SC&I Associate Professor of Journalism and Media Studies and Director of the MIC Center Todd Wolfson has been elected the president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) for a four-year term ending in 2028.

The mission of the AAUP, a nonprofit membership association of faculty and other academic professionals headquartered in Washington, DC, is, “to advance academic freedom and shared governance; to define fundamental professional values and standards for higher education; to promote the economic security of faculty, academic professionals, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and all those engaged in teaching and research in higher education; to help the higher education community organize to make our goals a reality; and to ensure higher education's contribution to the common good,” according to the website.

As a candidate for the presidency of the AAUP, running under the slate “United Faculty for the Common Good,” Wolfson wrote, “I want AAUP to lead the charge in forging a national vision for the future of higher ed, and to build a campaign to bring that vision to life. To do this we need to attend to our partnership with AFT, and then work to establish partnerships with other higher ed unions as well as our students and our communities.

As a candidate for the presidency of the AAUP, running under the slate “United Faculty for the Common Good,” Wolfson wrote, “I want AAUP to lead the charge in forging a national vision for the future of higher ed, and to build a campaign to bring that vision to life."

“Before we can build with others, we need to attend to ourselves. We need an organization and staff that understand the problems our chapters face and can offer real material support. We need to fight to build alignment across AAUP and then across the broader sector. And, we have to understand how the affiliation agreement has impacted AAUP, from the national organization to state conferences and local chapters. We must work with AFT to make sure that this critical agreement helps us take a bold step forward.”

Since 2017, Wolfson has held leadership roles in Rutgers AAUP-AFT and he has served as its president and vice president. In these roles, Wolfson wrote, he “helped build our department rep infrastructure, which is the backbone of our organizing work at Rutgers.”

He served as president of the Rutgers AAUP-AFT during the COVID-19 pandemic, helping to “reignite the Coalition of Rutgers Unions (CRU), which represents about 20,000 workers across three campuses including staff, adjunct faculty, grad workers, healthcare workers and full-time faculty,” he wrote.

Wolfson's research focuses on the intersection of new media and contemporary social movements and he is author of “Digital Rebellion: The Birth of the Cyber Left” and co-editor of the forthcoming volume, “Great Refusal: Herbert Marcuse and Contemporary Social Movements.”

Following the pandemic, Wolfson said he “worked with higher ed leaders across the country in AAUP, UAW, CWA, AFT, NEA, AFSCME and many other unions to establish Higher Ed Labor United (HELU). HELU’s goal is to work with AAUP and other unions to unite higher ed workers wall-to-wall and coast-to-coast. I was elected as the first interim chair of HELU, which held its founding convention in May of 2024 with over 50 higher ed organizations in attendance.”

As president of the Rutgers AAUP-AFT in 2023, Wolfson said he helped “lead the historic strike at Rutgers of 9000 workers across three unions. Our strike brought together faculty, grads workers, postdocs, librarians, health care workers and counselors. We won more control over our work; contractual rights around academic freedom; job security for full-time non-tenure-track faculty, adjunct faculty, postdocs and grad workers; and raises between 14-44% over four years as well as a $600,000 fund to support housing for people living near the university.”

Wolfson's research focuses on the intersection of new media and contemporary social movements and he is author of “Digital Rebellion: The Birth of the Cyber Left” and co-editor of the forthcoming volume, “Great Refusal: Herbert Marcuse and Contemporary Social Movements.”  Wolfson believes in the importance of engaged scholarship that leads to tangible action in the world, and to that end, he is a co-founder of the Media Mobilizing Project (MMP) based in Philadelphia, PA. MMP is an award-winning organization that aims is to use new media and communication to build a movement of poor and working people, united across color lines. MMP's work has been supported by the Knight Foundation, Ford Foundation, Kellogg Foundation, Media and Democracy Coalition, and Media Democracy Fund amongst others.

Learn more about the Journalism and Media Studies major at the Rutgers School of Communication and Information on the website.

Photo: SC&I

In the Media:

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Inside Higher Ed profiles AAUP’s new president, Todd Wolfson (SC&I).