2021 AAUP Updates

The AAUP condemns in the strongest possible terms the recent actions to ban, limit, or distort the teaching of history and related academic subjects.

The AAUP released the second report on data collected from the 2021 AAUP Shared Governance Survey, the first national survey on shared governance since 2001. Focusing on faculty roles in decision making areas at 585 randomly-sampled four-year institutions of higher education, the report notes that the survey presents a mixed picture of the current state of shared governance.

The AAUP's Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2020–21, outlines how years of unstable funding, combined with the impacts of the COVID‑19 pandemic, have created an existential threat to shared governance and academic freedom in higher education that severely weakens our nation’s ability to effectively educate our communities.

As part of their efforts to roll back harmful Trump-era regulations, the US Department of Education announced a public comment period on a wide range of student lending and educational quality topics. The AAUP is calling for reforms to Public Service Loan Forgiveness, greater representation of faculty on rulemaking committees, and a quick decision on broad-based student loan cancellation.

At a time when the country is confronting deep-rooted racial inequity, legislators in a number of states have moved to restrict teaching about oppression, race, and gender.

We strongly oppose these efforts to stifle education about racism and American history in schools, colleges, and universities. Along with more than seventy other organizations who have signed on to a statement authored by the AAUP, PEN America, the American Historical Association, and the Association of American Colleges & Universities, we affirm that Americans of all ages deserve nothing less than a free and open exchange about history and the forces that shape our world today.

Matthew Finkin remembers Marty Lapidus, who died on May 27 at the age of eighty.

A new AAUP report on data from the first national survey about shared governance in two decades focuses on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on governance. Analyzing the results of a questionnaire completed by faculty governance leaders, it documents both the ways in which academic governance has been under severe pressure during the pandemic and an increase in faculty influence at some institutions.

At a time when bills seeking to suppress teaching about race, oppression, and gender are proliferating in the states, the unrebutted assumption must be that the board was motivated by concerns about Hannah-Jones's work on the New York Times's Pulitzer Prize-winning "1619 Project" and that its intervention was therefore not only inappropriate but racist and blatantly political, linked to a wider attack on teaching and learning about the role of racism in the history of the United States.