Happy spring to you all! Here’s your monthly digest of all things AAUP and higher ed.

Upcoming Events

• April 4 at 2:00 p.m. EST: Join us for a virtual discussion, “Campus Speech in Politically Charged Times.” Policy experts and local leaders from the AAUP and AFT will delve into how the AAUP’s policies and AFT and AAUP contract language on academic freedom and campus speech apply to the current situation, what faculty at different campuses are facing on the ground, and what our affiliates are doing to support our members and protect campus speech.
• June 13-16: The AAUP Conference and Biennial Meeting will take place in the Washington, DC, area. The conference includes informational sessions, presentations on pressing issues in higher education, AAUP awards, and plenary sessions. The biennial meeting conducts important AAUP business, including officer and Council elections. Learn more and register.
• August 1-4: Save the date! The 2024 Summer Institute will be held at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. You can read more about the institute here. Details about this year’s program will be forthcoming in the spring.

Spring Academe Preview

The March Academe preview includes four early-release articles from our forthcoming spring issue, which will reconsider the AAUP’s history through a racial-equity lens. This spring issue preview also includes new book reviews, a profile of the University of Pennsylvania AAUP chapter, a selection of recent posts from the Academe Blog, and congressional testimony by a former AAUP president that was originally published in the AAUP Bulletin in 1962. The full issue will be published in May.

AAUP in the Courts

Our amicus briefs are a key component of our work to defend higher education for the common good.  

• Echoing crucial points made in the AAUP’s brief, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court issued an important decision this month in a case involving academic freedom, grant funding, and tenure contract at Tufts University, writing, “academic freedom and economic security are not hortatory concepts but important norms in the academic community.” After noting that the central contractual language at issue in the case was taken word-for-word from the 1940 Statement, the court echoed crucial points made in the AAUP’s amicus brief, explaining in particular that “academic freedom is essential to the common good” and that the purpose of tenure is to safeguard academic freedom and ensure the economic security of faculty members.
• The AAUP filed an amicus brief in a case concerning the ability of a college to terminate tenured faculty appointments due to the institution’s purported financial difficulties. The brief was filed on behalf of four individuals who were tenured professors at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York.
• We also filed amicus briefs in two important legal cases involving the right of faculty members to teach and to speak publicly about curriculum standards and shared governance. More here.

Major Gift

The Academic Freedom Lecture Fund, a Michigan nonprofit corporation, has made a gift of $650,000 to the AAUP Foundation, in order to support work for the purpose of fostering an understanding of the meaning and value of academic freedom and intellectual freedom among faculty, students, staff, and the general public.

AAUP in the News

• The formation of an AAUP-AFT union for tenured and tenure-track faculty at the University of Michigan-Flint has come one step closer to reality, after university administrators agreed this month to recognize the bargaining unit.
• “Nobody trusts that this is actually going to be fairly applied…this policy is a clever way of looking reasonable but producing a climate where people are always looking over their shoulder to see who’s going to judge them.” – Alice Pawley, Purdue AAUP quoted in the New York Times on the signing of Indiana State Bill 202 into law.
• “We are seeing the brain drain that we predicted in Texas and Florida, and I think Indiana will follow suit there.” – AAUP president Irene Mulvey quoted on National Public Radio on the chilling impact of Indiana’s “intellectual diversity” bill, SB 202.
• “From campus administrations curtailing student protests, to trustees and politicians imposing an ideological litmus test on professors in the guise of “intellectual diversity,” while dictating our curricula and our campus programming, censorship has come to academia.” – Afshan Jafar and Simon Feldman in an op ed published in Inside Higher Education on the “viewpoint diversity” wave.
• “Since 1915 and urgently since Oct. 7, the A.A.U.P. has advocated a robust concept of academic freedom. We have urged administrators to provide an environment in which no voices are silenced, no ideas are suppressed, and the most deeply held beliefs are subject to challenge.” – AAUP president Irene Mulvey in an op ed published in the New York Times.
• The AAUP sanction of New College of Florida was covered in several outlets including USA Today, The Guardian, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Daily Beast.