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

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