A PSA Response to the AAUP’s 2025–26 Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession

The June 2026 release of the American Association of University Professors’ Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession (ARES 2025–26) reads like an actuarial inventory of a dying industry. Authored by Glenn T. Colby and issued under the auspices of the Committee on the Economic Status of the Profession, the document methodically catalogs the ongoing degradation of academic labor in the United States: real wages trailing inflation, continuing faculty losing purchasing power relative to historical benchmarks, executive compensation soaring into the millions, and a casualized instructional majority trapped in sub-poverty piecework.

The diagnostic work performed by the AAUP is empirically rigorous, but its political and structural diagnosis remains hopelessly obsolete. The report treats the immiseration of the professoriate as if it were a temporary aggregate demand problem, an administrative ethics lapse, or a series of unfortunate external shocks—the lingering wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2008 subprime crisis, executive orders targeting diversity programs, and congressional threats to indirect-cost recovery. Its concluding policy recommendations read like an exercise in nostalgia: invoking the non-binding 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, pleading for "budgetary transparency" under the 1972 statement on The Role of the Faculty in Budgetary and Salary Matters, and urging faculty to form advisory committees to help deans make "open and clearly understood" compensation decisions.

The fundamental error running through all thirty-two pages of the report is the unexamined assumption that higher education is identical to the corporate institution that currently encloses it. The AAUP assumes that intellectual production must occur within the legal machinery of an employer-enroller corporation (Universitas), where scholars sell their labor as subordinate employees (locatio operarum) to an entity that owns the physical plant, holds the state-granted credential monopoly, and commands the payroll.

Beyond the AAUP's "One Faculty" Triage: Why Academic Freedom and Workplace Equity Require the Professional Society of Academics

For more than a century, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has stood as an intellectual and organizational conscience of American higher education. In its founding 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure, the Association articulated an idealistic vision of the university as an "inviolable refuge" from the tyranny of public opinion, commercial passions, and government overreach. It insisted that the search for truth requires an extraordinary degree of independence, secured through continuous tenure and meaningful shared governance.

Yet, over the last four decades, that refuge has been systematically dismantled from within. The contemporary corporate university (Universitas) has steadily replaced its permanent scholarly core with an army of insecure, low-wage instructional laborers. To confront this slow-motion collapse, the AAUP launched its signature labor initiative: the One Faculty campaign. Faced with an academic workforce that has been fragmented into hostile caste divisions, the campaign calls for cross-rank solidarity. It urges tenure-line scholars, non-tenure-track instructors, academic librarians, postdocs, and graduate employees to unite under a single standard of professional dignity, fair compensation, and shared governance.

The empirical justification for the AAUP’s alarm is beyond dispute and common to most higher education systems around the world. In the US, the data snapshots compiled by the AAUP’s Department of Research and Public Policy lay bare an institutional system that has commodified instruction and codified inequality. But while the AAUP’s diagnostic work is sound, its strategic remedy—the "One Faculty" campaign—suffers from an insurmountable theoretical and structural flaw: it attempts to resolve a structural crisis of corporate ownership through the mechanisms of employee trade-union triage.

Why the AAUP’s “Extorted Compliance” Report Demands the PSA

The American Association of University Professor’s July 2026 Special Report, "Extorted Compliance: A Threat to Institutional Autonomy, Academic Freedom, and Shared Governance," provides an unsparing empirical record of the moral and structural collapse of corporate higher education. The joint subcommittee—chaired by Rana M. Jaleel and co-authored by distinguished scholars including Henry Reichman, Joan Wallach Scott, and Risa L. Lieberwitz—has assembled an undeniable indictment of how federal power has weaponized research overhead, Title VI/IX compliance, and ad hoc regulatory extortion to bring America’s universities to heel.

Meeting Academic Duty Until I Die

I have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). This is an uncurable, terminal illness better known by the name, Lou Gehrig’s Disease, after the early twentieth century baseball player and which in more recent times was made familiar to us in the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking.

In a bit of Morrisette irony, my immediately previous post here on the Professional Society of Academic (PSA) blog opened with this shot across the bow of organizations like the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA):

There are only two ways to stop me from criticizing the ignorant, irresponsible assumption of universities and colleges: Someone or some group that has more reach and authority than myself takes up the PSA project or someone refers me to material that successfully argues a professional model for higher education service and stewardship is not viable or desirable.

Because it is present from the moment of conception, we don’t think to factor in death as an end to our aims and efforts. We don’t phrase things this way: "I want to be a teacher, if I grow up." I certainly didn’t factor in death when at 56 I retired, discovered for myself new technology called a Constitutional AI, and switched into high gear a PSA initiative meant to raise awareness for a professional alternative to the monopoly of inherited university and college employer-enrollers that everyone assumes without question. Being otherwise in very good health, I assumed at least another twenty years of effort aimed at improving the sorry state of higher education. I now expect to be dead within a year.

The AAUP, the ACTA, and the PSA

Continuously and effectively, I criticize the institutional inheritance of university and college employer-enrollers that’s monopolized the facilitation of higher education for nearly a millennium now. I have more recently directed my criticism at the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which claims to be a champion of all things related to this inherited higher education institution (HEI) model. I have been working on this social good reform or revolution project for over thirty years, ever since I co-invented and developed the Professional Society of Academics (PSA) model as replacement or complement for the HEI model.

There are only two ways to stop me from criticizing the ignorant, irresponsible assumption of universities and colleges: Someone or some group that has more reach and authority than myself takes up the PSA project or someone refers me to material that successfully argues a professional model for higher education service and stewardship is not viable or desirable. In the meantime, my immediate strategy is to make the AAUP the focus of PSA criticism. To that end, here is the first in a series of posts that criticizes the policies, practices and actions of this organization over its 110 years of ignorant, irresponsible and unnecessary stewardship. I will be forwarding these posts to critics of the AAUP, of which there are a growing number, particularly during this period of social, political and fiscal unrest that is but one more instance in a long history of HEI model unrest.

The AAUP, University Employer-Enrollers, and AI are Not Compatible

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) might have become something it should have. Instead, the organization opted for shoring up institutional employer shortcomings, first as a professional association and later as a faculty employee union. While the AAUP has made itself an authoritative functionary of the inherited institutional model, 110 years ago when the organization was founded, 55 years ago when it morphed into a labor union, or at any time along the way, why did its members not wonder if there is a different way to serve and steward the social good of higher education?

In the history of the AAUP you will find no ad hoc committees or research reports of any kind that pose this question. Like the rest, exclusive institutional employment and enrollment remains the unexamined assumption of its members. As such, all AAUP action amounts to a (defensive) reaction to the dynamics of this unchallenged, inherited, monopolistic mode of higher education earning and learning. This makes everything the AAUP says on the question of AI in the academe both irresponsible and predictable, as evidenced in its July 2025 report, "Artificial Intelligence and Academic Professions."

Though the title indicates that the AAUP has in mind a narrow band of dues-defined concerns for its report, the PSA response to AI has in mind a more inclusive, direct, explicit concern for the entire social good and all those who depend upon it. In comparing the ad hoc committee and PSA responses, I find myself increasingly concerned about the future of higher education and so this post addresses each of the report's findings and recommendations on AI in the academe.