Faculty at American University are increasingly being hired off tenure track, calling academic freedom into question while the administration remains disinterested in including them in decision making, faculty members said. The University’s American Association of University Professors chapter called for greater transparency and increased job security.
While graduate student employment and contingent appointments continue to increase substantially, Glenn Colby, a senior researcher for the national AAUP, said he worries that the goal of universities to “attract and retain faculty members of ability” is being abandoned.
At the University, there has been a 24 percent decrease between 2019 and 2024 in assistant professor roles, with a 22 percent increase in hiring non-tenure track faculty following national trends, according to an outside report by Howard Bunsis. This is alongside an about 15 percent increase in management positions from 2019 to 2024 while full time faculty has increased less than 5 percent. Managers across the University make an average $14,000 more than the average of all ranked faculty, while lecturers make an average of $90,000 less than full professors.
“Without the protection of tenure it puts academic freedom at risk. The primary purpose of tenure is to protect academic freedom including economic security knowing that you are not going to lose your job because something that you’re researching might be a conflict with board members,” Colby said.
Adrienne Massanari, associate professor of communication studies, said the compounding effects of threats to cut federal funding at universities, the dismantling of the Department of Education and AU facing scrutiny for alleged antisemitism mean the time to “speak out” is now.
The University never responded to comment in the allotted time given.
‘My academic freedom is ephemeral because I’m fireable’
Colby said the increase of faculty hired in contingent appointments places academic freedom at risk, while also providing lower salaries and less job security for faculty.
Colby said he sees this trend towards hiring off the tenure track as a national problem as he believes academic freedom is “under attack” at this moment.
Within the AAUP investigation of the full U.S. academic workforce, the percentage of faculty members who were full-time tenured fell from about 37 percent in 2002 to about 32 percent this year. In that same time period, those in full-time contingent without tenure increased from about 14 percent to 19 percent.
“It’s not just faculty that have this right, students have academic freedom as well,” said John Bracht, current president of AU’s AAUP chapter and associate professor of biology.
Faculty need to be protected in this way so that they are not fired immediately for their research and teachings in the classroom, but also to protect students.
“Academic freedom is defined as the freedom of a faculty member to control what they say in a classroom, what they teach, what they research in their research, and what’s cool about it is it also covers the right of students to learn,” Bracht said.
Contingent faculty are in a more “precarious position,” yet Bracht was constantly encouraged by their bravery in speaking their mind despite holding few protections of job security.
Lara Schwartz, vice president of AU’s AAUP chapter and a member of term faculty, has experienced this unpredictability first hand with seven linear contracts before receiving her current three year contract.
“My academic freedom is ephemeral because I’m fireable,” Schwartz said.
Bracht said he sees AAUP as a “more nimble version” of the Faculty Senate who can respond in the moment to concerns, often doing so through statements produced and published on their website.
One of the most recent joint statements, drafted by leadership including Schwartz, who has expertise in free speech as the director of the Project on Civic Dialogue, responded to the cancellation of the AU chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine’s workshop scheduled for Feb. 25.
The University said in a statement that AU SJP had failed to secure a safety assessment and the event “contained imagery and language that contributed to the safety concerns about the event, does not represent AU’s values and creates discord in our community.”
AAUP said in its statement that administrators violated their own policy on academic freedom and expressive conduct through viewpoint discrimination against AU SJP.
The AU SJP event “is the kind of expression that is the norm for political expression,” Schwartz added. “We don’t censor it and punish the people who do it because some people in a community are disturbed.”
In order to avoid the precedent set by this decision, Schwartz said there needs to be a policy that articulates “any abridgement of expression rights” and must be the least limiting with a committee that can investigate these actions in order to allow the University to continue running while protecting freedom of speech and expression.
This idea of limiting the exchange of ideas on campus in club activities, classrooms or otherwise constitutes a problem. Schwartz said students will receive the best education when there are “active scholars doing what they do best” — disagreeing with each other and asking the hard questions.
Carolyn Gallaher, secretary-treasurer of AU AAUP and a professor in the School of International Service, said this tactic shows bias on the part of the University.
“The message it would send is some ideologies are okay and others are not,” Gallaher said regarding the cancelled AU SJP event.
In “taking sides,” Gallaher said, the University undermines their own legitimacy and creates an attitude of mistrust and anger.
Want administration to ‘have our backs’
This issue of academic freedom is tied closely to a lack of shared governance, another frustration faculty say they have with University administration.
Bracht defined shared governance as the principle that the administration does not run a university on its own, but should partner with faculty. He added that this desire for shared governance was an issue noticed among faculty for a good amount of time.
While serving on the working group for faculty engagement in 2022, Bracht and others created a taxonomy of faculty concerns on campus which fell into four buckets: shared governance, compensation, working conditions and diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
“Over and over and over again we were hearing from faculty they’re not having insight into the decisions that just get handed down to them from on high,” Bracht said.
