As we approach the end of the year, we’re happy to release something that requires absolutely zero time on Zoom—a new podcast from the AAUP called AAUP Presents.

We just released our first batch of three episodes and they’re available to listen on all the podcast platforms and on our website.

• Listen on Spotify
• Listen on Apple Podcasts
• Listen directly on the AAUP site

We’re kicking off this series with an interview with AAUP president Irene Mulvey, who takes us through some of AAUP’s work this year as it relates to the pandemic, to academic freedom, and to the New Deal for Higher Education.

Episode two is a look at AAUP’s work on shared governance, with an examination of a special investigation of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on governance. We also discuss the results of our national shared governance survey, including data on the impact of the pandemic, the demographics of senate chairs and governance structures, and faculty roles in decision-making.

We round out this debut series with a podcast about the 2020–21 Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, which also features a deeper dive into the issue of institutional debt.

We had some great guests for these shows, and we hope you’ll give it a listen! If you have topics you’d like to hear covered in future episodes, drop me a line at mquinn@aaup.orgwith your ideas.

I hope you have a safe and happy December.

Mariah Quinn
Senior Program Officer for Digital Organizing and Chapter Services

Dear Colleague,
I am president of the AAUP and the AAUP Foundation, and I appreciate your interest in and support for the AAUP. As 2021 draws to a close, I hope you will consider the AAUP Foundation in your year-end giving plans. 
The AAUP Foundation is the charitable and educational arm of the AAUP, and it funds very important work that we would not be able to do with membership dues alone.
The Foundation’s Academic Freedom Fund supports projects that safeguard academic freedom to create a higher education environment in which teaching, learning, and research can flourish. Through this fund, we support governance investigations and academic freedom investigations, underwrite costs for the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom, and provide grants to individual faculty members whose academic freedom has been violated. This year, a grant from the Academic Freedom Fund paid for our sweeping, omnibus governance investigation and special report, COVID-19 and Academic Governance, which documented what it called “opportunistic exploitations of catastrophic events” at eight institutions and resulted in sanctions for violating principles of academic governance for seven of them. Commitments for next year include funding for the special AAUP committee that will prepare a report on violations of principles of academic governance and persistent structural racism in the University of North Carolina system. 
You can support this work by donating to the AAUP Foundation.
This year, our Foundation awarded an Academic Freedom Fund grant to Isaac Kamola, associate professor of political science at Trinity College, for his Faculty First Responders project, which helps faculty members learn how to respond quickly and effectively when they or their colleagues are targeted for truly brutal online harassment when their work, especially on topics related to race, is picked up by groups like Campus Reform whose agenda is to frighten faculty into submission and to stoke conservative outrage against higher education. 

Please join us in providing funding for these kinds of essential projects.
The Foundation’s Legal Defense Fund supports litigation that protects academic freedom and professional rights, and it provides funding for the amicus briefs we file in cases with important implications for higher education. This year, the Foundation’s support allowed the AAUP to weigh in on a case about the teaching of ideas about race in Texas, a case involving the distribution of antiunion materials by Oregon State University, and a case concerning firearms at the University of Michigan.
We must continue the important work of the AAUP Foundation and expand its efforts.
Your donation in any amount will help. 
Join me in making a difference for 2022 with a year-end gift. 
Sincerely,
Irene Mulvey
President, AAUP and 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

ATLANTA – Eight Southern state chapters of a national organization of university professors are asking the University System of Georgia to rescind changes in tenure policies they argue would essentially abolish the tenure system.
The system’s Board of Regents voted in October to replace a system that permits professors to be fired only for a specific cause following a peer review with a system that lets professors be dismissed if they fail to take corrective steps following two consecutive subpar reviews.
“The board’s new procedure for post-tenure review exposes faculty to censorship, ideological bias and notoriously fickle criteria like student evaluations and ‘performance,’ ” leaders of the eight state chapters of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)  Awrote in a letter Wednesday to Teresa MacCartney, the university system’s acting chancellor.
“When implemented, the University System of Georgia will no longer have tenure and, therefore, meaningful academic freedom will cease to exist.”
The letter went on to warn that the new policy will discourage professors from wishing to come to Georgia and motivate those already in the system to leave.
The changes in post-tenure review, which will apply to all 26 of the system’s colleges and universities except Georgia Gwinnett College, emerged from the recommendations of a working group formed in September of last year.
The goal of the changes was to ensure faculty members continue to do their jobs well after they have achieved tenure, the regents wrote in a prepared statement following the October vote.
But about 1,500 professors on university system campuses signed a petition opposing the changes.
The national AAUP is conducting an investigation of the changes that could lead the group to censure the university system. A report is expected before the end of the year.
The chapters signing onto the letter represented the Southern states of North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Louisiana, Texas, Tennessee, Kentucky and Oklahoma.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.