AAUP Council

We share a belief that higher education is in a crisis that stretches back at least fifty years, beginning with the racialized and gendered divestment from our postsecondary institutions. This crisis has led to mounting student debt, commodified education, a devalued contingent workforce, and attacks on tenure and academic freedom at colleges and universities, which far too often exploit the communities where they reside. As the administrative class grows, both faculty governance and the educational mission suffer. This long crisis in higher education has been accelerated by the pandemic, where over 650,000 workers in the sector lost their jobs.

The sheer magnitude of the crisis across higher education demands a new approach in order to build the power necessary for the collective transformation of the sector. To that end, we believe that AAUP and all higher ed workers must focus on a broad vision of wall-to-wall organizing in and beyond our campuses.

For us this means tearing down the barriers that divide us to build advocacy chapters, coalitions, and collective bargaining units across job categories: from professional staff and grad workers to dining staff, adjunct faculty, and tenure track faculty. It means confronting contingency at our institutions and demanding that all higher ed work be treated with dignity. It means aligning ourselves with students to cancel student debt, while winning free public higher education in two and four year institutions. It means recognizing that our campuses have no borders and we must organize for and with the communities to which we belong. It means recognizing and making reparations for the present-day and historic harms that academia has wrought on communities of color: labor exploitation, land displacement, and scientific experimentation. And this recognition demands that our institutions go beyond declarations and reports to undertake reparations in our broader communities. Another university is possible.