AAUP's Evolution from Champion of Academic Freedom to Apologist for DEI and Antisemitism

An AAUP publicity photo, released in 2020 to accompany the group’s Statement of Solidarity with Essential Workers. Image via Quillette

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP)—once a venerable organization—has been captured by radicals. Once a champion of academic freedom and professionalism, this organization has been steadily descending into the pit of Woke ideology—embracing its disdain for free speech, its censoriousness, its obsession with identity politics and—you guess it right—its obligate antisemitism.

As documented on these pages, in August 2024, AAUP disgraced itself by ending its opposition to academic boycotts. During the past spring’s protests, AAUP vocally opposed measures by university administrators towards combating lawlessness and restoring normal university operation. Many prominent intellectuals—including past presidents of AAUP and leaders of FIRE and Heterodox Academy—criticized these actions and called upon AAUP to right its course, but to no avail. In this edition of our newsletter, we call attention to an open letter from the Academic Engagement Network (AEN) calling on the AAUP to reform, and we shed light on more of AAUP’s recent misdeeds.

CALL TO ACTION: Tell the AAUP to Respect Jewish and Zionist Faculty Members (from the AEN)

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has exhibited a disturbing pattern of anti-Israel rhetoric and action in recent months, from rescinding its categorical opposition to academic boycotts, to hosting programs and that offer only one-sided and highly inflammatory anti-Israel narratives, to publishing posts that dismiss rising antisemitism on campus and the concerns of Jewish students, faculty, and staff. Now it is co-sponsoring a “National Day of Action” campaign alongside fringe anti-Zionist groups that have at times trafficked in antisemitic rhetoric and activism.

To respond to this escalating politicization of a major academic organization, AEN collaborated with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to develop a Call to Action, which will send a letter to AAUP leadership urging them to publicly address the harm caused, reaffirm their commitment to inclusion, and ensure that future advocacy and educational efforts truly represent all members. We hope that you will consider adding your name to this effort!

We think the AAUP is too far gone to be salvageable, but we still signed the letter.

The Fall of the AAUP (Greg Lukianoff, The Eternally Radical Idea, November 20, 2024)

In this post, Greg recaps the public exchanges that FIRE has had with the AAUP. He begins:

One of the great disappointments of my professional life has been watching the decline of the American Association of University Professors, formerly the gold standard for defense of academic freedom on campus. Of course, there have always been and still are good, principled AAUP members and chapters out there. But since the beginning of my career back in 2001, the national AAUP have gone from being principled (if slow and plodding) defenders of academic freedom to increasingly partisan critics of freedom of speech and the First Amendment — taking institutional positions that directly threaten academic freedom.

Greg organized his analysis of the ideological corruption of AAUP using the following categories:

• The AAUP has championed a stark distinction between free speech and academic freedom, which is dangerous to both.

• The AAUP has publicly supported political litmus tests for professors.

• The AAUP came out in favor of academic boycotts and then lied about it.

• The AAUP supported a book that proposed a gaping partisan exception to academic freedom.

• The AAUP failed to defend professors who got in trouble for speech unpopular with the left.

• The AAUP lied about its most effective competitor—FIRE.

Greg concludes by highlighting the inconsistency in AAUP’s recent actions and positions, providing a smoking gun of its corruption by a particular ideology:

The truth is that the AAUP relied on free speech and the First Amendment for its entire existence. But once their leaders got confident that enough “right-thinking people” would be in charge forever, they turned on it. They said nothing as tuition prices and bureaucratization skyrocketed while viewpoint diversity among professors plunged. They stopped defending professors whose speech was unpopular with the kinds of scholars who thought the search for truth was over (and that, as luck would have it, they’re the ones who found it!).

When professors were targeted at an unprecedented rate and a culture of—what might you call it?—cancellation hit academia, causing public trust in higher education to collapse, the AAUP sneered at the idea that Cancel Culture even existed. They failed to protect their colleagues, particularly when they were threatened by fellow academics or students. Indeed, they doubled down and came out in favor of political litmus tests as long as they liked the politics being tested for. They gave in to members who wanted to use academic boycotts to serve political ends even if it torpedoed the search for truth. They supported a new exception to academic freedom that basically meant it was nothing more than what their favored members wished it to be.

