Policy Documents and Reports

The essential guide to the AAUP's recommended policies and best practices for higher education, now in its twelfth edition.

For the past century, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), long viewed as the authoritative voice of the academic profession, has developed gold standards for sound academic practice.

The AAUP's Policy Documents and Reports (widely known as the Redbook) presents in a convenient format a wide range of policy documents, some formulated in cooperation with other educational organizations. The twelfth edition includes statements and reports on academic freedom, tenure, and due process; academic governance; professional ethics; recruitment and faculty appointment; librarians and academic professionals; online and distance education; intellectual property, copyright, and outside funding; discrimination; collective bargaining; budgets, salaries, and benefits; and students' rights and freedoms.

The new edition features central AAUP policy documents that have undergone revision or have received significant statistical and legal updates since the publication of the last edition. These include the Recommended Institutional Regulations on Academic Freedom and Tenure, the Statement on Collective Bargaining, On Collegiality as a Criterion for Faculty Evaluation, The Use and Abuse of Faculty Suspensions, and Contingent Appointments and the Academic Profession, as well as the documents that outline procedures for conducting Association investigations. This edition also features newly rewritten versions of two existing Redbook statements: Academic Freedom and Outside Speakers and the Statement on Online Education. And nine documents are included for the first time, including four on academic governance—Confidentiality and Faculty Representation in Academic Governance, Faculty Evaluation of Administrators, Faculty Communication with Governing Boards: Best Practices, and On the Use of Executive Recruiters in Presidential Searches—and a 2024 statement on achieving racial justice in higher education, On Eliminating Discrimination and Achieving Equality in Higher Education.