University of Minnesota
Twin Cities Chapter

News

• 1/14/2023: Our AAUP chapter has issued a statement on Hamline University and academic freedom.
• 1/8/2023: Our AAUP chapter is organizing a Town Hall towards understanding the issues confronting the growing number of fixed-term or contingent faculty members on our campus. This is part of our effort that is targeted at focusing attention on the common interests of the different categories of faculty members and working towards their realization. This Town Hall hopes to bring forward the thinking expressed in Fall 2022 in various forms, such as the op-ed of faculty members in the School of Social Work and the op-ed and the podcast involving Sumanth Gopinath and Heather Holcombe, the President and Vice-President of our chapter. 
  We will be meeting on Friday, January 27 from 2:00pm - 4:00pm in Blegen Hall 250. (Note that we were originally meeting in room 317 but this has changed to room 250.) We hope to see you there. While a Zoom link is available, to fully engage in the discussion we encourage in-person participation.
  
• 12/6/2022: Read the Minnesota Daily op-ed by Heather Holcombe and Sumanth Gopinath the, respectively, vice president and president of the UMN-Twin Cities chapter of the AAUP on the lack of job stability, academic freedom, and a livable wage. You can also listen to their podcast with Minnesota Daily reporter Stella Mehlhoff in which they discuss the challenges faced by fixed-term faculty.
• Previous news items can be found here.

About the AAUP.
The mission of the AAUP, identifed on the national website at aaup.org:

Advancing academic freedom and shared governance; defining professional values and standards; promoting the economic security of those who teach and research in higher education; organizing to make our goals a reality; and ensuring higher education's contribution to the common good.

The University of Minnesota Twin Cities chapter works to realize the AAUP mission on the campus. Its members, comprising people who teach or conduct research at the university,  work both within and outside of the existing governance structure to further this mission. The activities of the chapter encompass the following:

• An organizational role, in which it functions to identify issues from the grassroots and to involve members and non-members in thinking through solutions
  
• An advocacy role, in which it apprises the administration and governance of issues and follows up with support from its constituency towards ensuring their resolution
• A synergistic role with governance, where its members work within the existing governance structure to represent its perspectives and to raise relevant issues

Join the chapter if the mission and the focus strike a chord! Follow the "Join the AAUP" link at the top of the page to find out how.

Follow us on Twitter or email us at umn.tc.aaup@gmail.com to find out more.