Q: Does Gallaudet have an official AAUP Chapter?
A: Yes. We were recognized as an advocacy chapter by the National AAUP in March, 2021. As of December 2023, we had 72 dues-paying members, representing 43% of Gallaudet’s 165 voting faculty.

Q: What issues does the Gallaudet AAUP focus on?
A: At our first meeting as an official chapter in 2021, we unanimously voted to focus on salary and compensation. This includes the loss of cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) and merit increases (MIs). These happened annually before 2009 (14 years ago). Up until 2009, Gallaudet faculty salaries were above average for the Washington, DC area. However, because of the loss of regular cost-of-living adjustments and merit increases since 2009, Gallaudet is now the lowest-paying university for faculty in the DC area.

In October 2023, we approved the #AcademicsNotAdmin central campaign message.

Q: Is the Gallaudet AAUP a union? Are we protected?
A: We are not a recognized union. The Gallaudet AAUP chapter is an advocacy chapter. The National AAUP/AFT supports advocacy chapters, collective bargaining chapters, and union chapters.

All Gallaudet AAUP members are also members of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and belong to AFT Local 6741, AFL-CIO, with all rights and benefits of AFT membership, such as discounts on cell phone service and insurance. The AFT has 1.7 million union members. The AFL-CIO is a coalition of unions altogether representing 12.5 million working people. Both the AFT and AFL-CIO regularly lobby Congress on issues which affect education and labor generally.

Even though we are not a union, we have most of the legal protections of a union. Our right to organize is protected by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (NLRA) (29 U.S.C. §§ 151-169). See our Employee Rights page for more information about the NLRA and our right to organize.

Q: How is the AAUP different from Faculty Governance?
A: We aim to work together. Faculty Governance is an integral part of Gallaudet’s daily operations and has broad responsibilities. AAUP is an external advocacy organization that focuses on the narrower issues of faculty well-being, shared governance, and academic freedom. Faculty Governance has been working hard on the salary issue for longer than we have, but they need help! Our goal is to work with Faculty Governance and the administration on these issues. As an external organization, we have access to external resources, such as the legal teams of the National AAUP/AFT to help in our efforts.

Q: I am faculty and have a meeting with an administrator about my job. Can the AAUP represent me?
A: Yes! This is one of the benefits of joining the Gallaudet AAUP. We can send one of our executive committee members to high-stakes meetings that you have with administrators. These include employment negotiations, disciplinary meetings, or whistleblowing / reporting an incident.

Q: Is joining the AAUP expensive?
A: Membership fees, which are tax-deductible, are based on your salary level. As of 2024, dues ranged from $75 to $331 per year (or $6.25 to $27.58 monthly). This is roughly 0.2% of your annual salary.

Q: Is joining the AAUP worth it?
Absolutely, yes! If your AAUP chapter, through advocating for faculty well-being, is able to improve your salary as much as the cost of an annual AAUP membership (which is only 0.2% of your salary), then you have just paid your membership dues for life. This is a bargain rate for an agent that acts on your behalf.

For example, if your salary is $75,000, your dues are $245 a year. If the AAUP is able to advocate for you and lobby Gallaudet to give all faculty a 1% raise, just once in your entire career, your salary will go up by $750. You’ve paid your AAUP dues for life, and you’d still have $505 left over, every year until you retire from Gallaudet. (Taxes are left out of this calculation for simplicity).

Workers who are represented by a collective or union earn, on average, 20% more than workers who aren’t represented by one. This has been true across industries. Having an organization that acts as your agent by constantly advocating for you is worth the cost of annual dues!

Q: Why are administrations so insistent on keeping salaries low?
Administrators are tasked with negotiating the best prices they can for everything, including labor. Typically, labor is around 80% of the cost of running any business or organization, which makes it a prime target. By keeping labor costs down, even if it’s just by a few percentage points, administrators free up a great deal of money that they can use to fund other projects. This is an egoist corporate model that has been dominant in the United States since the 1980s, even though our country had been more pro-labor from the 1930s through the 1970s. It’s also a short-sighted model. Longer-term worker concerns, such as productivity, loyalty and well-being, do not show up on budget spreadsheets and are therefore often disregarded.

Administrators will trim faculty salaries for as long as we let them. Human nature being what it is, administrators rarely trim their own salaries; in fact, they usually boost their own salaries.

Q: Do we really need an AAUP presence? Isn’t Faculty Governance enough?
Unfortunately, internal Faculty Governance is not enough. Faculty Governance is overwhelmed with its many responsibilities. Arguing our platform using only numbers and logic and comparator institutions is not enough; the administration will forcibly trim salaries for as long as they can get away with it. History has shown us that the proven way to counteract wage reductions is through worker solidarity.

We have a tremendous advantage. Gallaudet faculty are bilingual, experts in our field, and uniquely qualified. This makes us possibly the most difficult workforce in the world to replace. While other universities can hire adjuncts from a large national pool of hearing Ph.D.s, Gallaudet does not have the ability to quickly replace more than a few faculty at a time with ASL-fluent adjuncts who are also experts in their fields.

Q: Has the Gallaudet AAUP had any success on the salary issue?
A: We believe so, yes! Looking back at our AAUP chapter’s short history since becoming official in March 2021: Gallaudet gave most faculty a 3% general pay increase after having given no raises or adjustments in four years. The following year (2022), Gallaudet gave an additional 3% general pay increase to all faculty. This is a total of a 6% increase over two years. Was this a coincidence? We don’t think so. Gallaudet had a precedent of not giving raises, not even any adjustments for inflation. We think that the AAUP’s advocacy efforts, on top of Faculty Governance’s efforts, were a part of this sudden break in precedence. Of course, the administration would never want to acknowledge that external lobbying is making a difference.

Q: How does the Gallaudet AAUP advocate for salaries?
We have been empowering the Gallaudet community by providing accurate and up-to-date information about salaries at comparable institutions. We obtain our data from the federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), maintained by the U.S. Department of Education, the AAUP Faculty Compensation Survey, and public disclosure forms filed with the Internal Revenue Service such as IRS Form 990. Before the Gallaudet AAUP began making this information easily accessible, it was difficult for most faculty to find this information. This meant that the Gallaudet administration had the upper hand in any salary discussions and they were able to craft whatever narrative served their own purposes. By sharing accurate salary data, we have empowered our faculty to stand up and ask for the salaries that we deserve. And in fact, we have seen a dramatic change in the conversations on campus since we became active.

Recently, the Gallaudet AAUP funded an external forensic audit of Gallaudet’s finances to counteract the administration’s ongoing narrative that Gallaudet is in financial distress. (The audit found that Gallaudet is not, and never was in financial distress).

Q: I like what the AAUP is doing, but I don’t necessarily want to join. Is this okay?
A: We really need your membership to be able to project power at the negotiating table. If being a known member is a concern, know that we, and AAUP National, will always keep your membership anonymous.

Q: If I join the AAUP, will the administration know that I am a member?
A: Absolutely not. We respect your confidentiality. The National AAUP will also never disclose your name. If the administration calls them and asks, they will only reveal the number of members that a chapter has, but never give names. Likewise, the Gallaudet AAUP chapter does not share our roster with anyone. Only the chapter President and Vice President have access to the roster. We do not even share this roster with the other officers and members of the AAUP Executive Committee, or with chapter members. For our daily operations, we really don’t need to access the roster. We are keeping the roster hidden in this way to prevent any chance of accidental disclosure.