Winter 2022 | Vol. 108, No. 1
The winter issue of Academe explores how the pandemic has changed faculty organizing and engendered new kinds of solidarity. The articles offer snapshots of the recent work of AAUP chapters around the country, provide templates for expanding the faculty’s influence on campus, and draw out lessons that chapters can carry forward into a postpandemic era. They also serve as a reminder that, despite the upheaval of the past two years, the power of AAUP chapters is still built on the same foundations of effective organizing.

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Dear Colleagues,

As a union family, as colleagues, we are unified in our resolve for a contract for all of us and in breaking down the barriers of systemic injustices. 

We are excited to announce that after two years of bargaining through a pandemic – we have a new contract!

Our members overwhelmingly voted in favor to ratify the Tentative Agreement with the CSU; 95% of members who voted said yes. In addition, we had our highest voter turnout of the past decade.

As your colleagues and member-leaders of our CFA union family, we want to thank each and every one of you for turning out and showing the CSU administration that this contract matters.

This new contract and our vote show that we can win pay raises and address issues of anti-racism and social justice at the same time. 

Our salary increases – General Salary Increases (GSI), Service Salary Increases (SSI), and Post Promotion Increases (PPI) – mean so much more to our members, addressing need with immediate increases, as well as a $3,500 COVID Service Award, which acknowledges the tremendous amount of uncompensated labor heaped onto faculty during the early phase of the pandemic. And we will reopen salary negotiations next year to further address salary equity and inflation.

The anti-racism and social justice provisions in our new contract are powerful. We took a number of steps to accomplish this, including increasing exceptional service awards and naming “cultural taxation” as a workload problem faced by faculty whose social identities include women and/or Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC), and/or LGBTQIA+. 

Lecturers deserve the increased rights and respect gained in this contract, including expanded range elevation. We secured three years of expanded eligibility to many more lecturer and librarian faculty who were shut out of the program in the past. 

Counselor and librarian working conditions will improve with this contract through new terms for teleworking. Our faculty knew it was time to modernize and allow these important services to happen on and off campus locations, and we’ve seen it work for the last two years. 

Coaches now have more stable job security with the opportunity for multi-year contracts, instead of being on year-to-year contracts for decades.   

This truly is a contract for us all. And these provisions will make a difference collectively and individually.

Charles Toombs; CFA President; Professor, Africana Studies, San Diego State
“After two hard-fought, member-driven years of bargaining, we have a new contract! This vote signifies that we can bargain for salary gains while at the same time moving our working conditions forward through an anti-racism and social justice lens. We are stronger together and our votes demonstrate that emphatically. This is a historic contract for all of us.”

Kevin Wehr; CFA Vice President; Professor, Sociology, Sacramento State 
“This is a historic contract in so many ways; it is the first contract bargained explicitly with our anti-racism and social justice frame, and we’ve made some great strides on this including new and defensible rights; there are gains made in important areas of the contract that all members will benefit from, including several firsts for CSU faculty and firsts for the nation; we have a fair compensation package that demonstrates equal pay for equal work; and all of this was bargained during a pandemic—another first that hopefully will not be repeated!"

Vang Vang; CFA Treasurer; Librarian, Fresno State
“When I joined the CFA Bargaining Team, my goal was to win a contract that I could be proud of, a contract that would have something for every member. Raises are awesome but we achieved so much more in this contract, and I could not be prouder. For my work, changes to Article 20 will make an immediate difference, giving librarians and counselors the right to telework. This shows us respect as professionals. I cannot thank my librarian colleagues across the 23 campuses enough for advocating alongside myself and our bargaining team for this win. For me, this contract is just the beginning.” 

Even with this contract, our advocacy continues. We still have a salary reopener next year. Our workgroups need to meet about much needed measures like parental support and teaching tenure/professor of practice. Additionally, we look forward to the Chancellor’s upcoming announcement regarding alternatives to policing and working with him on a path forward. 

We need all of us, together, statewide and on our chapter campuses to continue our important advocacy to further our collective rights, respect, and justice. Please continue to be in contact with your chapter leadership and chapter representatives for our work to progress forward.

Again, as your colleagues and CFA member-leaders, we thank each and every one of you. Together, we secured a contract for us all.

