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Tag Archives: AAUP


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New Episodes of AAUP Presents

It has been a busy week at the AAUP, and our podcast AAUP Presents is back with two new episodes!

On Saturday, the AAUP’s governing Council voted unanimously to add Indiana University Northwest to the Association’s list of censured administrations. In a new episode we discuss the AAUP’s investigative report about the case, which revolved around the summary suspension and dismissal of Dr. Mark McPhail. The investigation found that in acting against McPhail the administration disregarded AAUP-supported standards of academic due process. Investigators found “highly credible” McPhail’s allegation that the administration’s actions were prompted by his criticism of the administration’s handling of racial equity issues and therefore violated his academic freedom. Here’s a direct link.

The episode features Afshan Jafar, professor of sociology at Connecticut College and the chair of the investigating committee for the report, and Mark Criley, senior program officer in the AAUP’s Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance, who staffed the investigation.

In the next podcast episode, we look at what last week’s student debt relief cases before the Supreme Court mean for faculty. Risa Lieberwitz, the AAUP’s general counsel and a professor of labor and employment law at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and Jenna Sablan, the AAUP’s senior program officer for government relations, weigh in on what happened at the high court and what’s ahead on the debt relief front. Here’s the link to the podcast.

You can find these episodes (and all previous ones) here on our website.

We’ll have more episodes for you this month. Make sure you subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred platform to get notified when new episodes are released.

Thanks for listening,
Mariah Quinn, Digital Organizer, AAUP


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AAUP, AFT, NCAC Issue Statement Denouncing Florida HB 999

With the introduction of HB 999, the Florida legislature—at Governor DeSantis’s urging—has doubled down on its attacks on academic freedom with a bill that would effectively silence faculty and students across the ideological spectrum and purge whole fields of study from public universities. This bill substitutes the ideological beliefs of those in power for the freedom that is necessary for colleges and universities to serve the common good and function as intellectual centers where young people succeed and where the ideas that drive our country’s economy and democracy are ignited. Read the statement and sign on here.


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Stronger Together: The AAUP-AFT Affiliation

This day after Labor Day, in addition to celebrating and appreciating all workers, we celebrate the just-finalized historic alliance between the AAUP and the American Federation of Teachers. Now, together, we represent more higher education workers than any other union. Our game-changing partnership brings together AAUP’s academic expertise and AFT’s power and reach, and creates a movement with the strength of hundreds of thousands of higher education workers. Together, we will be stronger in our work to dismantle systemic racism and fight white supremacy; we vow to bring a racial equity lens to all aspects of all of our work. Together, we will be more effective at beating back outrageous legislative intrusions into the academy—intrusions that obliterate the academic freedom needed for effective teaching, research and free inquiry. Together, we will be united in our efforts to ensure that higher education plays its essential role as a public good in a democracy.

Because our affiliation builds on our successful joint organizing work, we anticipate bringing even more academic workers into our movement, and we anticipate being able to disseminate AAUP’s essential work on academic freedom and shared governance more broadly throughout the higher education community. We will be working together to organize a more powerful academic labor movement around our principles on campuses, in statehouses, and in Congress.

This has been one of the most invigorating summers of our careers, beginning in June when delegates voted overwhelmingly to ratify the affiliation agreement at the June 2022 Biennial Association Meeting, and continuing into July with the signing of the agreement at the AFT convention to thunderous applause and digital fireworks. Now, as we start the new academic year, we get to work as partners protecting higher education, demanding that higher ed lives up to its promise for everyone. We’ll be fighting with you and for you. It’s an exciting time and we have never been stronger.

In solidarity,
Irene Mulvey, AAUP President
Randi Weingarten, AFT President

Irene Mulvey and Randi Weingarten holding an AAUP Redbook
  AAUP-AFT Alliance f2022


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Faculty at Miami University File to Form AAUP Union

With support from a strong majority of Miami University faculty, on Friday the Faculty Alliance of Miami (FAM) filed a petition for certification at the Ohio State Employment Relations Board (SERB) to form a union with the AAUP. Ohio statute allows the Miami administration to avoid a drawn-out and costly election by voluntarily recognizing the union.

This is a significant moment for faculty at Miami and for collective bargaining in Ohio. The Miami University union drive builds on a national wave of higher education organizing in recent years. Miami would join the ten out of fourteen other four-year Ohio public universities with collective bargaining agreements and would be the largest bargaining unit to file since Bowling Green State University in 2010.

FAM has built a strong organization rooted in member activism and centered on strengthening the role of faculty at their institution. “Through FAM, teaching and learning will be reinvigorated at Miami University,” says Theresa Kulbaga, professor of English and a lead FAM organizer. “Faculty working conditions are student learning conditions. When faculty are valued and supported, the quality of our programs and our teaching are strengthened.”

The move was prompted by long-standing issues with working conditions, shared governance, compensation, and academic freedom.

“Miami’s faculty and administration can work together to support high quality teaching and learning,” notes Todd Edwards, FAM press secretary. “As institutions of higher education face unprecedented challenges, faculty have an important role to play in the search for solutions. A stronger voice for faculty means a stronger Miami.”

embers of the Faculty Alliance of Miami filing for union certification on Friday, June 3.

Congratulations to everyone who worked on the campaign!

The AAUP


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AAUP/AFT solidarity

In September 2021, we announced that the AAUP and the American Federation of Teachers were exploring ways to expand and enhance our very successful ten-plus-year organizing partnership.

We are incredibly proud of the work that AAUP and AFT have done together to organize faculty and graduate employees around the US and to strengthen higher education and the profession. As a result of our partnership, more than twenty thousand faculty and other academic workers are in unions that are jointly represented by the AAUP and the AFT. In addition, we have worked together on important legislative efforts at the federal and state level to expand access to higher education, ensure adequate funding for public institutions, increase Pell grants, and expand academic workers’ right to unionize. AAUP members are already being included in planned student loan debt clinics run by AFT higher ed staff, and AFT members have had the opportunity to attend our Summer Institutes. Since last fall, we’ve been discussing how to best build on our successful organizing work, support our shared commitment to education and the common good, and build a stronger and more inclusive higher education movement.

We don’t believe it’s an exaggeration to say that democracy is hanging on by a thread right now, and a strong higher education movement is part of what’s needed to salvage and strengthen our democracy. In the few months since we started exploring possibilities for affiliation, the attacks on higher education and the common good have increased. Educational gag order legislation aimed at curtailing academic freedom has been introduced in thirty-eight states. We see administrations acquiescing to pressure from governing boards and state legislatures on fundamental issues such as academic freedom, faculty shared governance, and due process. We see state systems launching full assaults on tenure.

At the same time, we see a renewed interest in organizing to confront these challenges among faculty and other academic workers. On campuses where unionization is possible, we see faculty forming organizing committees and starting union campaigns. We also see a renewed interest in building and strengthening advocacy chapters as a vehicle for campus change. The ongoing challenges facing higher education and this renewed interest in organizing underscore the need for solidarity—with our colleagues and within our own organization, to be sure, but also with other organizations and with the academic labor movement as a whole. This affiliation will help all of us—AAUP and AFT Higher Education members together—achieve this.

Sincerely,

Irene Mulvey, President
Paul Davis, Vice President
Chris Sinclair, Secretary-Treasurer