2024 AAUP Updates

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.

We, along with other members of the American labor movement, mourn the loss of life in Israel and Palestine. We express our solidarity with all workers and our common desire for peace in Palestine and Israel, and we call on President Joe Biden and Congress to push for an immediate ceasefire and end to the siege of Gaza. Read the whole statement.

The AAUP has received a grant from the Mellon Foundation to establish a Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, with the aim of examining and confronting the recent surge of political and ideological attacks on American higher education.

The AAUP released a statement today commenting on the recent US House Committee on Education and the Workforce demand for documents and information from the University of Pennsylvania on attempts to curb antisemitism. The statement calls on administrators, faculties, trustees, and all who care about higher education as a public good in a democracy to resist political interference and reaffirm their commitments to academic freedom, freedom of expression, shared governance, and institutional autonomy.