Reports from the 2025 AAUP Summer Institute

From Adrienne Krone (AAUP-Allegheny College–President)

I am so grateful I got to go to the AAUP Summer Institute at Morehouse College in Atlanta in July 2025! We recently restarted our advocacy chapter at Allegheny College, so I brought home a lot of new and exciting ideas. I attended a day-long pre-conference session, “Organize Every Campus,” that provided a really good overview of every step in the organizing process and helped me prepare for rapid response events and longer campaigns.

Many other sessions provided additional practice and preparation for campaigns. I particularly appreciated the session, “How Your Advocacy Chapter Can Act Like a Union,” because I was able to work through a practice campaign with colleagues from AAUP advocacy chapters at other small liberal arts colleges like Allegheny.

Many of the other sessions helped me understand the ways that AAUP and AFT are providing guidance for faculty regarding contemporary issues like artificial intelligence as well as their role at the forefront of the legal battles in defense of higher education. I attended the session “The Higher Ed Legal Landscape and How to Organize Within it,” which provided an overview of some of the legal cases that AAUP and AFT have taken on as well as some of the ways that our campuses can help support this critical work. In addition to all of these informative sessions, the best part of the Summer Institute was meeting faculty from all over the country and working together to problem-solve all the issues, large and small, that we are seeing on our campuses and beyond.

From Rosemary Barbara (AAUP-La Salle University–Secretary/Treasurer)

The Summer Institute gave me the time and space to think about our AAUP Chapter and what we might be able to do better. It was so beneficial to be able to meet people from across the country, learn from them, bounce ideas off of them, and know that we are all in solidarity together. At first, I felt a little overwhelmed because we are small advocacy chapter, but as the days went on, I was able to think about how the methods that I was learning about could be adapted to our experience. For example, the idea of dividing up our faculty list and each member of the executive committee reaching out personally to 10-15 faculty members is doable and would allow us to get into conversations with people. While we are speaking, we can also discuss not just what AAUP can do for individual faculty, but how faculty can help AAUP which in turn helps us all.

I attended the session “How Your Advocacy Chapter Can Operate Like a Union” and found the suggestions offered there helpful. Seeing the process of growing membership as part of the approach to organizing is important. Building relationships among the faculty so that we can speak in a united voice is important.

There is more to learn, but this was a good beginning.

From Andy Vaughn (AAUP-Penn, PA-AAUP Conference Board member):

I had an excellent time in Atlanta attending this year’s Summer Institute at Morehouse College. It was truly inspiring to see so many other professors from a wide variety of schools come together to recognize and devise action plans to address the unprecedented challenges facing our universities right now.

I attended several sessions that I thought were especially valuable. In the “Building Power and Solidarity through Shared Governance and Collective Bargaining”, I learned the power of cooperation between AAUP chapters and a school’s faculty senate, and I plan to bring that lesson back to my chapter to promote better integration and communication between these two crucial bodies in faculty governance.

Another session I really enjoyed was “Political Mobilization for 2026 and Beyond.” This session was chaired by folks working at AFT to help mobilize efforts to promote candidates who best represent the values of AAUP. It was really useful to learn what exactly is and isn’t allowed in terms of talking to colleagues about political issues, the best ways to go about doing so, and how to move forward politically after recent major setbacks. Finally, I really enjoyed getting together with representatives from the other Pennsylvania AAUP chapters for drinks and discussing our shared goals while recognizing the unique challenges faced in each of our universities.

I highly recommend the summer institute for new AAUP members as well as long-time members looking for new ways to get involved!