@tnaaup.bsky.social

Today, the AAUP & Texas AAUP sued Texas Tech Chancellor Brandon Creighton over directives he gave that mandated the censorship & thought policing of thousands of faculty & students leading to the suppression of academic freedom & the pursuit of knowledge. More Here: www.aaup.org/news/aaup-te... 🧵

Lawsuit cover page:

TEXAS AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS-AMERICAN
FEDERATION OF TEACHERS and the
AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS,
Plaintiffs,
V.
BRANDON CREIGHTON in his official capacity as Chancellor of the Texas Tech University System, and ARCILIA ACOSTA, CODY CAMPBELL, CLAY CASH, TIM CULP, SHELLEY SWEATT, DOUG MCREAKEN, DON SINCLAIR, DUSTIN WOMBLE, and RACHEL MCLELLAND, in their official capacities as members of the Texas Tech University System Board of Regents,
Defendants.

A win for higher ed: a U.S. Appeals Court upheld academic freedom and faculty free speech by striking down the "Stop WOKE Act." The Act intended to limit students’ right to learn by restricting faculty’s ability to teach about race, gender, and more. Read more below: academeblog.org/2026/07/08/u...

US Appeals Court Strikes Down Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act”

BY HANK REICHMAN In a long-awaited ruling a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, on July 7 ruled that Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act” restricting how r…

academeblog.org

We join with faculty in Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Texas to note with dismay that central tenets of the AAUP have disappeared from the Principles of Accreditation of the Commission on Colleges and Universities (formerly SACSCOC). 🧵 1/8 sacscoc.org/principles-r...

Principles Review - SACSCOC

SACSCOC Principles of Accreditation review The future of accreditation should be shaped by the institutions and stakeholders it serves. The Principles Review Committee, composed of peer representative...

sacscoc.org

The Vanderbilt and Wash U AAUP chapters have released a JOINT statement on the preposterous and embarrassing "State of the Scholarship" report commissioned by our chancellors. Please read and circulate!

bpb-us-e2.wpmucdn.com

The AAUP chapters at Vanderbilt & Wash U have issued a joint statement denouncing the “State of Scholarship” report commissioned by their chancellors. Please, let’s make this as widely read as the gaslighting to which it responds.

Joint Statement on the "State of Scholarship" Report
The Vanderbilt University and Washington University chapters of the American Association of University Professors express our profound disagreement with the "State of Scholarship" report commissioned by our universities' chancellors. The report distorts the state of humanistic and social scientific scholarship at our universities and in the academy overall. Worse, it proposes a shocking intrusion of university administration into faculty governance and portends greater threats to academic freedom that should concern all faculty.
The report currently appears on Vanderbilt's website under the insignia of both Vanderbilt and Washington Universities. It is already receiving public condemnation. As the American Council of Learned Societies makes clear, the report is founded on false premises and anecdotal evidence and thus does nothing to "ensure deeper and more meaningful relations among scholars and members of the public." No doubt more rebuttals from scholars, departments, and professional societies will follow. It suffices for us to say that the report falls far short of the standards of political neutrality and disinterested inquiry it claims to champion. Historians, literary scholars, and anthropologists are singled out for caricature while the authors fail to acknowledge their own public biases against scholarship performed in the name of social justice. Nor does the report divulge its source of funding or conflicts of interest that may entail - standard practice for any work of humanistic or social scientific scholarship. In sum, the report is itself a clear example of "politicized" research that its authors attempt to decry.
What is most alarming is the guidance the report offers to its intended audience of university chancellors and presidents. By falsely arguing that humanities and social science departments are in the throes of an epistemological crisis, the authors lay the groundwork for university adminis…Weakening faculty governance does nothing to solve the real challenges facing our universities, and undermines our ability to effectively address society's most profound problems and challenges, from the inequalities of wealth and white supremacy to the political consequences of climate change.
Indeed, the direst threats to public trust in higher education are not philosophical debates about the nature of truth. Currently, the federal government is dramatically cutting funding for the humanities and social sciences as well as for the natural sciences, engineering, medicine, public health, and the arts. In response, university administrations have instituted austerity measures, even as administrative salaries and administrative positions have taken up an increasing share of decreasing budgets.
The best way for scholars to cultivate diverse opinions and advance knowledge is by strengthening academic freedom. Political threats to higher education have degraded, and will continue to degrade, the quality of all fields of our universities' research, to the detriment of America's global standing.
We note that the organizations now working most actively and successfully to defend academic free inquiry from politicized federal interference are not university leaders but the American Council of Learned Societies, the Modern Language Association, and the American Historical Association - professional societies of the very disciplines chastised by the report.
We call on our chancellors to rescind the report and affirm their commitment to the intellectual autonomy of faculty, academic departments, and governing faculty bodies. Administrative interference into academic departments, as licensed by this report, is a violation of the standards of academic freedom that have made American universities the envy of the world. Rather than undermining these bedrock principles, administrators should vigorously and publicly defend them.
Vanderbilt University AAUP
vanderbiltaaup@gmail.com
Wa…