American Association of University Professors

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AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS

AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS, a nonprofit organization committed to preserving academic freedom and maintaining high standards of academic and moral excellence in American universities. Its membership, now exceeding 45,000, comprises faculty and professional staff from accredited American universities and colleges. The American Association of University Professors has played a major role in the shaping of American academe in the twentieth century.

In 1900 sociologist Edward Ross was fired from his job at Stanford University over a disagreement with Mrs. Leland Stanford. This alarmed academics across the country, including Johns Hopkins philosopher Arthur O. Love-joy. In 1915 he and John Dewey held a meeting at Johns Hopkins in order to establish an organization dedicated to protecting the rights of university professors and others in academia. The American Association of University Professors was founded at that meeting.

In 1940 the American Association of University Professors left their greatest mark on the landscape of American academia when they released their "Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure," which served as the blueprint for academic freedom and faculty standards throughout the country. The statement claims that academic freedom, in both teaching and research, is essential to the quest for truth, the true purpose of academia. The statement asserts that tenure is a necessary means for ensuring academic freedom as well as providing economic security and lays out a tenure system practically identical to that still used in the majority of American universities at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This was reinforced by the Supreme Court's 1957 ruling in Sweezy v. New Hampshire, which stated that the essentiality of academic freedom was almost self-evident and argued that teachers and students must "remain free to inquire." The association's statement was reevaluated and amended in 1970 and again in 1990, when all gender-specific language was removed.

The national headquarters of the American Association of University Professors is in Washington, D.C. They serve as a unifying force between the state and local chapters and as a congressional lobby. The legal division deals with a variety of issues, such as discrimination, intellectual property, and faculty contracts; it also submits amicus briefs before the Supreme Court and appellate courts.

Any institution with seven or more national members can form a campus chapter. These campus chapters together form state conferences to deal with legal and legislative issues on the state level. In 2000, the American Association of University Professors had members at more than 2,000 institutions, with 500 campus chapters and 39 state conferences. Six times a year they publish Academe, a journal for higher education. Their other major publication is the Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, which is a comprehensive analysis of salaries in the field.