An Appreciation of Risa Lieberwitz’s Service as AAUP General Counsel

The AAUP thanks Risa Lieberwitz for her extraordinary decade of service as the AAUP’s general counsel. During remarkably tumultuous times, Risa was instrumental in keeping AAUP principles and policies front and center while monitoring legal developments in higher education and providing advice to AAUP governing bodies.

A comprehensive review of Risa’s service over her ten years as general counsel would require an entire issue of Academe. Future historians will have the pleasure of reviewing her quarterly reports to the AAUP’s Council, her legal roundups at the Summer Institute, and the numerous policy documents and amicus briefs in which she had a hand. Here, I touch on only a few highlights.

During Risa’s tenure, the AAUP’s work opposing discrimination and supporting remedies for discrimination was outstanding. Our brief in Freyd v. University of Oregon provided a thorough, data-based argument showing ongoing gender-based salary inequities, particularly for women full professors at doctoral institutions. In the Supreme Court cases Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. UNC, the AAUP joined with thirty-nine other higher education associations in a brief describing how race-conscious admissions policies further educational objectives and stressing the importance of a racially diverse student body to the promotion and protection of academic freedom. And while the court’s disappointing decision overturned forty years of precedent, the arguments set forth in the brief stand and the AAUP’s work in this area continues. At the 2024 Summer Institute, Risa presented on the multiple ways AAUP chapters and members can maintain the progress toward diversity in higher education even after the court’s decision on affirmative action.

Highlights of Risa’s work on academic freedom include a brief supporting Florida faculty members challenging Florida’s “Stop WOKE” act and a brief with the Nevada Faculty Alliance in support of a professor who faced retaliation from college administrators for speaking up about lowered curricular standards. The brief outlining AAUP policies on academic freedom in McAdams v. Marquette University was cited in the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s excellent decision reversing the suspension and banishment from campus of a faculty member punished for posts on his personal blog. The brief in Buchanan v. Alexander emphasized the importance of faculty being able to use controversial language and ideas to challenge students in the classroom.

In short, we have Risa to thank for ensuring that the AAUP’s voice was preeminent in fighting for the rights of faculty, in protecting academic freedom and due process, in advancing shared governance and faculty collective bargaining rights, and in advancing diversity and racial equity in higher education. It is essential to point out that Risa did all of this work while she was a full-time professor of labor and employment law in the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations and, for part of the time, president of the Cornell AAUP chapter!

In addition to being an extraordinary asset for the AAUP, Risa is a treasured colleague. Members will remember her rare gift for clearly explaining complex arguments, and I will forever appreciate her willingness to talk through any matter with me. Risa is newly appointed to Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, so we can all be grateful that her service to the AAUP will continue.

Irene Mulvey is immediate past president of the AAUP