Faculty morale at Lehigh is low.
Last year, Lehigh faculty revived the university’s longstanding chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which was founded in 1915 to defend shared governance and academic freedom on U.S. campuses.
Shared governance is a simple idea, meaning the people who teach and research have a real voice in the decisions that shape their work. This matters for students, because faculty who feel more respected stay longer, teach and advise more generously, and make enduring commitments to our community.
Over the past few years, we have seen free speech become increasingly constrained. There have been attempts to bar community members who identify as Muslim from campus. anti-Black, antisemitic, and anti-LGBTQ+ hate speech keeps recurring.
At a moment requiring bold leadership, the university’s responses have often been formulaic, written in the language of risk management, instead of in defense of the values and principles that bind us as an equitable community.
Faculty with relevant expertise and students with firsthand experience are rarely consulted. Students have raised their voices, and we share their frustration.
The same pattern appears in how decisions are made. From the strategic planning process to the rollout of the AI policy, administrators make choices that shape teaching and research with little more than a pretense of faculty consultation.
Working conditions show the consequences of this administrative posture. This fall, the administration announced cuts to non-medical benefits for faculty and staff. It did so after convening a benefits working group and then rejecting the recommendations that faculty and staff had spent months developing.
The cuts follow increases in parking fees, annual health insurance premium hikes, and raises that haven’t kept pace with inflation.
The costs of excluding the people closest to a problem can also be human. Consider the case of four Ghanaian students accused of admissions fraud. Despite the objections of concerned faculty, the university pursued charges and the students spent eight months in Northampton County Jail before being transferred to ICE detention.
Ultimately, most charges were dropped due to lack of evidence. A university that acts this way has lost sight of its obligations to its students.
University administrators, as a matter of course, make crucial decisions every day in the face of real legal and financial pressures. We don’t doubt they care about Lehigh. But a university is more than its strategic plan, its leadership, or its branding. It’s the communities of students, faculty, staff and alumni whose commitment to shared values and mission keeps it going over decades.
The university cannot achieve its goals without strong faculty morale and working conditions that support teaching and research. This is why a stronger faculty voice matters.
Working closely with the Faculty Senate, we will pursue a genuine seat at the table on decisions that affect benefits, compensation and working conditions, a formal consultation process for major policies, a renewed commitment to academic freedom and a response protocol for hate incidents that includes faculty expertise and student perspectives.
We invite all tenure and non-tenure track faculty and graduate students at Lehigh to join our rapidly growing chapter. We also encourage students, staff and alumni to support the AAUP and to join our public activities in the year ahead.
Together, we can set an agenda to strengthen academic freedom and shared governance.
We say all this because we value Lehigh’s role as a world-class research university, committed to the vital work of teaching, learning and maintaining a just and ethical community. Living up to that ideal depends on all of us having a voice.
The Group Executive Board of Lehigh University’s AAUP Advocacy Chapter
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