46 Virtual Teaching and Copyright Concerns: An Interview with Aaron Nisenson, AAUP

• Pages: 46-49

Published in Landslide® magazine, Volume 13, Number 4, a publication of the ABA Section of Intellectual Property Law (ABA-IPL), ©2021 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.

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Virtual Teaching

and Copyright

Concerns

An Interview with

Aaron Nisenson, AAUP

Aaron Nisenson (anisenson@aaup.org) is senior counsel and director of the

legal department for the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).

He joined the AAUP in January 2013 and speaks and writes extensively on higher

education, faculty rights, constitutional, labor, and employment law.

Could you tell us a little bit about the American Association of University

Professors?

The AAUP is a nonprot professional association that has faculty members

throughout the U.S. We also have some graduate student members and other pro-

fessionals at universities. Our membership is open to faculty and others at public

and private universities. Our members tend to be in traditional higher education

campuses and community colleges. The AAUP is headquartered in Washington,

D.C., but we generally operate through local chapters. Members can gather and

form a local chapter and then ask for a charter from us, and then they have a local

chapter. We also have a national at-large chapter that includes retirees and other

faculty who do not have a home chapter. Much of our work is done through local

chapters that exist at colleges and universities and centers around helping our

members advocate for benecial rights on their campuses.

What types of issues does the AAUP address on behalf of its faculty

membership?

We typically see a couple of different things that faculty are interested in.

One is at their particular institution. For example: What are the policies? What

are the academic freedom rights? Many of our chapters are collective bargain-

ing chapters, so they might bargain wages and benets for the faculty. Faculty

also often have a more national perspective on academic freedom, faculty

advancement, pay for faculty—things like that that might be more nationwide.

Local chapters can be involved in both. The national chapter tends to be faculty

and retirees who are more interested in the national issues and not as much in

the issues on their particular campuses.

We’re also very active in setting standards and policies

for the profession, and in some instances, we’ve worked with

college and university groups to do that. Our statements on

academic freedom and on tenure and governance have been

adopted by the AAUP, but also by hundreds of university higher

ed organizations. And we have specic guidance that we provide: we have

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