The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) is a nonprofit membership association of faculty and academic professionals. The association was founded in 1915 through a series of meetings at the Chemists’ Club in New York, and has grown over the last century into a coalition of collective bargaining units and advocacy groups at public and private institutions of higher education.

The AAUP defines standards for equitable policies of academic employment, prioritizes faculty and staff involvement in shared governance, and advances rights and interests pertaining to academic freedom and teaching conditions. The organization is headquartered in Washington, DC, with members and chapters based at colleges and universities across the United States. 

Our AAUP chapter is member-driven and shaped by your concerns, and we encourage all those eligible to join. We employ a broad definition of faculty which includes standing faculty, contingent faculty, lecturers and instructors, researchers, postdoctoral fellows, librarians and archivists, and technicians whose work contributes to teaching. Persons eligible for membership in the national AAUP are eligible for membership in the Yale chapter. The national AAUP constitution, in turn, extends membership to any “person who holds a professional position of teacher, researcher, graduate student, or related professional appointment, excluding administrators.”

The AAUP constitution also clarifies that “members of bargaining units may be admitted to active membership only if they are members of the local organization that serves as bargaining agent.” Thus, if you are eligible to join the national AAUP, even if you are also a member of the union of graduate workers (Local 33), the union of clerical and technical workers (Local 34), or the union of service and maintenance workers (Local 35), then we welcome your membership in the AAUP chapter.

Yes, there are active AAUP advocacy chapters across Connecticut at Wesleyan, Quinnipiac, University of Hartford, Fairfield University, Connecticut College, and Trinity College.

Our colleagues at Southern CT State, Central CT State, Eastern CT State, Western CT State, University of Connecticut (UConn), and the UConn Health Center all have active AAUP collective bargaining units.

In November 2024, Yale became the last university in the Ivy League to establish an AAUP chapter. Many of the other chapters at Ivy schools were established or re-established between 2020 and 2024. Now is the perfect time to get involved.

The Yale AAUP chapter is not a union. Faculty members of private universities have faced obstacles to unionization since the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on National Labor Relations Board v. Yeshiva University (1980), in which a majority concluded that private college faculty hold “managerial” status, excluding them from the right to unionize.

We are an advocacy chapter with the ability to organize around issues of academic labor, faculty governance, academic freedom, contingent faculty issues, and other topics relevant to us. As an AAUP chapter, we have the opportunity to organize alongside the advocacy chapters and collective bargaining units of our colleagues in both public and private higher education. We can access the same policy and guidance resources from the national AAUP that are available to unionized faculties. And, due to the AAUP’s affiliation with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), we are eligible for the full range of the AFT’s member benefits.

The Senate has been instrumental in achieving important advances for the faculty on many fronts, including family leave, childcare, status of instructional faculty, digital copyright, diversity policies, and investment policies. There is overlap between both the membership and executive leadership of the Senate and the Yale AAUP chapter, and we anticipate working together for common goals. However, a major impetus for our Yale AAUP chapter is that the Senate only includes FAS and SEAS faculty as members. Our chapter joins faculty from across the university, including all the professional schools, which are not represented by the Senate.

There are other substantive issues that the AAUP chapter aims to address, and that are difficult to address through existing routes, including the Senate. One is the need for greater transparency and data sharing from university administration. For years, members of the Senate have requested the establishment of an ombudsperson role, for example. Salary raises since the pandemic have not resolved the salary gap with respect to peer institutions, especially in the sciences and engineering (CESOF Report, 2022). The AAUP has a distinguished history of advocating for these issues on behalf of faculties across the country, and a Yale chapter will help us by complementing and reinforcing the Senate’s role.

Finally, the AAUP is a national organization that links us to resources and campaigns elsewhere in higher education. We believe that we will benefit a great deal from learning from and working in solidarity with these colleagues, and that this is particularly important in the current moment, characterized by politicized attacks on higher education as a whole.

In 2024, the AAUP announced it had ended its longstanding categorical opposition to academic boycotts. The updated policy does not endorse specific boycotts, but rather allows individual faculty members to support and participate in academic boycotts that defend the academic freedom and fundamental rights of colleagues and students facing violations of those rights. The policy emphasizes that, in such cases, academic boycotts are not inherently
threats to academic freedom but can be viewed as legitimate strategies to address conditions that undermine the core mission of higher education.

The AAUP’s statement clarifies that such boycotts should not impose political or religious litmus tests and should not target individual scholars and teachers engaged in ordinary academic practices, such as publishing scholarship, delivering lectures and conference presentations, or participating in research collaborations. Instead, boycotts should target only higher education institutions that violate academic freedom or the rights essential to it. It also asserts that faculty and students should not face institutional or governmental penalties for participating in, refusing to participate in, or criticizing academic boycotts.