They then tripled down, claiming that the plunging respect for academia was just due to some outside right-wing plot rather than contempt for a trillion-dollar industry that wanted to wish all criticisms of itself away. Somehow, they couldn’t understand that this would make them even less respected and trustworthy to the public. Instead, they sidelined truth and helped plunge academia into crisis.

But, of course, it was everyone else’s fault.

An Unsettling Approach to Academic Freedom (Andy Lamey, Quillette, March 10, 2025)

Writing for Quillette, Andy Lamey takes a deep dive into the history of the AAUP and exposes how its recent actions are at odds with its original mission. He emphasizes AAUP’s most egregious offense against academic freedom and free inquire—its defense of DEI:

As academic freedom is the main basis for opposing mandatory diversity statements, nothing I am arguing here should be taken as ruling out non-mandatory policies aimed at advancing diversity goals. If a university were to offer, say, workshops on teaching diverse classes that faculty could choose to attend, such workshops might or might not be valuable, depending on their content. But they would pose no threat to academic freedom.

The optional nature of such measures would actually make it easier for universities to identify faculty who care about DEI. Policies that oblige a job candidate to describe his or her DEI “skills, competencies, and achievements” invite obvious rote answers. Because aspiring candidates have an incentive to present themselves as DEI enthusiasts, it’s hard to know if they are sincere. Someone who freely chooses to participate in DEI activities, on the other hand, is more likely to actually support DEI, an attribute that mandatory statements are supposed to uncover in the first place….

The AAUP’s shift is in part a response to Donald Trump and the illiberal forces he’s energised, representatives of which have used anti-DEI arguments to justify their own assault on the independence of American universities. There is no question that Trumpism and its adjacent forces pose a major threat to academic freedom. But not only has the AAUP responded to that threat by diluting its own commitment to this ideal; as discussed in more detail below, its representatives have made cranky and intolerant remarks about other mainstream academic-freedom organisations that the AAUP should be embracing as allies.

AAUP at USC

The AAUP chapter at USC is faithfully following the course of the national organization, as amply documented by letters and statements posted on the chapter’s website. Of note is the letter they sent on April 1st to President Folt and Provost Guzman:

Dear President Folt and Provost Guzman,

We write regarding threats issued by the new Trump administration against institutions of higher education. We are extremely disquieted by the clear political intrusions into, indeed in some cases threats against, the safety and livelihood of USC’s community, including faculty, staff, and students, as well as the academic freedom in research and teaching that is the fundament of a university.

While we recognize that the university must comply with laws and court orders, it should never serve as a deputy for government enforcement. Executive orders, “Dear Colleague” letters, and social media posts are not legally binding, and are being challenged in the courts. Many other leading universities have already joined lawsuits contesting cuts to research funding.

We are seeking leadership from you on the following matters:

1) A policy that affirms that in the event of interruptions to programs at NIH, NSF, or other federal grantmaking institutions, USC will cushion those interruptions by covering payroll, so that campus community members do not experience sudden loss of wages;

2) A policy that affirms USC will not share students’ names, addresses, and other contact information with federal agencies based on students’ actual or perceived political affiliations;

3) A policy about ICE on campus that affirms community members’ rights, and offers specific, concrete guidance about what campus community members should do if ICE targets members of our institution.

4) A policy that affirms USC’s commitment to academic freedom, necessarily including historical or social processes and experiences that have become sites of political controversy (colonialism, race, gender, sexuality, etc.).

We also write to express grave disappointment with USC’s preemptive compliance regarding Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Instead of holding firm and recommitting USC to our values, you chose to obey a directive that may well be illegal, by removing those words from the community vocabulary, and merging the Office of Inclusion and Diversity into the Culture Team. Such a move does not merely pertain to a few words on websites: it leaves us fearful regarding which core values will be the next to be so quickly and easily surrendered. Historians of the twentieth century have warned us about the perils of obedience in advance in such a climate. This is what you are engaging in, and the stakes could not be higher or more dangerous.

