UAM-UMD is running a “May Membership Drive” to encourage UMD faculty to join AAUP as official dues-paying members. You can becomes dues paying member here: https://www.aaup.org/membership/join
Why is it important to be a dues paying member? So glad you asked!
1) Dues are your commitment to building sustainable power & a better future. Making our university a better place to work & learn requires a new vision for higher education &, equally important, building the political power, institutions, and campaigns that can make that vision a reality. And that requires resources—a lot of them. Member dues make this possible. It is your commitment to improving higher education and making universities more equitable workplaces.
2) Your union is on the offensive, but to win, you need to support it. The new Trump administration has weaponized federal funding to attack universities’ DEI initiatives, shared governance, international visa programs, and funding for research focused on climate change, social inequality, infectious diseases, & humanities. Your union has been fighting hard against these unprecedented attacks at the national level, filing four major lawsuits already. But so much more is needed.
3) Your national union is ramping up local organizing at UMD. To meet the urgency of this moment, AAUP-AFT national is putting unprecedented levels of resources into organizing at UMD and Maryland more broadly And this has only been possible because other faculty throughout the country have taken the step we are asking you to today: to become a dues-paying member.
4) Your dues will directly fund UAM-UMD (AAUP-AFT). Beginning in the coming academic year, AAUP-AFT national, through their new Dues Back Program, will return a share of each of our member’s dues to UAM-UMD to help fuel local chapter growth and organizing. So by becoming a dues-paying member of AAUP-AFT, you will directly contribute to building our organizing power at UMD too!
5) Being a dues-paying member has its benefits. All dues paying members of UAM-UMD (AAUP-AFT) are also full members of AAUP and AFT national. This gives you access to all of the member benefits of AAUP and AFT national too (which are quite nice)!
If you are not official dues-paying members, please seriously consider joining: https://www.aaup.
It is doubly important that we boost our dues-paying members in the next couple of weeks because our total dues-paying member number on May 31st will be what is used to calculate how much we will receive from AAUP National in the new “Dues Sharing” program that will return part of each our member’s dues directly to us in UAM-UMD. If we can get our numbers up before May 31st, we could have a nice budget for ourselves next year.