As One Faculty we are…
Protecting Academic Freedom & Shared Governance
Academic Freedom
Academic freedom is the indispensable requisite for unfettered teaching and research in institutions of higher education. As the academic community’s core policy document states, “institutions of higher education are conducted for the common good and not to further the interest of either the individual teacher or the institution as a whole. The common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition”
Shared Governance
The role of the faculty is to have primary responsibility for such fundamental areas as curriculum, subject matter and methods of instruction, research, faculty status, and aspects of student life which relate to the educational process. The faculty should also have a role in decision-making outside of their immediate areas of primary responsibility, including long-term planning, budgeting, and the selection, evaluation and retention of administrators.
Tenure
The principal purpose of tenure is to safeguard academic freedom, which is necessary for all who teach and conduct research in higher education. When faculty members can lose their positions because of their speech, publications, or research findings, they cannot properly fulfill their core responsibilities to advance and transmit knowledge.
Academic Freedom
Academic freedom is the indispensable requisite for unfettered teaching and research in institutions of higher education. As the academic community’s core policy document states, “institutions of higher education are conducted for the common good and not to further the interest of either the individual teacher or the institution as a whole. The common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition” (1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, which has been endorsed by more than 250 national scholarly and educational associations).
Shared Governance
The role of the faculty is to have primary responsibility for such fundamental areas as curriculum, subject matter and methods of instruction, research, faculty status, and aspects of student life which relate to the educational process. The responsibility for faculty status includes appointments, reappointments, decisions not to reappoint, promotions, the granting of tenure, and dismissal. The faculty should also have a role in decision-making outside of their immediate areas of primary responsibility, including long-term planning, budgeting, and the selection, evaluation and retention of administrators.
Response to CRT and other censorship
The recent attempts to abolish or curtail teaching about the role of race in US history, and the ongoing repercussions of racism and slavery, represent the latest example of the same phenomenon. When politicians mandate the academic content that faculty can and cannot teach or the scholarly areas they can or cannot research or study, they prevent colleges and universities from fulfilling their missions. Such actions also severely violate both academic freedom, the cornerstone of American higher education, and the faculty’s primary role in institutional decision-making. The lasting results—which should be unacceptable to politicians across the ideological spectrum—are the impoverishment of student education and the diminution of the purpose of American higher education in a free society. To be clear, those most harmed by these cynical attempts of partisan political interference are the students. When legislators take actions like the ones we are seeing these days—actions which essentially legislate ignorance —our students are denied the opportunity to learn and grow.
One Faculty. One Resistance.
“”The Anming Hu case demonstrates the power of the AAUP at the local and the national levels to redress wrongs against individual faculty members.””
Donna Braquet
“I joined AAUP as an Assistant Professor because I was in a dysfunctional department and the Dean’s Office would do nothing to help us. Serving on the local AAUP Executive Committee as an Assistant Professor taught me how to help myself.”
Professor Mary McAlpin
“Over 30 years I’ve seen the tenure system weakened by continued threats, political and institutional. But AAUP has always stood for the importance of tenure and academic freedom for the pursuit of new knowledge, beneficial solutions to all of society’s challenges.”
Professor Laura Howes
