Emma Whitford | 19 October 2026 | Times Higher Ed
Rutgers University faculty unions reached a tentative agreement with university officials earlier this month to guarantee academic freedom protections to all unit members, including tenured and untenured full-time professors, part-time and adjunct faculty, librarians, clinicians, graduate student workers, and postdocs.
Todd Wolfson, president of the national American Association of University Professors, called the agreement a “monumental, historic win” at a time when faculty speech, research and curriculum have come under intense political scrutiny. Union leaders at Rutgers are encouraged by the progress, but greater job security is needed to make the protections truly enforceable for contract faculty, they said.
“International students, full-time faculty and part-time faculty in particular—we were all feeling very vulnerable,” said Hank Kalet, a journalism lecturer and vice president of the adjunct faculty union. “So these protections became a central focus for a lot of our members.”