2021 AAUP Updates

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.

As part of their efforts to roll back harmful Trump-era regulations, the US Department of Education announced a public comment period on a wide range of student lending and educational quality topics. The AAUP is calling for reforms to Public Service Loan Forgiveness, greater representation of faculty on rulemaking committees, and a quick decision on broad-based student loan cancellation.

At a time when the country is confronting deep-rooted racial inequity, legislators in a number of states have moved to restrict teaching about oppression, race, and gender.

We strongly oppose these efforts to stifle education about racism and American history in schools, colleges, and universities. Along with more than seventy other organizations who have signed on to a statement authored by the AAUP, PEN America, the American Historical Association, and the Association of American Colleges & Universities, we affirm that Americans of all ages deserve nothing less than a free and open exchange about history and the forces that shape our world today.

In testimony given at a hearing about improving enforcement of Title IX, the AAUP emphasized four elements that are essential to achieving gender equity in institutions of higher education: free speech and academic freedom, due process, faculty governance, and analysis of sources of inequality.