As faculty at the Colleges, your energies and attention are pulled in many directions. Our experiences in recent years have affirmed the necessity of the Claremont Colleges AAUP chapter, especially regarding how the chapter can support faculty and faculty governance. When you join our Claremont Colleges local chapter, it allows us to better communicate across the consortium on common concerns, and to share and spread information that might otherwise be siloed in departments or Colleges.   

We encourage you to join national AAUP via the website (see note about chapter dues at the bottom): https://www.aaup.org/membership/join

We also encourage you to pay chapter dues, which are paid independently of the national membership fee. Chapter dues are progressively structured. See the section “what are the chapter dues” at the bottom of this page.

You may join our mailing list without being an AAUP member  (either at national or at chapter levels) and come to our meetings and contribute, however only dues-paying members are permitted to vote.

Power in numbers, and in shared information across the Colleges

The Claremont Colleges AAUP chapter also gives us, as consortial faculty, the power and safety in numbers that helps us to raise our voices with confidence, and to effect change. Large numbers of faculty standing together on an issue are more effective than a few isolated voices. Our Executive Committee is energetic and works through a seven-step process to collect initiatives and feedback from each College constituency for each memo issued. The Executive Committee (with members from 6 of the 7 institutions in the consortium) has regularly produced collectively-sourced letters to the administration about pressing pandemic-related issues such as: dependent care provisions, retirement contribution cuts, faculty governance, choice of modality of instruction, and liability waivers for on-campus faculty. Additionally, we have advocated for better compensation and working conditions for contingent faculty. 

How is the AAUP Chapter related to the College and the Faculty Executive Committee (or equivalent)?

Many of our Faculty Handbooks within the Claremont Colleges quote AAUP language in describing College policies. While we do often work closely with the Faculty Executive Committee (or equivalent) at each of the Colleges and collaborate on many occasions, the AAUP is an independent association. We do not substitute for the elected committees of each College, but we can work collaboratively to hold the administration to the policies stated in their own Faculty Handbooks.

We are here to educate faculty about their rights, but also to listen to their concerns and take action to support them. Some of our main considerations are: academic freedom, shared governance (active involvement of faculty in decision-making processes and priority-setting), transparency, workload, compensation, benefits, and job security. Our members decide the issues to discuss and be involved in, within the ambit of AAUP.

The AAUP’s national profile, and respected history of advocacy for faculty, lends our chapter more weight than a freestanding organization. Since its foundation in 1915, the AAUP has helped shape American higher education into what it is today, by developing standards and procedures that are followed in universities and colleges across the USA. We encourage you to join the Claremont Colleges chapter and build momentum with us as we enter the coming months’ discussions of budget cuts and furloughs.

What are the chapter dues?

One purpose of asking for any chapter dues is simply to have the funds needed to cover the modest expenses the chapter incurs, notably a Zoom account independent of the Colleges. But you will see we have also established negative chapter dues for adjunct faculty and tenure-track faculty prior to their third-year review.  Why?  Two reasons.  First, by national AAUP rules, only faculty who are members in good standing of the national AAUP can vote within the chapter, and we want our adjunct colleagues and most junior tenure-track to be able to vote within the chapter: we do not want voting in the chapter skewed toward senior, tenured faculty.  And along with this goal of inclusivity within the local chapter, we also want to encourage all of us to join the national AAUP.