In union, 
CFA officers
 
 

State legislatures across the nation have passed legislation barring the teaching of “divisive concepts.” In some states, this legislation excludes teaching about race and gender at the university level. Faculty senates at Michigan State, Portland State, DePaul University, Molloy College, and the Universities of Alabama, Colorado, Delaware, Minnesota, and Oregon have all passed resolutions defending academic freedom and rejecting such educational gag orders.
We’re pleased to offer a webinar on faculty senate resolutions on behalf of our coalition partners at the African American Policy Forum. Please join in a discussion on Thursday, February 17, at 1 p.m. ET, about the importance of these resolutions to the preservation of education and why institutions of higher education need to commit to ideologically free classrooms.
Two members of the African American Policy Forum, DePaul University professor Valerie Johnson and Portland State professor Jennifer Ruth (who also serves on the AAUP's Committee A), will lead the webinar and answer questions about how to use shared governance to fight back against this assault on academic freedom. Resources to pursue the resolution campaign on your campus will be provided.
Register at https://www.aaup.org/event/webinar-using-faculty-senate-fight-educational-gag-orders.
Best wishes,
Gwendolyn Bradley, AAUP Senior Program Officer

As we approach the end of the year, we’re happy to release something that requires absolutely zero time on Zoom—a new podcast from the AAUP called AAUP Presents.

We just released our first batch of three episodes and they’re available to listen on all the podcast platforms and on our website.

• Listen on Spotify
• Listen on Apple Podcasts
• Listen directly on the AAUP site

We’re kicking off this series with an interview with AAUP president Irene Mulvey, who takes us through some of AAUP’s work this year as it relates to the pandemic, to academic freedom, and to the New Deal for Higher Education.

Episode two is a look at AAUP’s work on shared governance, with an examination of a special investigation of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on governance. We also discuss the results of our national shared governance survey, including data on the impact of the pandemic, the demographics of senate chairs and governance structures, and faculty roles in decision-making.

We round out this debut series with a podcast about the 2020–21 Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, which also features a deeper dive into the issue of institutional debt.

We had some great guests for these shows, and we hope you’ll give it a listen! If you have topics you’d like to hear covered in future episodes, drop me a line at mquinn@aaup.orgwith your ideas.

I hope you have a safe and happy December.

Mariah Quinn
Senior Program Officer for Digital Organizing and Chapter Services

Dear Colleague,
I am president of the AAUP and the AAUP Foundation, and I appreciate your interest in and support for the AAUP. As 2021 draws to a close, I hope you will consider the AAUP Foundation in your year-end giving plans. 
The AAUP Foundation is the charitable and educational arm of the AAUP, and it funds very important work that we would not be able to do with membership dues alone.
The Foundation’s Academic Freedom Fund supports projects that safeguard academic freedom to create a higher education environment in which teaching, learning, and research can flourish. Through this fund, we support governance investigations and academic freedom investigations, underwrite costs for the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom, and provide grants to individual faculty members whose academic freedom has been violated. This year, a grant from the Academic Freedom Fund paid for our sweeping, omnibus governance investigation and special report, COVID-19 and Academic Governance, which documented what it called “opportunistic exploitations of catastrophic events” at eight institutions and resulted in sanctions for violating principles of academic governance for seven of them. Commitments for next year include funding for the special AAUP committee that will prepare a report on violations of principles of academic governance and persistent structural racism in the University of North Carolina system. 
You can support this work by donating to the AAUP Foundation.
This year, our Foundation awarded an Academic Freedom Fund grant to Isaac Kamola, associate professor of political science at Trinity College, for his Faculty First Responders project, which helps faculty members learn how to respond quickly and effectively when they or their colleagues are targeted for truly brutal online harassment when their work, especially on topics related to race, is picked up by groups like Campus Reform whose agenda is to frighten faculty into submission and to stoke conservative outrage against higher education. 

Please join us in providing funding for these kinds of essential projects.
The Foundation’s Legal Defense Fund supports litigation that protects academic freedom and professional rights, and it provides funding for the amicus briefs we file in cases with important implications for higher education. This year, the Foundation’s support allowed the AAUP to weigh in on a case about the teaching of ideas about race in Texas, a case involving the distribution of antiunion materials by Oregon State University, and a case concerning firearms at the University of Michigan.
We must continue the important work of the AAUP Foundation and expand its efforts.
Your donation in any amount will help. 
Join me in making a difference for 2022 with a year-end gift. 
Sincerely,
Irene Mulvey
President, AAUP and AAUP Foundation 
P.S. If you prefer to donate by mail, please make a check payable to "AAUP Foundation" and send to:
AAUP Foundation
1133 Nineteenth Street NW, Suite 200
Washington DC 20036

