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After restarting an advocacy chapter of the American Association of University Professors in November, Yale faculty are calling for shared governance and a more vocal University.

The newly re-established AAUP chapter held its first meeting on Tuesday, where around 50 faculty members from across Yale’s schools discussed threats to higher education and the advocacy of the chapter’s four working groups on academic freedom and University governance, academic labor, Yale and New Haven and member recruitment.

“The general perception is that there has been an erosion of shared governance over the years as Yale has been corporatized more and more, so we try to defend that concept, which I think is critical to the proper behavior of a university,” Alessandro Gomez, who serves on the AAUP chapter’s executive committee and the executive council of Yale’s faculty senate, told the News.

According to Gomez, renewed interest in organizing an AAUP chapter came last spring, when many faculty members became concerned with the arrests of pro-Palestine protesters. In May, the FAS-SEAS Senate passed a resolution calling for clearer free expression policies following the arrests. Following months of organizing starting in May, the chapter was officially formed in November.

Gomez previously led efforts to restart Yale’s AAUP chapter in 2023, but because it was a single-person effort, he felt that the number of faculty getting involved were “not imposing enough” for the AAUP’s official reestablishment. There were also revival efforts in 2012 as faculty argued that projects such as Yale-NUS increasingly reflected a top-down approach in University decision-making that disempowered faculty. The AAUP at Yale has largely been inactive for over two decades.

“Especially after the recent elections, people in academia feel somewhat threatened by the new [Trump] administration,” Gomez said. “We are looking for all possible organizations that can help us defend academic freedom and the principle of shared governance and other things that we have been struggling with for a long time.”

“Who on earth is going to speak up in academia?”

One of the AAUP chapter’s first advocacy efforts has been to affirm previous Yale policies to safeguard immigrant students — including recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — and to urge current administrators to unequivocally continue enforcing these policies. 

Among the seven members of the AAUP chapter’s executive committee, six signed a letter during Yale’s presidential search last year urging the next president to “unequivocally reaffirm” values in environmental, social and civil justice. One member, Gomez, signed a letter around the same time from Faculty for Yale, a group advocating for institutional neutrality. 

“We shouldn’t be afraid of potentially attracting attention from Congress or from the Trump administration,” Gomez said. “If an institution like Yale, with its rich history and with its very powerful endowment, is afraid of speaking up, who on earth is going to speak up in academia?”

Daniel HoSang, another member of the AAUP chapter’s executive committee, compared University President Maurie McInnis’ approach of limiting public statements to former President Peter Salovey’s numerous statements against the Trump administration’s policy actions, including the administration’s “Muslim ban” and threats to end DACA.

“President Salovey laid out a pretty clear policy about the obligations and protections Yale would afford to students who may be subject to certain kinds of sanctions and enforcement of immigration law,” HoSang said. “No one has ever said that’s no longer the policy. We think for the policy to mean something in practice, you have to let people know about it.”

HoSang also pointed out that statements in themselves cannot be expected to “have value,” suggesting that the University’s public stances should be coupled with concrete policy improvements. In the context of immigration protections, HoSang pointed to how the University previously offered legal support to international and DACA recipient students in the case that they faced immigration enforcement actions. 

In a recent interview with the News, McInnis said that administrators are working with legislators behind the scenes to address how policy changes under Trump affect the Yale community. According to McInnis, while her office has not yet publicly commented on immigration, the Office of International Students and Scholars has been in contact with potentially impacted students.

“Implementation of changes from the federal government will depend on federal agencies and courts, and as we learn details that affect our students, we will inform them and focus our efforts where we can be most effective,” McInnis wrote in a later email to the News. “Yale’s approach is to communicate with our community when we have news to share.”

The “black box” of University governance

Beyond immediate policy concerns, the renewed AAUP chapter also seeks to continue longstanding efforts to increase faculty input in administrative decisions. 

“The university will be stronger by having more robust processes that substantively allow people not just to offer a suggestion, which certainly exist now, but to deliberate,” HoSang told the News. “We want reciprocity and being able to have a substantive role in helping to shape the decisions about the university, especially at a time now when there are so many threats to higher education.”

The University currently has an FAS-SEAS Senate with elected members who meet periodically with the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the University Provost and trustees of the Yale Corporation. 

However, Gomez said that the Senate’s conversations with University administrators often have a lack of transparency and an asymmetry of information. According to Gomez, greater access to University data would better equip faculty members to argue certain points with administrators.

Gomez told the News that the benefit of having an AAUP chapter is that it would incorporate more faculty from across Yale’s graduate and professional schools, rather than being limited to only the Faculty of Arts and Science and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, as the senate currently is. The AAUP, which Gomez sees as the more “activist arm” of faculty organizing efforts, will meet with the FAS-SEAS Senate around mid-February to discuss how the two bodies can coordinate goals.

During the chapter’s first meeting, faculty also pointed to the outsized power that the office of the University Provost’s office holds over faculty affairs. In particular, faculty expressed concern over how the Provost’s office has sole power to edit the Faculty Handbook, which acts akin to a contract between faculty and the University. 

“There is a lot of power associated with that office,” Gomez told the News. “Some of how that power is wielded and who among the people in the provost’s office actually intervene in certain decisions, it’s not clear to many of us. It’s a bit of a black box.”

Meanwhile, Gomez is optimistic that faculty may find a “receptive ear” in FAS Dean Steven Wilkinson, who just assumed his position on Jan. 1. 

In an email to the News, Wilkinson wrote that the regular meetings among University administrators and faculty, including those serving on advisory committees for a variety of University policies, provide existing structures to incorporate faculty in FAS decision-making.

“I am now a few weeks into my new role, getting to know the faculty, staff, organization, and processes,” Wilkinson wrote. “As I have said to the chairs, senate leaders and other faculty, we will have a strategic review next year which will look at all major aspects of how the FAS works, and how we can make it work better.”

Yale is the last Ivy League university to have an active AAUP chapter.

YOLANDA WANG
Yolanda Wang covers Faculty and Academics as well as Endowment, Finances and Donations. Originally from Buffalo, NY, she is a junior in Davenport College majoring in political science.