Gift from Academic Freedom Lecture Fund

The AAUP Foundation received a gift of $650,000 from the Aca­demic Freedom Lecture Fund in March after the Michigan non­profit corporation dissolved and transferred its assets. The fund had provided financial support for the University of Michigan Senate’s Davis, Markert, Nickerson Lecture on Academic and Intellectual Freedom, established in 1990 by the university’s senate assembly to make amends for “the failure of the University Community to protect the values of intellectual freedom” more than three decades earlier.

In 1954, the University of Michigan suspended without pay three faculty members who refused to answer questions related to Communist Party membership when testifying before a subcom­mittee of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Professors H. Chandler Davis and Mark Nickerson were subsequently dismissed, while Clement Markert was reinstated. After publishing an inconclusive special committee report about the university’s actions in 1956, the AAUP appointed in 1957 an investigating committee whose report resulted in censure. Davis’s effort to challenge HUAC was the focus of Steve Batterson’s 2023 book The Prosecution of Professor Chandler Davis, reviewed by Joan W. Scott in the winter 2024 issue of Academe.

The AAUP provided a matching grant when the fund began to solicit donations to support an annual lec­ture series. In 1991, AAUP general counsel Robert M. O’Neil gave the first lecture, which included a panel discussion with Davis, Markert, and Nickerson. The series featured many other AAUP leaders over the years. Adapted versions of recent lectures by Henry Reichman and Gene Nichol appeared in the winter 2021 and fall 2019 issues of Academe. The last lecture of the series in 2023, by PEN America’s Jonathan Friedman, focused on the threats of educational gag order legislation to higher education.

The gift to the AAUP Foundation will support work with the purpose of fostering an understanding of the meaning and value of academic free­dom and intellectual freedom among faculty, students, staff, and the gen­eral public. The Foundation—whose mission as the charitable and edu­cational arm of the AAUP includes “supporting principles of academic freedom and the quality of higher education in a free and democratic society”—is honored to carry on the legacy of the Academic Freedom Lecture Fund.