AAUP
https://www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/favicon.ico
The AAUP has released a new Statement on Academic Boycotts, which reconsiders the AAUP's prior categorical opposition to academic boycotts set forth in the 2006 report On Academic Boycotts. The AAUP's revised policy maintains that academic boycotts are not in themselves violations of academic freedom and can instead be legitimate tactical responses to conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education.

The ascension of J. D. Vance to the Republican presidential ticket has brought the decades-long battle to define the future of American higher education to a tipping point. With Vance, American Far-Right authoritarians have succeeded in elevating a fascist who vows to “aggressively attack universities in this country” to within striking distance of their goal: the annihilation of American higher education as we know it. All those who care about higher education, academic freedom, and the future of democracy should prepare for the fight ahead by organizing their campus communities.

The AAUP has joined 227 organizations signing onto a letter urging the US Department of Education to release its hardship proposal on student debt relief in order to ease the financial burdens faced by student borrows and their families. The Department of Education's Notice of Proposed Rulemarking would provide student debt relief to student loan borrowers experiencing hardship and provide an outline for the Biden administration to continue its mission of student debt relief nationwide.

The report describes key institutional finance trends in US higher education and documents the ongoing shift in the makeup of the academic workforce from mostly full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty members to mostly faculty members holding contingent appointments that are ineligible for tenure.

Key findings on compensation include the following. From fall 2022 to fall 2023, nominal average salaries for full-time faculty members increased 3.8 percent for all academic ranks combined. However, real average salaries for full-time faculty members are nowhere near prepandemic levels. Economic conditions remain dire for part-time faculty members, who make up just under half (48.7 percent) of the academic workforce. In 2022–23, part-time faculty members earned an average of $3,903 per three-credit course section.

“This is extremely alarming for academic freedom,” said Anita Levy, a senior program officer in the AAUPs’ Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure and Governance. Faculty members who lack tenure “teach in precarious positions,” she said, and don’t “have economic security and may feel that they need to either self-censor or revise their curricula or their teaching methods.”

At the root of it all, Levy said, is a “demonization of higher education faculty.” Attacks on tenure are just part of a broader right-wing attack on higher education that’s taken hold in some state legislatures and in political discourse on the right, she said.

Todd Wolfson, president of the AAUP, called for greater transparency, including student, faculty and staff involvement.

“This should be an open, transparent process,” he said. “We don’t think Florida has done a good job with transparency. … No one knows if Ron DeSantis put some candidates on a dartboard and threw a dart.”

“We need [the new UF president] not to be a political hack who knows nothing about higher education,” he said. “If you don’t understand it, you don’t value it.”

For an industry that employs four million Americans and attempts to educate 15 million more, higher education is, strangely, routinely ignored in presidential elections. But there’s hope for 2024, though not for the best of reasons. IHE asked a range of higher ed leaders, thinkers, reformers and skeptics what they’d ask Biden, Trump or both candidates if CNN magically handed them the microphone.

Here are some of their sharpest questions:

"The U.S. has a world-class public education system, but states’ divestment in public universities has resulted in higher tuition rates, worsening racial inequalities and preventing many from a path of upward mobility. How can we maintain and extend excellence in public higher education while making college and university affordable for a broad swath of U.S. society?" Rotua Lumbantobing, vice president of the AAUP.

An attorney defending Florida's STOP WOKE Act argued that a state can “insist that professors not offer—or espouse, I should say, and endorse—viewpoints that are contrary to the state’s.”

But AAUP Risa Lieberwitz, general counsel for the AAUP, says: “the state of Florida is making an extreme argument about the First Amendment that would eliminate academic freedom completely in the classroom, and that is an argument without merit under the First Amendment.”