Mark Your Calendar

Plan to join your colleagues at the AAUP’s Annual Conference on the State of Higher Education and annual business meeting, June 12-16, 2013.

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What's New

The AAUP's Committee on Women wrote University of Connecticut President Susan Herbst urging the university to commit time and resources to the development of sound policies and procedures for managing sexual assault on campus.

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Standing Committee and Subcommittee Reports

Freedom and Responsibility

Statement addressing the ethical responsibilities that go along with academic freedom.

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The Role of the Faculty in Conditions of Financial Exigency

A report making recommendations on the faculty's role in financial exigency and proposing revisions to the AAUP's Recommended Institutional Regulations on Academic Freedom and Tenure. Program closures on the scale we have recently witnessed represent a massive transfer of power from the faculty to the administration over curricular matters that affect the educational missions of institutions, for which the faculty should always bear the primary responsibility. Increasingly, administrators are making budgetary decisions that profoundly affect the curricula and the educational missions of their institutions; rarely are those decisions recognized as decisions about the curriculum, even though the elimination of entire programs of study (ostensibly for financial reasons) has obvious implications for the curricular range and the academic integrity of any university.

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The Inclusion in Governance of Faculty Members Holding Contingent Appointments

The proportion of faculty appointments that are “contingent”—lacking the benefits and protections of tenure and a planned long-term relationship with an institution—has increased dramatically over the past few decades. The structures of faculty governance, however, as well as AAUP policies on the subject, tend to assume a faculty that is primarily full time and on the tenure track. This report examines the issues and makes recommendations on how contingent faculty should be included in institutional governance.