The Albany Chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) was founded in 1932 as a chapter organized to represent professors at the New York State College for Teachers in Albany, N.Y., and to promote AAUP's goals of protecting academic freedom, promoting faculty governance, and pressing for salaries equal to their professional status. Regional meetings of the AAUP chapters in the capital district began in the 1935-36 school year and continued until World War II. [AAUP--Albany Chapter, Minutes, October 31, 1945]

In 1944 the chapter, which always maintained an interest in faculty governance and ways to implement such, argued for the establishment of a Faculty-Administration Council at the New York State College for Teachers. This body became a significant policy making body on campus, its membership composed of administrative staff, including the President of the College and the Dean, and twelve elected faculty members. An important predecessor to the University Senate, the Faculty-Administration Council held its last recorded meeting in 1955.

During the 1960s, many changes affected the Albany Chapter. The former New York State College for Teachers became a university in 1962, and by the mid-1960s an entirely new and much larger campus had been built to house this institution. Concurrently, AAUP was revitalizing regional cooperation in New York through the formation of the New York State Conference of Chapters of AAUP and the Council of SUNY Chapters of AAUP, both of which the Albany chapter was affiliated with. The most significant change, however, was the 1967 implementation of the Public Employees Relations Act (commonly, the Taylor Law), which authorized collective bargaining for all state employees, including university professors. The Public Employees Relations Board (PERB) decided that all professionals employed at the State University of New York would constitute a single bargaining unit. The Albany chapter at this time was opposed to being the representative for this unit, because it recognized the university's professors as a group of employees with needs and desires substantially different from those of other professional staff.

The question of who would be the bargaining agent for professionals at the State University of New York at Albany became an important one for the Albany chapter of AAUP and the campus as a whole. In November 1968, the entire SUNY-AAUP Council voted to ask PERB to add AAUP to the ballot to elect a bargaining agent for all SUNY campuses. A questionnaire that the Albany chapter distributed on campus in 1968 showed widespread support for collective bargaining and for AAUP to be the bargaining agent for the professionals on campus. By this time, PERB had not yet decided whether all of the State University of New York or its individual campuses would constitute the bargaining unit with the state.