ATLANTA – Eight Southern state chapters of a national organization of university professors are asking the University System of Georgia to rescind changes in tenure policies they argue would essentially abolish the tenure system.
The system’s Board of Regents voted in October to replace a system that permits professors to be fired only for a specific cause following a peer review with a system that lets professors be dismissed if they fail to take corrective steps following two consecutive subpar reviews.
“The board’s new procedure for post-tenure review exposes faculty to censorship, ideological bias and notoriously fickle criteria like student evaluations and ‘performance,’ ” leaders of the eight state chapters of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)  Awrote in a letter Wednesday to Teresa MacCartney, the university system’s acting chancellor.
“When implemented, the University System of Georgia will no longer have tenure and, therefore, meaningful academic freedom will cease to exist.”
The letter went on to warn that the new policy will discourage professors from wishing to come to Georgia and motivate those already in the system to leave.
The changes in post-tenure review, which will apply to all 26 of the system’s colleges and universities except Georgia Gwinnett College, emerged from the recommendations of a working group formed in September of last year.
The goal of the changes was to ensure faculty members continue to do their jobs well after they have achieved tenure, the regents wrote in a prepared statement following the October vote.
But about 1,500 professors on university system campuses signed a petition opposing the changes.
The national AAUP is conducting an investigation of the changes that could lead the group to censure the university system. A report is expected before the end of the year.
The chapters signing onto the letter represented the Southern states of North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Louisiana, Texas, Tennessee, Kentucky and Oklahoma.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.

As fall terms get underway on campuses, so too do state legislative campaigns seeking to restrict teaching about the history of race and racism in the United States. Three states have already pre-filed bills for the 2022 legislative season, and several more have active legislation that will carry over from the 2021 session. 
The bills are a naked attempt to manipulate curricula to advance partisan or ideological aims. Many attack the scholarly field of critical race theory, but their purpose is much broader: to suppress teaching and learning about racism.
We’d like to know if and how these bills, or related attempts to chill the free exchange of facts and ideas about American history, have affected you. Please let us know by taking this brief survey. 
The AAUP is working to protect faculty’s ability to teach the truth about American history, and to further racial justice in higher education and in our own organization. Here are some resources and initiatives we’d like members to know about:

• The African American Policy Forum has issued a call to action for faculty to push back against these attacks on teaching by introducing faculty senate resolutions at the institutions. You can see a model resolution here and register for an October 14 kickoff event here. 
  
• This month, we filed an amicus brief condemning political attacks on teaching about race in Texas.
  
• Also this month, we welcomed to the staff a new government relations specialist who will work with chapters and state conferences, focusing this year on legislation that seeks to restrict teaching about race and racism
  
• We have launched a special committee that will report on a pattern of egregious violations of principles of academic governance and persistent structural racism in the University of North Carolina System.
  
• We issued this Statement on Legislation Restricting Teaching about Race.
  
• AAUP members discuss Critical Race Theory and the Assault on Antiracist Thinkingand Holding the Line against Attacks on Critical Race Theory in Nebraska in the fall issue of Academe magazine.
  
• Finally, over the past year, AAUP staff and leaders have been planning and participating in an intensive process to learn about systemic racism in the United States and re-evaluate our practices in light of what we learn. Because the work we are undertaking is substantial and deep, it will take time, and results will not be immediate. But we expect that it will be deep and lasting. 
  

More information about the wave of legislation seeking to suppress teaching about race is here. Other resources about racial justice are here.
In solidarity,
Glinda Rawls
Chair, AAUP Racial Justice Committee

As if the Fall 2021 semester couldn’t be more eventful, with many of you teaching and working on campus, fighting to protect your health and those of our students, and the myriad of issues you face every semester, our first big break towards a New Deal, the Build Back Better Act, has begun to move through Congress. We need your help to pass it! The passage of this bill will make President Biden’s American Families Plan law.
Join us for a day of action on Wednesday, September 15th as the Senate comes back into session, urging them to support the Build Back Better Act - as well as to ask for further investments in the academic workforce. (For details on the bill, click here).
As New Deal activists, can you take these actions on Wednesday, September 15?

1. Send a letter to your members of Congress via Action Network.
   
2. Post that Action Network link on your local or chapter’s social media.
   
3. Send out a call to action to your colleagues. Our toolkit includes samples materials for a draft email to members.
   
4. If you have any meetings around that date, ask the whole group to take some collective action on the Build Back Better Act. Check out our sample materials for more background and examples of social media posts, scripts for a voicemail at your senator’s office, and more. 
   

Additionally, we are holding a joint AFT/AAUP national advocacy meeting for chapter leaders on Friday, September 17th. Our presidents Randi Weingarten and Irene Mulvey will share the latest updates on the Build Back Better Act, answer any questions, and lay out opportunities to act in the coming weeks. You can RSVP here.
Please let us know how we can support you locally in this federal campaign!
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Jim Bakken, AAUP Deputy Director of Organizing Services 
Richelle Fiore, AFT Director of Higher Education Organizing