With just a few days left in 2018, I urge you to make a tax-deductible contribution to the AAUP Foundation before the year ends. Please also consider setting up a monthly recurring donation. We are grateful for the generosity of all who have given already.

Even a small gift can have a significant impact when many join together to support academic freedom and the professional standards that make US colleges and universities among the best in the world. With academic freedom endangered to an extent not seen since the 1950s, the Foundation's work is more important than ever.

The targeted harassment of individual faculty members such as Laurie Rubel at Brooklyn College, Amanda Gailey at the University of Nebraska, and Mark Bray at Dartmouth College continues unabated, making online smear campaigns and death threats an occupational hazard for many whose scholarship or extramural activities address racism and other contentious topics. Intensified assaults on tenure, shared governance, and the rights of faculty unions threaten not only the faculty but our democracy itself.

We need a strong AAUP Foundation to thwart these assaults and to ensure that AAUP principles and standards remain the norm in American higher education. Your contribution of any amount will help to make this possible.

As the charitable and educational arm of the AAUP, the Foundation enables work that membership dues alone would be unable to fund. The Foundation's Legal Defense Fund supports faculty members involved in litigation that protects tenure and academic freedom and provides funding for AAUP amicus briefs, such as recent challenges to Texas’s “campus carry” law and to the Trump administration’s travel ban affecting scholars from predominantly Muslim countries. AAUP investigations of academic freedom violations are supported by the Foundation's Academic Freedom Fund, which also assists faculty members involved in academic freedom controversies—like Johnny Williams, whose suspension by Trinity College due to his social media posts was later reversed. We underwrite publication costs for the AAUP’s annual Bulletin and Journal of Academic Freedom. This year the Foundation sponsored a well-attended conference on academic freedom in California community colleges and other educational programming as well as an UnKoch My Campus report aimed at counteracting undue academic influence by donors to colleges and universities. Internationally, the Foundation has helped fund Scholars at Risk’s Student Advocacy Programs and Scholar Transition Project, which assists higher education professionals forced to emigrate due to political upheaval.

"I believe that the work you do may be one of the few lifelines remaining in our embattled society," wrote one Foundation donor last year. "Long live the AAUP—one of our best and strongest hopes!" wrote another. But if the AAUP Foundation is to continue its important work, we must expand our efforts. Attacks on higher education and the common good are being felt by faculty across the ideological spectrum—regardless of tenure status, appointment type, or home institution—and in the past few years we have seen these attacks increase. The AAUP Foundation exists to safeguard academic freedom and to support higher education in a free and democratic society. In order to persist in this work, we depend on the generosity of AAUP members and other supporters.

Please donate today.

You can also remember the AAUP Foundation in your will and leave a legacy to protect academic freedom in the future. For more information about the Foundation, and about giving options, visit our website.

Thank you for your loyal and generous support! Please forward this email to friends and colleagues who may be interested in our mission.

Henry Reichman
Chair, AAUP Foundation
P.S. If you prefer to donate by mail, please make a check payable to "AAUP Foundation" and send to:

AAUP Foundation
1133 Nineteenth Street NW, Suite 200
Washington DC 20036

As we approach the end of the semester, I wanted to share information about three significant wins for the profession and for higher education as a common good. These successes emphasize the power that the national, the state conferences, and the chapters have when we stand united in our defense of the AAUP’s core principles of academic freedom, economic security, and shared governance for all those who teach and research in higher education.

AAUP members at University of Northern Iowa stand strong in support of collective bargaining: On October 30, 2018, the faculty at the University of Northern Iowa (UNI) voted resoundingly to recertify their AAUP chapter, the United Faculty of UNI, as their union. This vote is the result of legislation, designed to disempower unions like the United Faculty, that was passed in 2017 by the Iowa legislature. As the members and the leaders of the chapter recognized, this legislation is also an attempt to undermine the faculty voice and undermine academic freedom and shared governance. Working in collaboration with AAUP staff organizers, the chapter, which represents full-time and part-time faculty, ran a strong “Union Yes!” campaign, which resulted in 85 percent of all eligible faculty voting. Of those voting, 97 percent voted in favor of keeping AAUP union representation. Building on the momentum from this election, the chapter is continuing to strengthen shared governance on campus and to improve the working conditions of non-tenure-track members. For more information about this important victory for academic unionism, click here.

The AAUP achieves a victory for faculty governance rights at the University of Montana Western: Recently, faculty members at UMW contacted the AAUP for advice and assistance about their administration’s disregard for the role of the faculty in institutional decision making. At issue was the administration’s attempt to obstruct the faculty senate review of the chancellor, provost, and other administrators, as outlined in the university bylaws. The AAUP wrote to UMW chancellor Beth Weatherby, taking the administration to task for its unwillingness to respect shared governance, specifically the role of the faculty in the evaluation of administrators. The letter was brought to the attention of Montana commissioner of higher education Clayton T. Christian, who wrote to Weatherby to reaffirm “the important role faculty play in the campus decision-making process,” as well as the importance of principles of shared governance. The commissioner further asserted, “We must ensure that all review processes of administrators, as well as faculty, are robust, fair, and consistent with system and campus policies.” The AAUP’s intervention helped to guarantee that shared governance remains strong at University of Montana Western. Read an account by two UMW faculty members here.

Faculty form campus AAUP chapters to defend and strengthen academic freedom and shared governance: On November 30, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran a story about the revitalization of AAUP chapters on campuses around the country (see it here). In the past two years, the AAUP has welcomed 42 new or revitalized advocacy chapters. Faculty are banding together to form or revitalize AAUP chapters as a collective response to attacks on academic freedom and shared governance. Members cite corporatization, legislative overreach, and the adjunctification of the profession as the reasons for joining together to form a chapter. The AAUP welcomes these chapters and looks forward to working with them on defending AAUP core principles and ensuring higher education as a common good.

We will continue to provide updates on the important work being done by the national AAUP and by our chapters and conferences over the next semester. In the meantime, I wish everyone a happy holiday!

In solidarity,
Julie Schmid, AAUP Executive Director