Partnership Agreement

The AAUP and the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA) have agreed to work together as partner organizations in “defense and promotion of academic freedom, shared university governance, and the economic security of all those engaged in teaching and research in higher education.” In a formal agreement approved by the governing bodies of both organizations, the faculty groups “agreed to join together as independent but allied and cooperating entities.”

CUCFA is a coordinating agency for the faculty associations on nine of the ten separate campuses of the University of California. Under the arrangement with the AAUP, which will last for three years and is renewable, individual members of the nine campus faculty associations affiliated with CUCFA will be eligible to join the AAUP at special dues rates payable through their campus association. CUCFA will contribute financially to the AAUP, and the AAUP will provide the California associations with certain support services. The two organizations will promote each other’s activities and will plan a joint membership-organizing drive at all ten University of California campuses.

“The University of California has an exceptionally strong tradition of faculty activism dating back to the loyalty oath controversy of the 1950s and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of 1964,” says Henry Reichman, AAUP first vice president and a faculty member at California State University, East Bay, who negotiated the agreement on behalf of the AAUP. “We in the AAUP are excited about working more closely with the dedicated faculty who have built and sustained CUCFA and its constituent associations since their formation in the 1970s as effective advocates for the principles that the AAUP has upheld for a century.”