What is AAUP Advocacy Local 6741 of AFT?

Good question. It is a bit complicated. The short story: When AAUP merged with AFT recently, all AAUP members became AFT members too. For members of AAUP unionized chapters (i.e., ones that already had collective bargaining agreements), they entered AFT as separate locals. But many AAUP members are not in collective bargaining chapters. They are either affiliated with non-unionized “Advocacy Chapters” on their campuses or are independent members of AAUP with no university chapter to be affiliated with. During the merger, it was decided that all independent AAUP members and those in AAUP Advocacy chapters would be placed into one large AFT local, the so-called AAUP Advocacy Local 6741 of AFT, to give them a voice and place in AFT national. 

The aggregation of this large number of AAUP members into AAUP-AFT Local 6741 makes it a very large AFT local (~top 1% of all AFT locals in terms of size), which confers on it considerable voting power and resource allocation within AFT.