Join us!

Concerned about increasingly top-down decision-making? The erosion of shared faculty governance? The university’s restructuring and priorities? 

Now more than ever we need an effective forum for faculty to organize and advocate for ourselves, for our more vulnerable colleagues, for our students, and for a voice at the table. 

When possible the AAUP chapter will work with the University Senate, the Arts and Sciences Planning and Policy Committee, and other existing bodies to further faculty governance, but it will provide an independent and common space for faculty from all across the university. Accordingly, one of our most pressing goals is to recruit as broad a membership as possible, including faculty from the professional schools and non-tenure-track lecturers and adjuncts. 

Nationally, university faculty confront similar crises. Along with budget crises caused or worsened by the pandemic, the AAUP has helped faculty confront the ongoing corporatization of higher education, the hollowing-out of the tenure system and increased precarity of contingent faculty, and frightening new attempts to undermine intellectual freedom and police the speech of faculty inside and outside the classroom. 

The best way for us to better understand these problems, to help work towards solutions and countermeasures, and to express solidarity with our less secure colleagues across the country is to become a member of the AAUP.  

As a Columbia affiliate, you will automatically become a member of our chapter when you join the national AAUP. Annual membership fees (reimbursable as a professional fee) are on a sliding scale based on income, and should be seen as an investment in the vital work that the organization does to defend faculty governance and academic freedom at a time when both are under unprecedented threat. Becoming a member also entitles you to resources (legal and other) provided by the AAUP. Join online here!

Image: text from "Faculty Pay Level Rated 27th in Nation; Ranking in Annual Study by AAUP Marks Second Consecutive Decline," Fred Schneider, Columbia Spectator, May 8, 1972