Advancing Academic Freedom and Shared Governance, Defining Fundamental
      Professional Values and Standards for Higher Education, and Ensuring Higher
     Education’s Contribution to the Common Good.

What TAAUP Does

  The Tennessee Conference of the AAUP provides services to its constituent colleges and universities and to the state as a whole, and strives to protect the rights of all faculty members in Tennessee public and private institutions, whether they are full-time or adjunct, tenured, tenure track, or non-tenure track. We attempt to help government officials, the media and the general public understand the importance of higher education in helping students become more competitive in a global economy and more capable of exercising their rights and responsibilities as citizens, and to convey the vital role that faculty plays in achieving those goals.

President, Tennessee AAUP Conference: Máté Wierdl, University of Memphis, Department of Mathematical Sciences Wierdl
Wierdlmate@gmail.com

Past President, Tennessee AAUP Conference:
Josephine A. McQuail, Tennessee Technological University (TTU) jamquail@gmail.com

Vice President, Four-Year Public Universities:
Cynthia George, Tennessee State University

Vice President, Community Colleges:  David Johnson, Volunteer State Community College

Vice President, Contingent Faculty: Vacant

Vice President, Private Universities:
Linda White, LeMoyne-Owen College, Department of English lmwwriter@gmail.com

Secretary: Josie McQuail, retired, Tennessee Technological University, Secretaryjamquail@gmail.com
Treasurer:

Dora Estes (retired), adjunct faculty, Nashville State Community College, Dept of Accounting and Finance, dorast6@gmail.com

Tennessee AAUP Election Results

Now is the Time: Save Public Education

Please help save public education. Resist corporate influence on our and your campus: taxpayers (your) money goes into private hands with no public oversight, with no input from professors. Public education was hard fought for by your great-great grandparents. Don't let corporations turn back the wheels of time claiming this is the 21st century way. Completely false. The American college system became the envy of the World when it was taken out of corporate control 150 years ago.
  After having successfully attacked K-12 public education, Tennessee's lawmakers are now coming after higher education with bills like the "Divisive Concepts" legislation (the best summary is UTK's at Divisive Concepts Law - The University of Tennessee System). This legislation forbids teaching about certain concepts even in the higher education classroom, including race, gender, and the institution of slavery, without prescribed framing. This makes teaching certain subjects like feminism and "critical race theory" if not impossible, very risky to the faculty member. Everyone needs to educate themselves on these restrictive laws.
  If you are a student or a faculty member and you are willing to help, please contact me by email. wierdlmate@gmail.com Becoming a member of the AAUP would be a way of ensuring Academic Freedom survives to keep American education "the best in the world" -- which, however imperfect, some deem it to be.
  Additionally, we now have Project 2025 to worry about. Project 2025, “disavowed” supposedly by soon-to-be President Trump during the campaign, drawn up by the Heritage Foundation, and now, despite his disavowal, likely to be implanted. Here is one of the passages that address higher education:
  Although student loans and grants should ultimately be restored to the private sector (or, at the very least, the federal government should revisit its role as a guarantor, rather than direct lender) federal postsecondary education investments should bolster economic growth, and recipient institutions should nourish academic freedom and embrace intellectual diversity. That has not, however, been the track record of federal higher education policy or of the many institutions of higher education that are hostile to free expression, open inquiry, and American exceptionalism. Federal post-secondary policy should be more than massive, inefficient, and open-ended subsidies to “traditional” colleges and universities. It should be rebalanced to focus far more on bostering the workforce sills of Americans who have no interest in pursuing a four-year academic degree. It should reflect a fuller picture of learning after high school, placing apprenticeship programs of all types and career and technical vocation on an even playing field with degrees from colleges and universities. Rather than continuing to buttress a higher education system captured by woke “diversicrats” and a de facto monopoly enforced by the federal accreditation cartel, federal postsecondary education policy should prepare students for jobs in the dynamic economy, nurture institutional diversity, and expose schools to greater market forces.

Project 2025--Mandate for Leadership
Summary for the Effects on Higher Ed

  I hope you are "woke" now — that is WOKEN UP to what is going on with "Project 2025," and what it has in store for Higher Education: https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/project-2025-and-higher-education /font>

Get a Speaker/Be a Speaker

Being a republican with a small r

Thoughts from Troy D. Smith, Dept. of History, Tennessee Tech University

I tell students in my history classes a lot about "republicanism" (with a small r). The simplest definition is a government without a monarch, but it is much more than that. Republicanism carries a sense of civic responsibility and duty toward the community — to "promote the general welfare" — and a responsibility to step up and offer your abilities in a time of need, even when it is inconvenient for you personally.
As one famous small-r republican, Thomas Paine, put it: "These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered."
I believe that the word "country" in that quote could be replaced with "community" -or academic community, or higher education calling, or academic freedom -and be just as true. I am willing to continue to serve in my current statewide AAUP position, despite being unbelievably busy and burdened with responsibilities, because these are times that try our souls. Academic freedom and true shared governance are being restricted, impinged upon, and threatened with virtual extinction in this state, and we all have to do our part to resist that commodified, politicized tide. I hope that every AAUP member reading this will redouble their commitment to pour out the last full measure of devotion (of our time and energy) to the cause that brought us together.