2024 AAUP Updates

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.

This week, the AAUP filed an amicus brief in an important legal case concerning the ability of a college to terminate tenured faculty appointments due to the institution’s purported financial difficulties. The plaintiffs were tenured professors at Canisius College prior to their termination.

This week, the AAUP 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. Our briefs are a key component of our work to defend higher education for the common good, and they aim to shape the law to support academic freedom, which continues to face an unprecedented barrage of attacks. The AAUP hopes that these amicus briefs will spur the courts to issue decisions that will be favorable to the individual professors involved and that will protect the rights of faculty more broadly in the years to come.

The AAUP’s governing Council voted to add New College of Florida and Spartanburg Community College to the Association’s list of institutions sanctioned for substantial noncompliance with widely accepted standards of academic government.