From Kelly Benjamin, AAUP Media and Communications

AAUP Members on the Front Lines

As 2024 unfolds, the crisis in American higher education continues to make headlines nationwide, as do AAUP members fighting on the front lines to preserve academic freedom, shared governance, and quality in higher education. Here are the top clips of your colleagues in the news over the past month. As always, to stay up to date on all things AAUP, please follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Threads.

• “Universities don’t exist to serve private interests. They are not tools for the business interests or political agendas of donors and trustees.” – AAUP–Penn president Amy Offner quoted in the Daily Pennsylvaian’s coverage of faculty protests at Penn in defense of academic freedom as donor and political interference at the university escalates. The New York Times also reported on the protest.
• “While extolling Cornell’s existing policies protecting academic freedom and freedom of speech and expression, the new Interim Policy severely restricts those very freedoms” – Statement from Cornell–AAUP in protest of new restrictions on campus activity published in The Cornell Daily Sun.
• “The entire policy is rife with vague and subjective terms that could be applied unfairly.” – The American University AAUP chapter’s statement quoted in Inside Higher Education on a new policy banning indoor protests on campus.

Standing Up to the Cuts:

• “What could be more important for future problem solvers, creators, risk takers, innovators, lawmakers, teachers and students than understanding how our lives are shaped by the cultural and structural forces around us and how we collectively shape them in return?” – Afshan Jafar, cochair of the AAUP’s special committee on Florida, in an op-ed for the Tampa Bay Times on the removal of sociology as a core curriculum in the state.
• “Our students see adjunct faculty living on food stamps. They see mental health counselors with no availability for weeks or months. And they see so few course offerings that they can’t graduate on time.” – Connecticut State University AAUP president Louise Williams quoted in The Connecticut Mirror pushing back against proposed state budget cuts for higher education.
• “It’s a slap in the face intended to send a message to the faculty that they are not going to be listened to.”– University of North Carolina at Greensboro AAUP president Mark Elliot quoted on WXII TV News on the announcement of twenty program cuts from UNC Greensboro despite weeks of pushback from students, faculty, and alumni.
• “An undue amount of this revenue has gone to fund ballooning upper administrative costs. Meanwhile, faculty and staff wages and working conditions have been greatly diminished in the last 10 years.” – Victor Reyes, executive director of the Oregon state conference of the AAUP, quoted in the Oregon Capital Chronicle.

AAUP Research in the News:

• “There is no more important place for colleges to spend their money than hiring the best instructors they can find and providing fair pay, benefits and reasonable working conditions.” – The Los Angeles Times Editorial Board admonishing U.S. colleges for the overreliance on contingent faculty (cites AAUP data on contingent faculty positions)
• “The current academic climate underscores the necessity for changes within the academy concerning the production, cultivation and retention of Black scholars.”– Ms. Magazine (cites the AAUP’s 2020 Data Snapshot)

In Solidarity,
Kelly Benjamin
AAUP Media and Communications