Chapter Mission & History
Mission
Wesleyan AAUP is an Advocacy Chapter (not a collective bargaining chapter). We champion academic freedom, advance shared governance, and organize to promote economic security for all faculty and staff. In accordance with the One Faculty campaign, the chapter advocates for faculty across rank and category, including professors of the practice, visiting faculty, and adjunct faculty. We educate the campus community about AAUP policies and standards, create autonomous sites and processes for faculty discussions, prepare faculty to participate in governance more effectively, and organize members to make change on campus.
Our mission is to:
Promote the interests of our faculty (all those whose appointments consist primarily of teaching or research activities conducted at a professional level, including tenure-track and non-tenure track faculty, full-time and part-time faculty, librarians, research and teaching assistants, and postdocs)
Defend academic freedom at Wesleyan University and throughout academe
Encourage faculty participation in governance at Wesleyan University
Protect and advance the professional status and interests of all faculty, including equal pay for equal work
Promote administrative transparency and unrestricted dissemination of institutional data and information
Facilitate the dissemination of information on higher education principles and practices
Inform the academic community about AAUP standards, best practices, and policies
History
The histories of Wesleyan and the national AAUP are intertwined. The dismissal of a Wesleyan economics professor was a galvanizing event for the founding of the AAUP in 1915, and Wesleyan faculty established the first AAUP chapter in 1921. Wesleyan president James McConaughy, then-president of the American Association of Colleges, worked closely with the AAUP to shape the authoritative “1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure.”
The last active chapter on campus became dormant in the late 1990s. In Fall 2021, the national organization recognized the efforts of faculty to re-establish an advocacy chapter on campus. The re-established chapter was formally chartered in June 2022.
Read more about Wesleyan’s history of faculty organizing, 1913-2022, in our draft paper, “The AAUP and Faculty Organizing at Wesleyan: Historical Lessons.”