AAUP All-Member Meeting Tomorrow

AAUP national continues to take the fight to defend higher ed to the streets and in the courts. Join us tomorrow, May 1, at 7 p.m. ET /4 p.m. PT for an AAUP national member meeting to discuss next steps. RSVP now. On the agenda: Congress’sintentions to use the federal budget process to continue the attacks on our campuses and communities, and our plan to fight back.

May 1: AAUP Takes Action

We’ll be standing with allies on May Day to fight the Trump administration’s war on working people. They’re defunding schools, privatizing public services, attacking unions, and targeting immigrant families with fear and violence. We encourage you to join in—find an action near you here.

AAUP members from across the country made their voices heard in mass actions on April 5, April 8, and April 17. On the April 17 Day of Action for Higher Ed, a whopping eighty-four AAUP chapters organized demonstrations, teach-ins, workshops, film screenings, and other events to share knowledge and skills and to highlight our demands for quality education, funding, and a safe and welcoming environment for all students.

New Report: Academic Freedom and Tenure: Muhlenberg College

The AAUP has released a new report, Academic Freedom and Tenure: Muhlenberg College, on the 2024 dismissal of Dr. Maura Finkelstein, a tenured associate professor and chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. An inquiry into the dismissal was conducted in a national context of proliferating faculty suspensions, disciplinary actions, and dismissals relating to campus protests. The report concludes that the administration, in dismissing Finkelstein from the faculty solely because of one anti-Zionist repost on Instagram, acted in violation of AAUP-supported principles and standards of academic freedom and due process.

The AAUP Takes on Trump in the Courts

Since the Trump administration began its assaults on our universities and on immigrants, the AAUP has filed five lawsuits in defense of our campuses and communities. We also continue to file amicus briefs supporting others who are doing the same. Most recently:

• Yesterday, a federal judge ruled that our case seeking to block the Trump administration from carrying out large-scale arrests, detentions, and deportations of noncitizen students and faculty members who participate in pro-Palestinian protests can go forward. The lawsuit alleges that the administration’s ideological-deportation policy violates the First Amendment by targeting constitutionally protected speech that Americans have a right to hear and engage with.
• The national AAUP and our Harvard chapter filed a lawsuit seeking to block the Trump administration from demanding that Harvard University restrict speech and restructure its core operations or else face the cancellation of $8.7 billion in federal funding for the university and its affiliated hospitals.
• With the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality, the AAUP submitted a friend-of-the-court brief supporting the law firm Perkins Coie in its battle against the Trump administration. The AAUP’s brief focuses on the harms that will be caused if lawyers are afraid to take on cases or make certain arguments for fear of retaliation by the government and discusses the dangerous position taken by the administration through its casual invocation of national security to justify all manner of actions and to push back against robust judicial review. Read the brief here.
• Thirty faculty groups, including seventeen AAUP chapters, organized to join an amicus brief urging a preliminary injunction against ideological deportations of students and scholars. AAUP members from public and private institutions, from community colleges and research universities, from Texas to Minnesota, California to New Hampshire, and points in between are exercising solidarity to protect students and co-workers.

Protecting Students and Faculty

• In response to news reports that the Office for Civil Rights in the US Department of Education has requested the names and nationalities of students and faculty who may have been involved in alleged Title VI violations, the AAUP wrote to college and university general counsels to clarify that they are under no legal compulsion to comply with such a request, and to strongly urge them not to comply, given the serious risks and harms of doing so. The guidance is clear that institutions should not provide student and faculty information to enable deportations. More here.
• More resources relating to political attacks on immigrants are here.

Academic Freedom and Attacks on Disciplinary Knowledge

• The AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure released a statement highlighting the specific dangers to academic freedom and shared governance in the Trump administration’s demand that Columbia University’s Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department be placed in receivership. Implicit in that demand is the unfounded assumption that critical scholarship on the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa produces antisemitism. The specific targeting of this department threatens a future where intellectual inquiry would be controlled by the state.
• The AAUP released a statement condemning the attacks on the National Endowment for the Humanities as another step toward authoritarianism.

Win for Faculty in Nevada

Faculty at Nevada State University are celebrating after winning the right to collectively bargain for a safe workplace, for faculty voice in decision-making through shared governance, and to address low and stagnant wages. The American Arbitration Association certified that an overwhelming majority of the roughly 120 faculty voted “yes” in the in-person election that took place April 1-2, by a vote of 104 to 8. More here.

Staffing Up for the Fight

• We are rebuilding our staff in order to support your organizing in more and better ways. The AAUP has welcomed three new staffers since March: Zach Kesler, membership database administrator; Brian Allen, organizer; and Lukas Moe, organizer. Max Friedfeld, organizer, and Lena Solow, lead organizer, will join the AAUP full-time in early June. All are in the Department of Organizing and Services.
• We’re hiring for a number of other positions including assistant counsel and three special campaign positions. Please share the listings!

Faculty Compensation Survey Preliminary Results Are Out

Real average salaries for full-time faculty increased for the second consecutive year after adjusting for inflation, according to preliminary results from the AAUP’s 2024–25 Faculty Compensation Survey. Nominal average salaries increased 3.8 percent from fall 2023 to fall 2024, while real wages increased only 0.9 percent after adjusting for the 2.9 percent increase in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers.

