One month has passed since the death of openthebooks.com founder and CEO Adam Andrzejewski. If you never had the opportunity to meet Adam, he was the very definition of William Wordsworth’s Happy Warrior. Adam was always fighting on multiple fronts and pursuing countless leads, but never showed any signs of exhaustion. He was all smiles, leading us to those words we all love to see: Breaking News.
The Jefferson Council has a wonderful relationship with openthebooks.com, and we are thankful to count them among our partners. What attracted Adam to take an interest in the University of Virginia was the school’s history. This is the University founded by Thomas Jefferson, one of Adam’s heroes. Adam felt that if any public university should be naturally resilient to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), it would be Mr. Jefferson’s University where the ideals of its founder should flourish. This proved not to be the case as Adam and his team discovered over 235 DEI-related UVA employees. Adam soon understood The Jefferson Council’s fight all the better as he had his own firsthand experiences seeking answers from the University. UVA spokesperson Brian Coy refused to be transparent and UVA’s Freedom of Information Act office stonewalled Adam.
Our partnership with openthebooks.com has been so fruitful that The Jefferson Council’s president, Tom Neale, introduced Adam to the Alumni Free Speech Alliance. This led to a story about nearly one hundred million dollars spent a year on DEI across the University of North Carolina system. Today, UNC is working toward reforming the broken DEI system, announcing its plan for multi-million dollar DEI cuts.
Many members of The Jefferson Council shared their memories of Adam. Here are a few: