From Mike Budd, United Faculty of Florida NEA/AFT/AAUP/AFL-CIO
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) is becoming more of a labor union and less of an old-fashioned advocacy organization, with new, more activist leadership, influenced by increased organizing in the higher education labor movement, and moving to counter more authoritarian management by higher education bosses.
The venerable AAUP, founded in 1915 by John Dewey and Arthur O. Lovejoy, has defended academic freedom and tenure for university professors for more than a century, and continues to enjoy an influence far beyond its relatively small size, based on an older, residual tradition of advocacy and “shared governance.” But since the sixties, as higher education has grown to be a major industry with growing alienation between workers and managers, faculty, students and other campus workers have increasingly realized that we are being managed like workers in other industries. Gradually losing the illusion that our status as highly-educated professionals will magically allow us to continue to exert substantial control over our work, we have begun to organize and join unions, negotiate collective bargaining contracts, and engage in political action in our own and the public interest, including lobbying and strikes. Increasingly in competition with more than a dozen major national unions organizing campus workers, national AAUP since about 2009 has facilitated the transition of some of its more than 500 chapters around the country into unions that bargain collectively, often in affiliation with the American Federation of Teachers.
AAUP’s gradual transition into a more active labor union as well as a professional association has been accelerated in recent years as academic bosses adopt neoliberal labor practices of brutal austerity, “running a university like a corporation.” These practices of commodifying higher ed, replacing the public good with private priorities, have reached even the older, relatively affluent and protected liberal arts and research universities where many AAUP chapters represent faculty. Seeking to use its strengths as a think tank for the higher education labor movement, AAUP has responded with valuable blogs, reports and conference presentations focusing increased attention on the majority of faculty who are contingent and beyond its core constituency, demonstrating how precarity erodes academic freedom and how faculty working conditions are student learning conditions.
AAUP’s elected leadership has become more union-oriented and activist in recent years, too, culminating in 2024 with the election of Todd Wolfson as President, supported by a slate of like-minded officers and national council members. Wolfson has been a leader of the Rutgers AAUP-AFT chapter, including during the successful recent strike, and also a leader in HELU.
Wolfson and other AAUP leaders have wasted no time in helping to build the growing higher education labor movement. On September 13, 2024, Wolfson joined other higher ed union leaders from around the country in a press conference and statement of unity that received national attention. To quote from the AAUP’s own statement:
AAUP and Other Labor Leaders Lay Out Vision for Public Higher Ed Under a Harris Presidency
Leaders of multiple national labor organizations representing faculty and staff at hundreds of colleges and universities nationwide held a press conference in Philadelphia today calling on Kamala Harris to ensure our nation’s democratic future through a renewed federal investment in our higher education institutions. The press conference coincided with the release of a Statement of Unity signed by several national unions and labor organizations including the AAUP, AFSCME, AFT, CWA, HELU, NEA, OPEIU, SEIU, UAW, Unite Here, and more.
Our coalition recognizes American higher education as a public good and bedrock of our democracy. However, the current crisis in higher education of declining public funding, ballooning student debt, and widespread job insecurity threatens that promise and jeopardizes learning and working conditions for millions of Americans.
Colleges and universities should propel opportunity for the working class—for students, workers, and communities. This is why higher education labor leaders are calling for full federal funding of public higher education, expanded access, an end to the student debt crisis, and sustainable working conditions for the four million higher education workers that form the backbone of communities in every state in the country. Workers in US community colleges, technical schools, state colleges, and research universities maintain campuses, feed students, teach courses, undertake research, care for patients, and collectively make American higher education the envy of the world.
AAUP is well on its way to joining, and helping to lead, the growing higher education labor movement.