Greetings AAUP-CSU Members and Supporters,
Spring semester is off to a sobering start, from the violence perpetrated by federal officials in Minnesota and elsewhere, to the drastic budget cuts we are facing on our own campus. There is one organization that has successfully responded to national and local threats: The AAUP and AAUP-CSU. We want to continue this fight, but, candidly, our numbers are small. Too small to effectively respond to the threats we are facing.
We need you to join us at our meetings, read and share our communication with your colleagues, and help us build solidarity on campus. If we wait until ICE comes knocking our classroom doors, it will be too late.
The Trump administration recently abandoned its appeal of a ruling prohibiting them from restricting funding to schools and universities that challenged its anti-DEI policies. The AAUP has been out front on efforts to protect students’ and faculty members’ rights on campus.
Closer to home, AAUP-CSU worked with Faculty Council and ASCSU last fall to oppose changes to CSU’s free speech and peaceful assembly policy. The administration rescinded the policy.
If you want to oppose the Trump administration’s unconstitutional activities on college campuses, one of the best ways to do that is to get involved in your local chapter of AAUP!
This spring AAUP-CSU will be participating in important events on campus and in the community. We are planning programming for CSU’s Democracy Initiative, co-hosting candidate forums with Indivisible NoCo for candidates running in the Democratic primary, and fighting for more transparency in the university’s new budget model. The more participation we have from campus and community stakeholders, the more effective we will be. Join us!
[Take Action] [Stay Informed] [Get Support] [Join AAUP-CSU]
Take Action
Monthly meeting (new day and time! on campus!)
Monday, February 2 | 4:00-5:00pm | Ramskeller
We gather monthly to plan actions, discuss concerns, and build solidarity. All are welcome (faculty, staff, students, and community members). This month we’ll be discussing our spring semester initiatives and continuing to discuss ways to build our membership.
Stay Informed
The AAUP national’s President Todd Wolfson issued a statement after the killing of Alex Pretti in Minnesota, noting:
“This moment demands a unified, bold, and powerful response from the labor movement. We are uniting across sectors to organize, mobilize, and wield our full collective power to confront ICE, and demand the following:
- ICE must leave Minnesota now and withdraw from American cities where its presence is escalating violence and tearing communities apart.
- The agents who killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti must be investigated and held legally accountable.
- Congress must use its power to hold ICE accountable, and allow no additional federal funding for ICE in the upcoming Congressional budget. ICE must be investigated for human and constitutional violations of Americans and our neighbors.
- Minnesotan and national companies should cease economic relations with ICE and refuse ICE entry or using their property for staging grounds.”
Read the full statement here.
The Chronicle of Higher Education published an article, “Universities Need a New Defense: The Authoritarian Threat is Growing. The Old Playbook Won’t Work” in which Lee Bollinger, a former president of Columbia University and the University of Michigan, outlines the threats universities are facing from federal and state governments and argues that faculty must find new ways to respond. Bollinger states:
“We need nothing less than a new conception of the role of the university in a free society. The traditional arguments for why we should value universities — that they advance civilization, that they are an engine of economic and social growth, that they are a competitive advantage for the nation in the world, and that they educate our young and prepare our citizens and attempt to equalize the opportunities available to them — are valid. But these arguments do not begin to capture the foundational role of the university in the American constitutional system. If the press is the unofficial fourth branch of the system, the university is the fifth — and even more so now, as the press is in decline. Universities must preserve their integrity. We all have a responsibility to protect their standing in our democracy.”
Bollinger continues: “The simple fact is that leaders at every level, from faculty members to deans to presidents to trustees and alumni, must focus now on building this sense of mission. We must express it over and over again, taking every opportunity to explain and affirm it in as much detail as possible. This idea cannot be treated as something that everyone will grasp on their own or will naturally intuit. Like the modern meaning of the First Amendment, the idea of the freedom of the university is not self-evident, and the latter is certainly not part of the general knowledge of the faculty, students, and the public. We must never be shy about characterizing the university as one of the key means of realizing the human need to know, to understand, and to search for truth. It must be repeated endlessly and with all the infinite variations that will come over time.”
AAUP-CSU is eager to lead that fight on our campus. Read the rest of the article here, and join us to put Bollinger’s vision into practice on the CSU campus.
Read the full report here.
Get Support
AAUP works for you! As CSU embarks on a search for a new provost and prepares to search for a new chancellor, review the AAUP’s resources on shared governance and academic freedom.
Check out AAUP’s collection of reports, articles, and books on a variety of topics in AAUP’s Issues in Higher Ed page. Use their research to advocate for faculty and students on our campus!
Membership has its benefits! Check out the resources available to national AAUP members, including webinars, toolkits, a subscription to Academe, and benefits from the American Federation of Teachers.
Join AAUP-CSU
Membership Drive
The AAUP@CSU is mobilizing to respond to threats aimed at higher education and changes faculty are experiencing on campus.
We want to grow our numbers and we need your help! Invite your colleagues and friends to connect with AAUP@CSU:
- Sign up for our newsletter.
- Become a member or supporter.
- Attend our monthly meeting the first Monday of each month, 4:00-5:00 p.m., at Ramskeller in the Lory Student Center.
