AAUP Higher Ed Summit and Biennial Meeting Wrap-Up

The 2026 AAUP Higher Ed Summit and Biennial Meeting was held this past weekend, June 10-14, in Chicago, Illinois. This is not a normal moment, and this could not be a normal convention. Higher education is under coordinated political attack, our democracy is under siege, and the institutions our members have built their lives inside are being hollowed out from above and weaponized from outside. The tools of defense alone-campus-by-campus advocacy, statements after the fact, reactive litigation-will not hold the line, let alone win the future.

This weekend, we defined a different path: building wall-to-wall worker power on our campuses, confronting the authoritarian and corporate forces arrayed against higher education, advancing an affirmative national program for what our universities must become, and transforming the AAUP itself into a fighting labor organization capable of leading the sector and the broader struggle for democracy.

Highlights of the summit and Biennial Meeting follow.

Election Results

Delegates to the Biennial Meeting elected one at-large member of the AAUP governing Council and five regional Council members. The list of newly elected and re-elected leaders is below, and the full election results can be found here.

At-Large Council Member: Charmaine Chua, University of California, Berkeley

Region 1: Antonio Gallo, California State University, Northridge

Region 2: Leonard Bright, Texas A&M University

Region 3: Gretchen McNamara, Wright State University

Region 4: Roxanne Shirazi, City University of New York

Region 5: Nikolas Bowie, Harvard University

Proposals

Delegates to the Biennial Meeting approved a package of proposals put forward by the AAUP Council. The proposals commit the AAUP to:

• Building a wall-to-wall organization-uniting faculty, staff, and student workers.
• Fighting for a system that serves the public through free public higher education and debt-free pathways for students; dignity, security, and fair compensation for all higher education workers; reinvestment in research; equity and sustained support for under-resourced campuses.
• Acting in coalition with labor and social movements to defend civil liberties, resist political interference in education and research, and challenge the consolidation of authoritarian control.
• Fighting for a multiracial, inclusive democracy, and advancing policies that expand access to healthcare, housing, education, and economic security.
• Asserting that AI is a labor, governance, and public good issue-subject to collective bargaining, controlled through shared governance, and regulated to prevent de-skilling, displacement, surveillance, inequality, the unbundling of academic work, and the privatization and extraction of knowledge produced by academic workers and students.
• Ending the crisis of contingency by building a higher education workforce grounded in stability, equity, and respect.
• Aligning our structure with our ambitions by investing in organizing infrastructure, developing leadership at every level, expanding resources, and enforcing systems of accountability.

Other proposals approved by delegates included "Acting like Unions and With Unions: Transforming Advocacy Chapters into Fighting Pre-Contract Union Locals" and "Resolution Affirming Advocacy Dues-Sharing Strategies."

Plenaries

The 2026 Higher Ed Summit and Biennial Meeting included seven plenaries, where we came together for generative conversations about our path forward. These plenaries addressed building power in higher ed, democracy and AI, and higher ed as a public good, as well as a roundtable discussion for HBCU faculty and a presentation from a panel of Minneapolis labor activists on building education activism into a political force.

A keynote speech on Friday morning featured Stacy Davis Gates, president of the Chicago Teachers Union and an internationally recognized leader in labor, racial justice movements, and progressive politics. Davis Gates' inspiring speech emphasized the need for common cause and coalition-building among not only higher ed and K-12 workers but all communities in order to "reconstruct" the country in this moment of crisis and narrative control, and stressed workers' ability to wield power in organized forces-particularly through unions-as a key mechanism for achieving this goal.

Workshops

Workshops focused on organizing to meet the political moment and building strong chapters. We strategized together about our political agenda, shared governance, and nuts-and-bolts skills for running effective advocacy and collective bargaining chapters. Workshop tracks included Core Skills Organizing, More Skills Organizing, Political Education, Shared Governance in a Crisis, and Bargaining and Contract Enforcement, with individual sessions tailored to one of the five tracks.

Awards

The AAUP recognized five activists with awards this year. Learn more here.

Dr. Shannon Cummins of the University of Nebraska at Omaha and Professor Belle Boggs of North Carolina State University received the Georgina M. Smith Award, established in 1979 to honor AAUP leader Georgina M. Smith and recognize exceptional leadership in improving the status of academic women or academic collective bargaining.

Dr. Dee Sherwood of Western Michigan University and Professor Joseph Fu of the University of Georgia received the Marilyn Sternberg Award, given to AAUP members who demonstrate concern for human rights, courage, persistence, political foresight, imagination, and collective bargaining skills.

Finally, Jennifer Ruth of Portland State University, a longtime and significant defender of academic freedom at both the national and chapter levels of the AAUP, received the Outstanding Achievement Award, established in 2016 and granted to an AAUP member for outstanding chapter- or conference-level work that advances academic freedom or shared governance.