Why Join the AAUP?

Joining the AAUP makes you a member of the North Carolina Conference of the AAUP automatically.

Joining the AAUP says that you’re concerned about academic freedom, and about the way that basic freedom protects your teaching and research. It says that participating in faculty governance is important to you, and that you are concerned about career issues, tenure, and the overuse of contingent faculty. By joining, faculty members, academic professionals, and graduate students help to shape the future of our profession and proclaim their dedication to the education community. In addition, there are many practical benefits--discounts, insurance programs, financial incentives--available to AAUP members. Join your colleagues today to promote and protect your profession.

Read What the AAUP Means to Scholars Nationwide (thanks to aaup.org and the Illinois State Conference)

Kenneth J. Arrow
Stanford University, Nobel Prize in Economics

"The American Association of University Professors has, for nearly a century, been the defender of freedom in the academic community. Academic freedom is both a moral value in its own right and an essential component to the innovative and educational function of universities . . . All those who appreciate the central role of academic freedom in our modern world should generously help the AAUP as its indomitable champion."

Jonathan R. Cole
(Columbia University)

"We are witnessing today a rising tide of anti-intellectualism and an increasing intolerance of university and college teaching and research that offends external political ideologues. Not since the dark days of McCarthyism in the 1950s have we witnessed such a sustained and subtle attack on academic freedom . . . . Professors are being publicly savaged for the content of their ideas; peer review systems are being compromised; faculty and student computer and library records are being accessed by the FBI without probable cause; talented foreign students and scholars are finding it difficult to study or work in the United States because of immigration restrictions and visa rules; NIH research on biological and social science problems are being questioned because they offend the political sensibilities of members of Congress and the current administration. Why does this matter? Universities remain perhaps the only sanctuary for the relatively unbridled and unfettered search for truth and for profoundly new, but important ideas. Without a climate of free inquiry where faculty members can challenge existing orthodoxies and dogma and can dare others to rebut their ideas, creativity and discovery will suffer . . . If academic freedom is compromised, it won’t be long before the engine of innovation slows and our great centers of academic excellence lose their preeminence. What can be done? More than ever, we need to support the mission of the AAUP to defend aggressively the role that academic freedom plays in producing true distinction at American universities and colleges. The need to educate the public on the meaning and place of academic freedom in colleges and universities is greater today than ever before and that need can best be met by the work of the AAUP."

Robert M. O’Neil
Director, Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression; former president, University of Virginia

"The AAUP is so many ways the conscience of the academic profession in the United States. Its unwavering commitment to the protection of academic freedom, tenure and due process for faculty has never been more vital than in the perilous times since the September 11 attacks. The Association’s vigilance is the more remarkable for several qualities that distinguish it from other faculty organizations – that an embattled or beleaguered professor who seeks aid and counsel need not be an AAUP member, that AAUP actively collaborates with and supports administrators and governing boards when faculty interests warrant doing so, and that AAUP demands rigorous adherence to its basic principles even within its own ranks. The Association’s leadership has recognized over the years that academic freedom is only as secure as its ability to withstand utmost stress and pressure from hostile forces, both within and outside the academy."

Deborah Cooperstein
Adelphi University

"The AAUP Legal Defense Fund’s support to the Committee to Save Adelphi was critical in our successful effort to remove 18 of the university’s 19 trustees for serious dereliction of their responsibilities, and to remove President Peter Diamandopoulos."

Mary Gibson
Rutgers University

"Through the AAUP, I make connections with women colleagues in all disciplines, on my own campus and across the country. We share many of the same challenges, and, working together, we can create some very sensible solutions."

Rev. Theodore Hesburgh
president emeritus, University of Notre Dame

"For more than ninety years, the AAUP has been working conscientiously to protect and preserve academic freedom for all scholars in America, whatever their ideology, gender, religion, status within the profession, nationality, or sexual orientation."

Stanley N. Katz
Princeton University; president emeritus, American Council of Learned Societies

". . . there is only one organization whose primary mission is to promote vigilance in the name of academic freedom. It is the AAUP."

Louis Menand
Harvard University

"The AAUP is our only bulwark, outside the courts, against threats to freedom of thought. It has served college teachers and scholars well for almost one hundred years by identifying, publicizing, and working to correct abuses of the principle of academic freedom, and by scrupulously distinguishing between abuses of that principle and cases of simple disagreement or controversy. It is a watchdog, not a lobby, and we are all indebted to it."

David Montgomery
Yale University

"For almost a century the AAUP has provided the most important instrument through which college and university teachers have sought to defend their academic freedom against recurrent efforts by government, business, and other outside agencies to regulate teaching and discussion on campus or the participation of academics in public affairs. It has also played an increasingly important role in improving the terms under which academics are employed. Today those efforts are more important than ever. Government bodies, both state and federal, and organized and financed groups claiming to speak for "civil society" intervene systematically to shape academic curricula and personnel, while reduced legislative appropriations and the infusion of corporate models of governance produce rapidly increasing use of contingent faculty. Academics must act together to uphold the intellectual vitality of higher education through the courts, public forums, and sound research."

Martha Nussbaum
Harvard University

" . . . For many years, without fanfare, the AAUP has provided effective support for academic freedom, courageously defending all scholars in the U. S., whatever their political views, gender, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, or status in the profession. This has not always been easy, and it is not likely to be easy in the future . . . Academic freedom and the free search for truth are essential to a genuinely free and democratic society."

Rosa Maria Pegueros
(University of Rhode Island)

"Women often find that the teaching and research they pursue takes them into nontraditional fields and perspectives. We especially need the AAUP’s solid protections of academic freedom."