Members of The New School Chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP-TNS) work to ensure that The New School is attentive to the needs of the most vulnerable and marginalized and to develop a people-centered approach to the immense challenges facing higher education in moments of crisis. Solidarity, respect, compassion, and collective power are key principles guiding the work that we do.
Beginning in 1915, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has advocated for academic freedom, shared governance that prioritizes the voice and decision making power of faculty, and social equality. It helps to define professional ethics in higher education and to set pedagogical standards for teaching and learning that foster a just and equitable society. AAUP centers meaningful faculty and staff participation in decision-making processes and aims to build worker solidarity across campuses in the United States. It represents workers at universities and colleges in labor disputes and fights for economic security through direct advocacy and the creation of labor coalitions.
PublicSquare is a space to share information and ideas from members of The New School community. On Mondays at noon, Alex Aleinikoff hosts live Zoom broadcasts.
The New School’s AAUP chapter emerges from the shared historical origin of both institutions, over a century ago, and from ongoing commitments to social justice, the safeguarding of teaching, learning and research, and the strengthening of empowered faculty governance. At times of intense uncertainty at The New School, coupled with the longstanding inequalities plaguing our institution we are still attempting to transform, our chapter believes collective action and mobilization are more important than ever.
We are writing to you as members of the New School Chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP-TNS), a group affiliated with a national organization. Though we are not a union, we are an advocacy group that represents both full and part-time faculty, as well as other educators on campus. We are also a member of the New School Labor Coalition, which has been instrumental in shaping the moment of faculty-student-staff solidarity we are now in. Our mission is to ensure that The New School is attentive to the needs of the most vulnerable and marginalized, and we support a people-centered approach to the immense challenges facing our community in moments of crisis.
AAUP-TNS, as part of the New School Labor Coalition, stands in solidarity with our unionized colleagues as they negotiate new contracts with the university.
The New School has a long history of welcoming and helping endangered scholars and refugees. We call upon the University to live up to its history by waiving tuition for and making free, temporary housing available to any Ukrainian student enrolled at the New School who reports the need to bring their families to the United States. The need is far greater. There is an urgent need for the University to take an anti-imperialist and internationalist position in support of workers and endangered scholars worldwide and to renew publicly our commitment to being the “University in Exile.”
This statement offers an enumeration of the COVID-19 pandemic impacts on junior faculty. It describes a range of concrete, material and financial effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on Junior Faculty. Insofar as the pandemic is still ongoing, this enumeration is preliminary and partial.
In light of the likelihood of more frequent extreme weather events as a result of climate change in the future, The Leadership Council of AAUP-TNS and The New School Labor Coalition call on the University to perform a full, comprehensive review of its emergency policies and to share the review with the community.
The challenges of responding to the dynamic nature of the COVID-19 pandemic are immense, and we commend the University’s COVID Coordination Group and the UFS Summer Leadership Committee for its work in ensuring a safe return to campus. As educators, we feel strongly that teaching and learning work best when conducted in-person. At the same time, we recognize the anxiety and risk caused by the highly transmissible character of the Delta variant, as well as the deteriorating efficacy of vaccines over time and high transmission probabilities in classroom settings.
Craig Wilder. Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities, 2014.
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Angela Y. Davis. Cited in Anothermag.com, 2020.
Sandy Grande. “Refusing the University.” In Toward What Justice?: Describing Diverse Dreams of Justice in Education, 2018.
Abolition Collective. Making Abolitionist Worlds: Proposals for a World on Fire, 2020.
Robin D. G. Kelley. Cited in Black Ink, 2020.
Charandev Singh (of RISE). “Freedom to Stay, Freedom to Return: A Transnational Roundtable on Sanctuary Activism,” Radical History Review, 2019.
Naomi Paik. “Universities, Unjust Law, and Campus Sanctuaries.” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, 2020.