John Willoughby, former president of AU’s AAUP chapter and professor of economics, said he desires more of “a sense from the administration that they have our backs” because otherwise faculty do not have the freedom to explore ideas that “may not always be the flavor of the month.”
Willoughby said this support from the administration would look like faculty being involved in decision making, knowing what problems the University was facing and having a say in what was to be done.
Everyone needs to “feel comfortable discussing these issues in the way that academics are supposed to, which is the facts, logic, rigor, but also with passion,” Willoughby said. “You can’t remove the passion, and sometimes I think administrators want the passion stripped out and the argument stripped out but that isn’t how ideas move forward.”
In this current moment when attacks on higher education are running rampant, Willoughby said he’d “like to see AU be sort of a leader in resisting” rather than “shrinking away from controversy.”
As a member of the advisory committee for inclusive excellence, Massanari said the University seems to be following the strategy of “we’ll change the words, but we’ll keep doing the work.” Massanari advocated that if these issues of “knowledge and truth and fairness and equity” are as important as AU claims they are to the mission of the University, then it should be defending them outright.
AU tends to ‘underplay and undervalue expertise’ on campus
Many of the issues faculty struggle with originate from AU’s insistence on outsourcing labor and paying administrators far more than faculty and staff. These new administrative hires have little contact with faculty and staff, often excluding them in decision making processes that directly impact students, Massanari said.
Massanari said she saw this in how both national and international universities are run like businesses.
AU and other higher education institutions underplay the expertise of those on campus without fully appreciating “what faculty do or staff do and what the student experience is actually like,” Massanari said.
“That’s a pretty classic corporate technique, which is to not listen to your employees and then hire some really high-praised consultant who says exactly what your employees were saying for months and it somehow confers more value,” Massanari said.
Massanari also said these growing groups of administrators often treat everything as an emergency in an attempt to avoid receiving input from the community.
“Everything, A, is not an emergency, and B, when there are emergencies and things that I think should have been planned for, it’s like people are caught flat footed,” Massanari said.
Bracht reiterated that the administration has grown more than double the rate of faculty with a 35 percent increase, compared to a 15 percent increase in faculty over the last five years.
“Before we ask the academic side of [AU] to make cuts, we need to be reducing what we expanded,” Bracht said in reference to AU’s budget deficit response.
Many other members of AAUP reiterated this need to protect the core of the University as educating the next generation with teaching and research.
“You don’t reduce learning opportunities to grow roles that aren’t core roles in that way,” said Schwartz about the increase in administrative positions.
Gallaher mentioned this notion of “shared sacrifice,” saying that administrators should consider taking pay cuts if needed to account for the budget deficit. Furthermore, how salaries are set in the first place should be accounting for the core mission of learning.
‘Step up and advocate for each other’
Outside of faculty, staff felt their voices were not being heard by administration either. According to Shed Siliman, a specialist with the Center for Teaching, Research and Learning, the best way forward is a “coalition approach.”
Shed said this would look like the entire population at the University using their collective voices to disrupt daily campus life with instances of professors refusing to teach, students not going to class and staff not working.
“What happens to students is going to happen to us,” Shed said. “Our working conditions are the student’s learning conditions.”
Shed said many of their colleagues on staff are concerned with the administration’s allusions to staff reduction as a result of changing circumstances, like the budget deficit.
“As soon as [President Jonathan Alger] came in they sort of started arbitrary restrictions on work to disincentivize people from staying,” Shed said in reference to making staff work in person three days a week and making it difficult to receive overtime pay.
When Shed and other members of staff have brought their grievances to the administration, they feel like the response is often to share condolences without offering real solutions or honest explanations. Shed attributes this behavior to the concept of “non-performativity.”
“People were like ‘I’m scared’ and they were like ‘Thank you for sharing, next,’” Shed said about faculty and staff bringing their concerns for safety during a town hall with administrators.
Clementine Harvey, a neuroscience PhD candidate and member of the Graduate Student Worker Union, said there needs to be a commitment to supporting one another between students, faculty and staff.
“We all just need to step up and advocate for each other as a community because there is a lot of chaos happening right now,” Harvey said.
Massanari agreed that many of the frustrations across the University were shared and were not being listened to collectively.
“My sense is that there is a large percentage of faculty and staff and students here who really want something more to be done than what is being done and to be taking a cue from the community about that would be nice,” Massanari said.
For Shed, the University cannot run without the faculty, staff and students. The sooner each of the individuals in these groups realizes that and comes together the better.
“We are the University and we make it run. It can run without the administrators for the most part,” Shed said. “It’s not a university without students, or faculty or staff.”
This article was edited by Owen Auston-Babcock, Tyler Davis and Walker Whalen. Copy editing done by Luna Jinks, Sabine Kanter-Huchting and Ella Rousseau.
