Associate Professor Roxanne Shirazi, a Graduate Center librarian serving as head of archives and special collections at the school’s Mina Rees Library, has been elected to the governing council of the American Association of University Professors.
Roxanne Shirazi (Photo courtesy of Roxanne Shirazi).
Shirazi has been active in the union since becoming a full-time member in 2016, serving as both an alternate delegate and delegate for the GC and participating in the PSC library committee, including safeguarding library jobs and ensuring new technological systems work for faculty and staff rather than against them. She became more active with the AAUP, to which the PSC is affiliated, three years ago. Now she hopes that the PSC will continue to be a “powerful voice within the AAUP as it has been over the years,” she said.
Shirazi said, “I’m excited to be in that position and to bring the PSC into these conversations.”
This isn’t her first AAUP rodeo. She previously served on the AAUP’s Committee on College and University Governance, which issued a report last year, “In Defense of an Independent and Representative Faculty Voice.”
For Shirazi, this is an exciting opportunity both as a unionist and a library faculty member. As she put it, library workers have been under attack by the right nationally for a long time, before the second Trump administration came into power. The AAUP, she said, can be an advocate for free speech and expression through advocacy for higher education and libraries. “The library world has been rocked by these attacks,” she said.
The AAUP, like the PSC, is concerned about the increased use of AI at universities and what this might mean for workers as well as the student experience. Shirazi said AI is an issue library faculty and staff are acutely aware of and often have expertise in how to organize in this arena.
It’s also an important moment for the PSC, which has always had a strong voice in the AAUP. “I think with the AAUP it’s important to have the PSC involved because we have faculty, staff, adjuncts, counselors, we’re not entirely wall-to-wall, but we are walking that walk of making a larger voice by organizing together,” Shirazi said.
That’s a big part of the AAUP agenda, which in a recent statement said they are committed to “building wall-to-wall worker power on our campuses, confronting the authoritarian and corporate forces arrayed against higher education, advancing an affirmative national program for what our universities must become, and transforming the AAUP itself into a fighting labor organization capable of leading the sector and the broader struggle for democracy.”
In her role as the AAUP region 4 representative Shirazi represents AAUP members in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
