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Our Rights are Under Attack!

The Loyolan reports today on deeply troubling news that our administration is following a national trend—condemned by the AAUP—of attacking student and faculty rights of expression and academic freedom under the guise of “time, place, and manner” restrictions.
 
AAUP National has been clear on what these policies are: “[T]hese policies severely undermine the academic freedom and freedom of speech and expression that are fundamental to higher education. Free inquiry and free expression are indispensable for the transmission of knowledge, the development of students, and the well-being of democracy. Our colleges and universities should encourage, not suppress, open and vigorous dialogue and debate even on the most deeply held beliefs.”
 
Please contact your faculty senate representatives and your department chair immediately to express concern about these attacks. And more importantly, we need to show the administration that they are clearly out of line in demanding such a policy and pressing for it. (All this, while administrators continue to reward themselves without accountability from the faculty.)
 
The AAUP is again clear on the danger we face: “Administrators who claim that ‘expressive activity’ policies protect academic freedom and student learning, even as they severely restrict its exercise, risk destroying the very freedoms of speech and expression they claim to protect.”

The LMU administration is attempting to put a “faculty” face on these policies, and thankfully, our faculty senate has so far refused to play along. But more organized faculty resistance is needed!

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Meetings

LMU-AAUP General Assembly Meeting — Dec. 6, 2022

General Assembly Meeting Dec. 6 @ 3:30pm

As the semester comes to a close, join the LMU AAUP chapter for a General Assembly! The meeting will be driven by the concerns brought to it by those who attend, and we will map out an action agenda for the Spring Semester, focused on the primary concerns raised in our last meeting: the fight for true Cost of Living adjustments, budget transparency and equity, and creating a path to faculty unionization!

Faculty of all ranks and contracts are welcome to attend (unless one holds a primarily administrative appointment) so please share this your colleagues! If everyone brings a friend, we will double our size! 

Tuesday, Dec. 6, 3:30pm – 5:00pm

(contact SecretaryTreasurer@lmuaaup.org for location)

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Meetings

Direct Action Works! LMU-AAUP GA Meeting 11/10/22

Direct Action Works.

You may have seen that thanks to the direct action of students, staff, and faculty united, our Facilities Management workers will be getting the pay that they rightly demanded!   

It was already true before, and it’s proven true even more: Direct Action Works.

A huge congratulations and a massive debt of thanks to everyone who fought together to support our community. This is a huge win, and we have this win entirely because of the grassroots work put in by staff, students, and faculty. 

As the LMU-AAUP chapter said last year: we stand in unequivocal solidarity with facilities management workers at LMU and support their fair, just, and reasonable demands for better wages and working conditions. Their work is essential to the work of the university and their cause is our cause. This is true today and will be true tomorrow. 

Because, we must also remember:

And just this week, we’ve learned that our colleagues who feed us and our students aren’t being properly trained, respected, or even paid their wages.

We’re not alone at LMU, of course, as the AAUP national has told us: real wages for faculty nation-wide have dropped, on average, by 5% for full-time faculty over the last year. 

And all the while, university administrators and the board of trustees keep giving themselves raises, promotions, and (apparently now) mansions. 

It’s always austerity for us, and luxury for them. 

Our scrappy little chapter of the AAUP is young, and we’re still building capacity. But the faculty have always been and will always remain the heart of LMU.

Together with amazing support staff and students—who are fighting hard again and again for equity and justice—we can build a more democratic workplace, untied across colleges, faculty ranks, and contracts: we are one faculty. 

So, let’s get together and talk about what we can do to become more united, and how we can build alongside students and staff, for a genuinely democratic and powerfully united LMU: 

LMU-AAUP General Assembly Meeting, Thursday Nov. 10, 2022 at 4pm (w/ reception to follow)

General Assembly Meetings are open to current AAUP members as well as non-member faculty and staff (who currently do not hold primarily administrative appointments). Join us for an open conversation on the economic status of the faculty at LMU, and brainstorm how we build capacity, and where we go next. 

Agenda and location details forthcoming!

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Press Release Statement

Statement on Participation in Commencement Exercises

Faculty have the right of meaningful participation in the determination of their obligations to the University. When administrative decisions are made without such participation the administration is obligated to give transparent explanation and meaningful prior notification of changes to their contractual involvement in university organized events, such as graduation and commencement ceremonies. 

As such, if substantial logistical changes are made to such events, without sufficient notification for faculty to plan accordingly to attend to their own health, safety, and welfare, it is reasonable for faculty to decide not to participate in such events without fear of retribution or sanction.

