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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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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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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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Oct. 2: Teach-In on Academic Freedom & Political Economy of Higher Education w/ Isaac Kamola (Trinity College)

The LMU-AAUP is excited to announced our next discussion in a series with academic leaders and organizers! We will be hosting Prof. Isaac Kamola of Trinity College on Friday Oct. 2nd (Noon, PST).


Prof. Isaac Kamola

Prof. Kamola is currently the President of the Trinity College AAUP Chapter, and he was one of its co-founders. Trinity College’s AAUP chapter is relatively young, founded in 2016-17 by faculty at Trinity specifically to support DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) students on their campus and to ensure that the college would do everything they could to protect those students from deportation.

The chapter grew quickly, but was thrown into the national spotlight as they had to come to the defense of one of their faculty members, Johnny Wil­liams, came under national attack for extra-mural speech. They successfully fought for Dr. Williams’ academic freedom rights, and in the process revealed deeply troubling questions about university governance as Trinity. You can learn more about that case and the work that their chapter was able to do by already being organized here. 

And they have been leaders on their campus in laying out principles for faculty governance during Covid-19 and ensuring that their students and their faculty are well supported during this crisis.

Prof. Kamola is Associate Professor of Political Science at Trinity, and an expert not only in international political economy, but also in critical higher education studies. He has published widely on the various crises facing universities today, with a focus on how the political economy of higher education shapes and forms university’s commitments to principles like academic freedom.

All of which is to say: we can learn a lot from Prof. Kamola and the work of the Trinity College AAUP, and we hope you can take the time to join us this Friday, Oct. 2 at Noon to speak with him! 

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Meetings

General Assembly Meeting—Sep 18, 2020

Please join us for our monthly General Assembly Meeting of the LMU-AAUP on Friday September 18 at Noon (Pacific Time). This will be our regular open meeting for all current and potential members. All non-administrative LMU faculty and professional librarians of all ranks and contracts are welcome! Voting on any issues is restricted to current due-paying members. If you don’t have the zoom link in your email, contact the Secretary Treasurer for the link.

The primary business of the meeting will be to adopt and launch our campaign for a transparent and equitable budget at LMU, make concrete plans to build our membership (and power!), and to support demands being made by grass-roots campus groups to build a genuinely anti-racist university, moving beyond mere words.