The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) is an organization of professors and other academics in the United States. AAUP membership includes over 500 local campus chapters and 39 state organizations. The AAUP's stated mission is to advance academic freedom and shared governance, to define fundamental professional values and standards for higher education, and to ensure higher education's contribution to the common good. Founded in 1915 by Arthur O. Lovejoy and John Dewey, the AAUP has helped to shape American higher education by developing the standards and procedures that maintain quality in education and academic freedom in the country's colleges and universities. Irene Mulvey is the current president. History AAUP formed as the "Association of University Professors" in 1915. Among the events that led to its founding was the 1900 dismissal of eugenicist, economics professor, and sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross from Stanford University. Ross's work criticizing the employment of Chinese laborers by the Southern Pacific Railroad, run by Stanford's founder Leland Stanford, led Leland's widow, Jane Stanford, to intervene and, over the objections of the president and the faculty, to succeed in getting Ross eventually dismissed. In February 1915, the dismissals of two professors and two instructors at the University of Utah by President Joseph T. Kingsbury — and the subsequent resignations of 14 faculty members in protest — launched the AAUP's first institutional academic freedom inquest, spearheaded by AAUP founders Arthur O. Lovejoy (Secretary) and John Dewey (President). A similar 1911 controversy at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, involving some of the same professors, led in part to the University of Utah debacle. The AAUP published, in December 1915, its inaugural volume of the Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors, including the document now known as the 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure — the AAUP's foundational statement on the rights and corresponding obligations of members of the academic profession. Since 2010 the AAUP has published the Journal of Academic Freedom, an online-only open-access annual periodical. Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure As the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) details the history of their policy on academic freedom and tenure, the association maintains that there "are still people who want to control what professors teach and write." The AAUP's "Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure" is the definitive articulation of the principles and practices and is widely