Faculty and academic staff are not mere employees of a university, but rather are an essential and central group of decision makers for and about the life of the university. When this role is not respected by a university’s administration (as the case appears to be at LMU), then faculty are within their rights to remind the university of these facts.

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Press Release Statement

Statement of Solidarity with LMU Facilities Workers

The LMU-AAUP chapter stands in unequivocal solidarity with facilities management workers at LMU and support their fair, just, and reasonable demands for better wages and working conditions. Their work is essential to the work of the university and their cause is our cause.

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Spring 2022 General Assembly Meetings

SAVE THE DATES!

  • Friday Feb 11, 2022 at 12:00pm (Pacific), via Zoom
  • Friday Mar 11, 2022 at 12:00pm (Pacific), via Zoom
  • Friday Apr 8, 2022 at 12:00pm (Pacific), via Zoom

More details, zoom links, and agenda are forthcoming!

All non-administrative LMU faculty and professional librarians of all ranks and contracts are welcome to join! (Voting on any issues is restricted to current members, as required by AAUP bylaws).

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Press Release Statement

Open Letter for Budget Equity and Transparency

The following letter was sent today to the University President, Provost, and Faculty Senate President, along with a copy of A Call to Justice: An Open Letter to the Loyola Marymount University Community in support of Budget Equity and Transparency:

Dear Colleagues,

We write to you at the far edge of the third wave, after the dark days of January, in the midst of a tentative but growing sense of confidence as educators are cleared for vaccination in LA County. We have weathered a year of crisis, from spring break to spring break. We have learned quickly, we have adapted, we have rallied. We have worried for our families, worried for our colleagues, and worried for our jobs. We have supported our students and encouraged them on when we thought we had nothing left. And we have rallied to carry LMU through.

Our efforts have not always been perfect, but our efforts have brought stable enrollments.

As we discern together in the coming weeks about the future of our university, we encourage you to adopt an equity budget and commit to budget transparency in the months and years ahead. There has been some confusion in the past year about what, exactly, an equity budget means; we hope that the enclosed open letter—signed by over 100 individual faculty and staff members and endorsed by the membership of the LMU-AAUP, Faculty Senate Committee on the Economic Standing of the Faculty, and the Latinx Faculty Association—provides some guidance in understanding what an equity budget is and why it is a necessary reflection of our values as a university in the Jesuit and Marymount traditions.

We have made enormous sacrifices to get here. We must make good on those sacrifices now by taking care of each other.

Cordially,

LMU-AAUP

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Meetings

General Assembly Meeting—March 12, 2021

Please join us for a General Assembly Meeting of the LMU-AAUP on Friday March 12, 2021 at Noon (Pacific Time) via Zoom. This will be a regular open meeting for all current and potential members (so tell your friends to join us!). All non-administrative LMU faculty and professional librarians of all ranks and contracts are welcome! Voting on any issues is restricted to current members. If you don’t have the zoom link in your email, contact the Secretary Treasurer for the link.

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Press Release Statement

Statement regarding administration’s response to anonymous op-ed

The Executive Committee of the LMU Chapter of the American Association of University Professors (LMU-AAUP) issues the following statement:

The LMU chapter of the AAUP is concerned about the administration’s public response to the anonymous article published by The Loyolan. The administration’s response (which is unsigned yet claims to speak for “LMU” as a whole) reads as a public attack on our own students, rather than as a contribution to discernment for the sake of the whole university community regarding our financial situation. By offering no new documentation or evidence, this response exacerbates the deep distrust felt by many in our university community. The only adequate response is the fullest possible budget transparency, which has been demanded both by our Faculty Senate and by the LMU-AAUP, in an open letter adopted by its membership in September, signed by nearly 100 members of the faculty.

—The Executive Committee of the LMU-AAUP

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Statement

LMU-AAUP Stands in Solidarity with #BlackAtLMU and Black Faculty and Staff Association Demands

Following the statement of solidarity issued by the Executive Committee of the LMU-AAUP in support of Black faculty, staff, and student demands at Loyola Marymount University, the membership of the chapter voted on Sep. 18 2020 to ratify and endorse this statement as the offiical position of the LMU-AAUP chapter:

We stand in solidarity with #BlackAtLMU and the LMU Black Faculty and Staff Association and completely support the demands which they have issued. We join their calls for LMU to move beyond words and act directly against racism and anti-blackness at Loyola Marymount University. We too are “impatient with the institutional inertia that is historically, consciously, and strategically used to resist change.”

Black Lives Matter.