in the decision-making process.

The AAUP's Journal of Academic Freedom is seeking submissions for its tenth volume, scheduled for publication in fall 2019. The journal's new call for papers, "Who's a Bully? Civility, Authoritarianism, and Power in the Contemporary Academy," invites original, scholarly articles that consider how “bullying” is implicated in conflicts taking place around discourses of civility and academic freedom. Submit papers by March 1, 2019

Today the American Association of University Professors’ Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure joined with the Committee on Women in the Academic Profession to release a statement regarding the reported move by the Trump administration to promulgate a new legal definition of gender under Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in federally funded education programs.

The AAUP released an open letter to US congressman Jeff Fortenberry letting him know that threatening and harassing faculty members is unacceptable after Fortenberry's chief of staff harassed a University of Nebraska–Lincoln professor who "liked" a Facebook image making fun of Fortenberry. Sign on.

The United Faculty of the University of Northern Iowa successfully finished its first union recertification election. Despite intense anti-union pressure, of the 643 faculty members who were eligible to vote in the election, 547 faculty members voted in favor of United Faculty, a total of 85 percent support overall. The chapter represents full-time faculty and a significant portion of part-time faculty and it is affiliated with the AAUP.

AAUP has released an investigative report on the dismissals of two tenured faculty members and the nonrenewal of a tenure-track faculty member at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas. The investigating committee found credible the claims of all three faculty members that their criticism of administrative decisions led to actions against them.

The AAUP’s Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure and Governance has sent a letter to the president of the University of Michigan responding to the university’s statement that it will, without providing appropriate due process, discipline John Cheney-Lippold for his decision not to write a letter of recommendation for a student.

The AAUP has taken a look at the data around tenure and the casualization of faculty labor. We looked at at overall trends and broke out data regarding full-time contingent faculty and part-time and graduate-student instructors. Using data drawn from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), our findings highlight the current status of the academic labor system in US higher education.