2017 AAUP Updates

AAUP president Rudy Fichtenbaum calls on the University of North Carolina board of governors to stop interfering with the educational mission of the center and allow it to continue its work, which is consistent with the university mission and serves the common good.

New guidance from the Department of Labor heightens the potential for faculty on contingent appointments to get unemployment compensation over breaks between semesters.

Susan Fountain (CUNY School of Professional Studies) will be awarded the AAUP’s Georgina M. Smith Award on June 17 at the AAUP's annual conference. The award is presented to a person who has provided exceptional leadership in a given year in improving the status of academic women or in academic collective bargaining and through that work has improved the profession in general. Charlie Baker (College of the Holy Cross) will be awarded the AAUP’s Outstanding Achievement Award, presented for outstanding chapter- or conference-level work in advancing academic freedom or shared governance; promoting the economic security of academics; helping the higher education community organize; or ensuring higher education's contribution to the common good.

A proposed amendment of the AAUP Constitution for adoption by the 2017 Annual Meeting addresses course-release compensation for AAUP officers who are in part-time positions. 

The AAUP endorsed the College for All Act, introduced this month by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Pramila Jayapal, which would make four-year public college free for families making less than $125,000 and make community college free for all. The College for All Act restores the promise that higher education is an accessible public good, not a privilege for the wealthy few.

Full time faculty at Santa Fe Community College voted overwhelmingly today to form a union under the AAUP umbrella. As a result, approximately fifty full time faculty at the college will now be represented by the Santa Fe Community College-AAUP chapter.

In keeping with its mission to support principles of academic freedom and the quality of higher education in a free and democratic society, the AAUP Foundation welcomes grant applications from faculty impacted by the Trump Administration’s travel ban or by other threats to academic freedom. The next quarterly application deadline is March 31.

President Trump released an initial budget proposal Thursday containing deep cuts that would severely damage scientific research, the arts and humanities, and access to higher education. This is not a design for the world class system of higher education that Americans have come to expect. It is, instead, a design that will undermine the world's finest system of higher education and further harm low-income college students.