The AAUP is a nonprofit membership association of faculty and other academic professionals. Headquartered in Washington, DC, we have members and chapters based at colleges and universities across the country.
Since our foundation in 1915, the AAUP has helped to shape American higher education by developing the standards and procedures that maintain quality in education and academic freedom in this country's colleges and universities. We define fundamental professional values and standards for higher education, advance the rights of academics, particularly as those rights pertain to academic freedom and shared governance, and promote the interests of higher education teaching and research.
The AAUP has two sister organizations:
The AAUP-CBC is a labor union; its members are those chapters of the AAUP that engage in collective bargaining. The AAUP-CBC promotes organizing among tenure-line and contingent faculty, academic professionals, and graduate employees and provides support to member chapters as they work to protect shared governance and academic freedom, to uphold professional standards and values,
The AAUP Foundation is a public charity; it funds, through its grant making process, the charitable and educational purposes of the AAUP, including support for academic freedom and quality higher education.