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Two faculty members at one of the nation’s historically black colleges were dismissed recently for “insubordination.” Their offense? They had dared to question a presidential mandate forcing faculty to assign grades to first-year students based on a set formula: 60 percent for effort and 40 percent for actual performance. The dismissed faculty members refused to comply; one wrote to the president that the policy would “undermine the academic integrity of my classes and my professional standards as an instructor.” To assist these two courageous faculty members in their battle for academic justice, the Association drew on the Academic Freedom Fund, one of its special endowed funds.
The Academic Freedom Fund was established in 1956 as a permanent fund for supporting academic freedom through research, publication, and direct assistance to faculty members. Over nearly five decades, the fund has disbursed almost $500,000. Most awards have gone to individual faculty members—more than a hundred—to assist them when their academic freedom has been threatened. The fund has also underwritten conferences and workshops on academic freedom and subsidized special reports on critical academic freedom issues.
The reasons for grants of support from the fund reveal the highlights of the fight to protect academic freedom over the past five decades: failure to provide due process in reappointment and tenure decisions, denial of appointment and unfair dismissal because of political or religious beliefs, ideological attacks on scientific research and artistic expression, corporate interference in the publication of research results, and the use of national security concerns as a pretext for silencing dissent. Some of these threats to academic freedom are new; others are old enemies in new garb that remain threats nonetheless.
Since 1956, individual AAUP members concerned with protecting the faculty’s pursuit of truth have built the fund through their personal donations. The generosity of members has allowed the Association to provide modest assistance when it has been needed most, but the demands for help have grown increasingly greater. We want to honor our members’
legacy of individual support by expanding the fund and putting it on a more secure financial footing. Academic freedom is not free, but the cost of not protecting academic freedom is too high to contemplate.
Faculty heroism has a price; the Academic Freedom Fund needs to be there to help courageous faculty when they are called upon to pay that price. We cannot leave faculty to struggle alone against those who violate academic freedom and undermine the values of a free society. Now more than ever, when fear and uncertainty lend respectability to repression, the AAUP needs resources equal in monetary value to society’s interest in defending academic freedom.
The eminent historian Joan Wallach Scott puts the matter succinctly. “Academic freedom,” she has said, “is not a luxury or a special privilege. It is the necessary foundation of our educational system, one of the essential building blocks of our free society.” Join us in the struggle to preserve and protect this precious freedom.
Guidelines for Academic Freedom Fund Funding
The purposes for which expenditures may be made from the Fund are:
AFF assistance is available to any individual regardless of whether the applicant is a member of, or otherwise associated with, AAUP.
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