Dr. Irene Mulvey

Professor Irene Mulvey is president of the American Association of University Professors. She was elected to that office in June 2020 on a platform that, among its priorities, pledged to begin to reckon with institutional racism in the AAUP and in the academy. Under her leadership, the AAUP has implemented a racial equity initiative involving elected leadership and staff with the ambitious goal of permanent, structural and organizational change and a shift toward viewing all the association’s work through a racial equity lens.

Together with other AAUP officers and the AAUP’s governing council, she steered the AAUP-AFT affiliation agreement through the AAUP approval process, which resulted in an overwhelming vote in favor of affiliation at the AAUP biennial meeting in June 2022 and the implementation of the agreement on Aug. 1, 2022.

Mulvey taught mathematics for 37 years at Fairfield University, a Jesuit institution in Fairfield, Conn. She retired as a full professor from Fairfield in 2022 and was awarded the title of professor emerita of mathematics. Her activism in higher education began at the local level and grew to national prominence over the course of her career.

At Fairfield, she served many terms, often as chair, on the committee that negotiates with the administration on faculty salaries and benefits and on Fairfield’s healthcare committee. She also served as general faculty secretary, the highest elected faculty office, for three consecutive three-year terms. In addition to being a founding member of Fairfield’s chapter of the AAUP, she served multiple terms as president of its Faculty Welfare Committee.

At the state level, she served two terms as president of the Connecticut State Conference of the AAUP and many terms as treasurer. Nationally, before being elected as the AAUP’s president in 2020, Mulvey served multiple terms on the AAUP’s governing council and on key committees of the AAUP, including Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, the Committee on College and University Governance, the Committee on Membership, and the Committee on Organization of the Association.

September 2022