• Preliminary FCS findings are now available here, along with institution-level appendixes.
• Explore the results on the AAUP’s interactive data website at https://data.aaup.org/.

Save the Dates

• May 6 at 3 p.m. ET: In response to the escalating threats to our international students and colleagues, AFT Higher Education is hosting a webinar for all members: Understanding and Responding to Visa Revocations and Immigration Enforcement Actions on Campus. This webinar will address recent changes in immigration policies and how to best address them; the legal rights of graduate students, faculty, and staff union members during encounters with immigration authorities; and best practices to support individuals who have had their visas terminated.
• May 20, 6-7:30 p.m. ET: Over the last few weeks there has been a growing movement for faculty and university senates to pass mutual defense compacts to press their administrations to collaborate and fight for the future of higher ed. Join this timely webinar to explore the what, why, and how of mutual defense pacts—how they’re formed, what they accomplish, and how they are reshaping the landscape of higher education organizing. Speakers will share lessons from campuses already engaged in this movement, offer concrete strategies for building cross-campus solidarity, and provide tools and inspiration for collective action that can’t be ignored.
• July 17-20: The 2025 Summer Institute will be held July 17–20 at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. Registration coming soon.

Student Debt Alerts and Resources

• With increasing removals of important information from government websites, the National Consumer Law Center is strongly recommending that borrowers and those who work with them to screenshot IDR progress trackers ASAP in case they are removed. More in a blog post here.
• The Department of Education has announced that it will start forced collections against borrowers in default on May 5. See the NCLC blog poston what borrowers can do to protect themselves from forced collections.
• AAUP members get free access to student debt clinics and the Summer student debt management program through the American Federation of Teachers. Register here for debt clinics. Sign up for Summer here.

Special Series of AAUP Presents: Academic Freedom on the Line

Check out episode three of the AAUP Presents special series of podcasts “Academic Freedom on the Line,” produced in conjunction with the Center for Academic Freedom (CDAF). CDAF fellow and host Vineeta Singh speaks with Clare Carter at the Freedom to Learn team at PEN America to help us understand how state legislatures have attacked the principles of academic freedom, institutional autonomy, and shared governance, and then we get to hear from the students about what this has looked like on their campus, and how they have mobilized against these attacks. All episodes of AAUP Presents can be found on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and our website.

New Redbook is out!

The AAUP is excited to announce the publication of the twelfth edition of Policy Documents and Reports, known as the Redbook. The new Redbook comes ten years after the 2015 centennial edition, which celebrated the anniversary of the AAUP’s founding. This edition brings together new documents issued in the past decade; revised or updated materials, including new statistical information in the section on contingent appointments; and foundational documents such as the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure and the Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities.

Academe Seeks Book Review Editor

The American Association of University Professors seeks an AAUP member to serve as book review editor for Academe, its quarterly magazine. The book review editor’s primary responsibilities include identifying books for review and soliciting and editing nine to twelve book reviews each year. A stipend is available. Applications are due by June 1, 2025. More information here.

Journal of Academic Freedom Editor Search
The AAUP invites applications for a faculty editor or faculty coeditors for the next two volumes of the Journal of Academic Freedom, an online journal that seeks to develop international discussion of academic freedom and related issues. The faculty editor, who receives a stipend, is responsible for the selection and substantive editing of the articles that will appear in the journal’s one annual issue. Applications are due by June 1, 2025. More information here.

AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom tools and events:

• Check out the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom’s (CDAF) Academic Freedom Field Guide, which has been updated with new legal, digital security, and dox defense resources.
• Join us for our upcoming CDAF webinar,”Policing Higher Education: The Antidemocratic Attack on Scholars and Why It Matters,” Tuesday, May 13, 6 p.m. ET. Register here for a virtual discussion on Eve Darian-Smith’s new book Policing Higher Education: The Antidemocratic Attack on Scholars and Why It Matters. Darian Smith (distinguished professor and chair of the Department of Global Studies and International Studies at the University of California, Irvine and fellow at the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom) will be joined by a number of experts.

AAUP in the News

• “The workers and the unions, faculty, students, staff are leading and developing the fight in how to respond to the Trump administration, and we’re sort of dragging the universities along with us, slowly.” – Todd Wolfson, the AAUP president quoted in The Guardian.
• “It is high time for leading civil society institutions like Harvard to refuse and resist this federal government overreach and abuse.” – Kirsten Weld, a history professor at Harvard and president of the AAUP Harvard faculty chapter quoted in the Washington Post.
• “Institutions that stood up are remembered for standing up to that power and that coercion, they’re remembered for their acts of bravery,” she said. “Institutions that capitulated are remembered for their willingness to cave to autocratic demands.” – Risa Lieberwitz, president of the Cornell chapter of the AAUP quoted in WSKG News
• “This has been “a real example that when you create the space for workers to gather, they can and will self-organize.” – AAUP Local 6741 Secretary-Treasurer Bill Mullen quoted in Labor Notes.