Individualism, Professionalism, and Economic Security: Academic Freedom, Collective Bargaining, and the American Association of University Professors

The AAUP was founded to represent "the common interests of the teaching staffs" and to promote "the interests of the profession as a whole."  Although this commitment was swiftly translated into a more narrow focus on protecting academic freedom through tenure and shared governance processes, the AAUP was nonetheless attacked by university administrators and conservative politicians as a "professors' union."  Yet the organization eschewed both the union designation and a collective bargaining role until the 1970s, when under pressure from its state conferences it allowed individual chapters to become unions.  The move was controversial, as many members, especially at elite institutions, fearing that unionization would undermine professional standing and violate the individualism protected by academic freedom, left the group.  But union organizing expanded until the 1980 U.S. Supreme Court's Yeshiva decision limited the unionization rights of tenure-track faculty at private institutions.  Henceforth, such activity was largely limited to public institutions.  Today nearly three-fourths of all AAUP members are represented in collective bargaining units by the AAUP or one of its independent affiliates, and the organization has come to see unionization as a powerful means of protecting academic freedom in an era in which that freedom is perhaps most threatened by the declining economic status of much of the profession.  This paper will examine AAUP's evolving connection with unionization and the changing relationship between its support of academic freedom and shared governance and its growing role as the "professors' union" it was initially labeled by opponents.