Rutgers Unions Win Academic Freedom for All Unit Members

A Rutgers spokesperson said the university is “committed to supporting faculty on issues unique to higher education.”

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Rutgers University faculty unions reached a tentative agreement with university officials earlier this month to guarantee academic freedom protections to all unit members, including tenured and untenured full-time professors, part-time and adjunct faculty, librarians, clinicians, graduate student workers, and postdocs.

Todd Wolfson, president of the national American Association of University Professors, called the agreement a “monumental, historic win” at a time when faculty speech, research and curriculum have come under intense political scrutiny. Union leaders at Rutgers are encouraged by the progress, but greater job security is needed to make the protections truly enforceable for contract faculty, they said.

“International students, full-time faculty and part-time faculty in particular—we were all feeling very vulnerable,” said Hank Kalet, a journalism lecturer and vice president of the adjunct faculty union. “So these protections became a central focus for a lot of our members.”

Rutgers has two faculty unions, the Rutgers AAUP-AFT, which includes full-time faculty, clinicians, librarians, graduate student workers and postdocs, and the Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union. Both contracts expired in June, and negotiations, which began in January, are ongoing. The academic freedom article was based on a previous clause in the Rutgers AAUP-AFT contract, as well as a separate university policy on academic freedom. Union members were happy with the Rutgers policy but wanted a version of it enshrined in the contract so that Rutgers officials could not change faculty’s academic freedom protections without unit members’ input, said Emily Marker, a history professor and member of the bargaining committee.

“We need concrete, grievable assurances that our academic freedom rights and protections will be upheld to the level that they have been in the past with this very good policy,” Marker said.

The agreed-upon article states that unit members “have the right to academic freedom, which includes the right to examine, discuss, and present ideas and perspectives when engaged in teaching, research, professional practice, clinical practice, artistic expression, professional publication, librarianship and scholarship activities, consistent with their professional judgment, without retribution."

The policy says academic freedom “means the freedom to pursue and disseminate knowledge” and “to freely discuss subjects with which unit members are competent to deal and to present and maintain their opinions and conclusions while maintaining standards of sound scholarship and competent teaching.” It also notes that “unit members, as private citizens, enjoy the same freedoms of speech and expression as any private citizen, and shall be free from institutional discipline in the exercise of these rights.”

Rutgers professors’ fears of censorship aren’t just hypothetical. Recent reports from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression show that attempts to sanction faculty for their speech have increased in recent years, and academics who come under attack rarely receive public support from their administrators.

A year ago, shortly after President Donald Trump signed an executive order designating antifa as a terrorist organization, Rutgers history professor and antifascist movement expert Mark Bray received so many death threats that he and his family fled to Spain. Rutgers officials backed Bray, but the situation gave the need for academic freedom protections greater urgency, union leaders said.

At nearby institutions, faculty members didn’t receive such support from their administrators; Kalet pointed to the “Fired Four” at the City University of New York—four adjunct professors who were not reappointed in the summer of 2025 after participating in pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus. (Three have since been reappointed.)

“If we say something on social media, I believe that this [article] will protect us,” Kalet said. “If I post something … like ‘Free Palestine’ on social media, I should be protected.”

In an emailed statement, a Rutgers spokesperson said the university is “committed to supporting faculty on issues unique to higher education.”

“Since the university began negotiating with our unions in the spring, we have held 32 sessions with AAUP-AFT and 50 sessions with four staff bargaining units,” the spokesperson wrote. “We are operating from a position of fairness and fiscal responsibility while staying focused on maintaining academic excellence for our students. We will continue to negotiate in good faith, working to align union proposals with the university’s priorities and fiscal realities.”

For lecturers and other contract faculty, the academic freedom article is only the first step. Without job security that extends beyond one-year contracts, it would be difficult to make the article truly enforceable, Kalet explained.

“The biggest thing on the table for most [adjuncts] is job security,” Kalet said. “Without real job protections, adjuncts have no real academic freedom. So we won the first part of this, which is a recognition that we should have [academic freedom]. We need the second part to really hammer it home.”