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The members of the Alvernia University Chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AU-AAUP) welcome you to our website. We are proud of our University and proud to be counted among its professors. In the short fifty years Alvernia has existed, we have gone from being a tiny women’s college with graduation classes that could easily fit into a small living room to graduating classes that require Reading’s largest indoor amphitheater for our commencement ceremonies. Alvernia started with a few undergraduate disciplines, mostly nursing and education, and now we have a full range of undergraduate programs, many master’s programs, and have, in the last three years, implemented a Ph.D. in Leadership Studies. Less than twenty years ago, the registrar, bursar, dining hall, and library—along with a number of faculty offices and classrooms, were all located in one building. Now our campus buildings and grounds weave across the top of a hill above the city of Reading, PA, circle down past a small steam and come to rest besides a park that has become an experiment in how humans and the environment can work together to the advantage of both.

Our professors, like professors everywhere, constitute the backbone of our institution, but they are not simply the academic grinds of popular myth. Our Franciscan heritage asks us to be living testaments to Francis’s desire that our “walking should be our preaching.” We, as professors, are the servants of higher education, called to teach and to, as AAUP policy states, to conduct ourselves “for the common good,” and not “to further the interests of either the individual teacher or the institution as a whole.” We take as models the free inquiry that the Franciscan intellectual tradition epitomizes and the AAUP policy confirms: “the common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition.”

We at the AU-AAUP advocate for that free search for truth, whether it be through tenure duly awarded and firmly guarded by the bulwark of faculty governance, whether it be through our pledge that all members of our community enjoy the right to voice their opinions, or whether it be through the fundamental rights of due process, freedom from capricious actions, and adequate consideration given to each individual’s talents. We hold that all higher institutions should be places where standards are clear and goals are established; where the dignity and uniqueness of each profession is recognized; and where individuals are safe to be individuals.