2024 AAUP Updates

As part of a coalition of 228 national, state, and local civil rights, consumer advocacy, veterans, disability, and labor organizations, the AAUP has submitted comments supporting student debt cancellation. We encourage the US Department of Education to implement it as swiftly and efficiently as possible and to ensure that it provides the maximum amount of relief to borrowers.

The AAUP and its chapters defend the right to free speech and peaceful protest on university campuses, condemn the militarized response by institutional leaders to these activities, and vehemently oppose the politically motivated assault on higher education.

Faculty at the University of Kansas have voted overwhelmingly for a union, affiliated with the AAUP and AFT. United Academics of the University of Kansas represents more than 1,550 full-time and part-time tenured and nontenure-track faculty; teaching, research, clinical and online professors; lecturers; curators; librarians; grant-funded research scientists, and other academic staff.

The AAUP condemns in the strongest possible terms the crackdown on peaceful dissent occuring this week at Columbia, NYU, and other universities nationwide. The arrests of students and faculty are a disproportionate and wrong-headed response to overwhelmingly peaceful campus events.

Our campuses should be places of learning and education. Our goal should be dialogue and communication in service of understanding. Critically evaluating different points of view and putting up to debate even the most deeply held beliefs are what we should be promoting, modeling and supporting. President Shafik’s silencing of peaceful protesters and having them hauled off to jail does a grave disservice to Columbia’s reputation and will be a permanent stain on her presidential legacy.

AAUP president Irene Mulvey released a statement ahead of an upcoming House Education and Workforce Committee hearing.

Preliminary findings from our annual Faculty Compensation Survey show that average salaries for full-time faculty members increased 3.8 percent, following a 4.1 percent increase the prior year. Real (inflation-adjusted) average salaries for full-time faculty members increased 0.4 percent—the first time in four years that wage growth has exceeded inflation—but are nowhere close to the levels before the COVID-19 pandemic. The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers increased 3.4 percent in 2023, 6.5 percent in 2022, 7.0 percent in 2021, and 1.4 percent in 2020.

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has issued an important decision recognizing academic freedom and economic security as “important norms in the academic community.”

After noting that contractual language at issue in the case was taken word-for-word from the AAUP’s 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, 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.