2023 AAUP Updates

The AAUP's 2022–23 Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, released today, finds that real average salaries have declined by 2.4 percent after adjusting for inflation, making this the third consecutive year that wage growth has fallen short of inflation. 

An AAUP special committee established to review the apparent pattern of politically, racially, and ideologically motivated attacks on public higher education in Florida has released a preliminary report concluding that academic freedom, tenure, and shared governance in Florida’s public colleges and universities currently face a politically and ideologically driven assault unparalleled in US history. If sustained, this onslaught threatens the very survival of meaningful higher education in the state, with dire implications for the entire country.

A new report concludes that the administration of Hamline University violated the academic freedom of Professor Erika López Prater by failing to renew her teaching appointment as a result of her use of images of the Prophet Muhammad during an art history course. The committee of inquiry found that Professor López Prater's decision to display the images was not only justifiable and appropriate on scholarly and pedagogical grounds but also protected by academic freedom.

More than 800 faculty members at Miami University in Ohio officially have a union today after the State Employment Labor Relations Board certified that an overwhelming majority of faculty cast ballots in favor of forming a new chapter of the American Association of University Professors/American Federation of Teachers.

Governor DeSantis’s signing of anti-DEI SB 266 today further cements the decline of Florida’s higher education system by enshrining into law culture-war-inspired censorship that will have a disastrous impact on students, faculty, and the future of education in the state.

The AAUP's governing Council has voted to censure the administrations of Collin College and Emporia State University.

Today, the AAUP published an investigative report concerning the termination of thirty tenured and tenure-track faculty appointments at Emporia State University. The investigating committee concluded that these terminations and other policies at ESU demonstrated "that conditions for academic governance at Emporia State are deficient."

Today, the AAUP published a report concerning the Collin College administration’s summary termination of the services of professors Lora Burnett, Suzanne Jones, and Michael Phillips. An investigating committee found that the  administration’s actions violated all three faculty members’ academic freedom to speak as citizens and to criticize institutional policies, and, in one case, violated academic freedom in teaching.