These new demands and policies issued by the Trump administration are not a strategy to renew the public mission of higher education, which many of us might welcome. What is currently being carried out is a massive, deliberate assault against higher education as a center of critical inquiry and independent thought and research.

We are ready to play our part in defense of the university. We call upon you who have been charged to lead this academic community to take the lead in advancing and supporting those efforts. In this mission, we should all be firmly united.

Sincerely, [view live list of signatures here]

Reasonable people can disagree about recent changes in local university policies and have legitimate concerns about the actions of the Trump administration, but the letter does not invite a thoughtful and nuanced dialogue between administration and faculty about the current challenges to higher education. Rather, it demands (Demanding is what they do!) the reinstatement of controversial and divisive DEI programs—programs which are in opposition to academic freedom and are vectors for antisemitism. Continuing these programs (under any name), which often violate existing non-discrimination laws, are likely to result in USC losing its federal funding, but that is of little concern to this group. Respect for the law is also not one of its values: they demand that the university not cooperate with ICE. And best of all—in case the university ends up under sanction for non-compliance with federal mandates—they want financial assurances from the university! This is the same group that demanded that students who engaged in civil disobedience by violating university rules and laws not be punished. If you want to engage in civil disobedience and fight the government, you should be willing to face the consequences.

The AAUP Warns Against ‘Anticipatory Obedience’—But It Only Opposes Federal Power It Doesn’t Control (Adam Ellwanger, Minding the Campus, February 13, 2025)

This essay continues the same theme—how the AAUP has taken an inconsistent and politicized position in response to actions of the Trump administration.

The AAUP asserts that Trump and state governments are determined to “undermine tenure and academic freedom protections, eviscerate shared governance, diminish the faculty’s control over the curriculum, and redefine higher education to benefit private interests over the public good.” In response to such “attacks”—the document uses the word eight times in a little over two pages—the AAUP insists that “Now is not the time to be complacent. Now is the time to act.”…

But the fact that these invitations to civil disobedience only come now—after fifteen years of draconian tinkering with higher education by Democratic presidents—shows that this isn’t a genuinely principled defense of academic inquiry as much as it is partisan politics, masquerading as high-minded moralism. Ironically, this duplicity and the entrenchment of left ideology in the universities are why major institutional reforms are necessary.

Universities across the country were all too eager to over-comply when Obama’s Justice Department issued the Dear Colleague letter that weaponized Title IX and institutionalized left perspectives on sex, gender, speech, and procedural justice. Similarly, there was no organized effort to resist the federal government’s takeover of the student loan industry in 2010. I didn’t hear a single complaint when Biden, in open defiance of the Supreme Court, continued to illegally cancel student loan debt. The president of my Faculty Senate did not send a concerned email to the faculty when the Biden administration injected one billion dollars of federal money into schools to promote diversity, half of which went to “race-based hiring” initiatives, which almost certainly ran afoul of employment law.

Did the AAUP somehow miss that one billion dollars in diversity funds might produce curricular changes that infringe upon the sacred sovereignty that faculty supposedly exercise over the curriculum? Of course not. They saw these federal interventions as good policy, so there was no resistance. Thus, their problem isn’t really federal involvement in higher education. They love it—so long as the reforms flatter their political sensibilities. Their real problem is federal reforms that run afoul of their personal politics.…

This reflexive opposition to the legitimate power of government to regulate education is a major reason why such a wide swath of the public has a negative opinion of universities. It’s also why higher education now finds itself with a target on its back: they put it there themselves.

And from Our Friends at the Babbling Beaver: AAUP Doubles Down on Cancel Culture

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) is girding for war. According to a report in the College Fix, they brought in the Action Center on Race & The Economy (ACRE) to help them restore Cancel Culture to its rightful place on college campuses. Their plan? To aggressively target university regents, trustees, and governing boards for intimidation and harassment.

Picketing and vandalizing the homes of top university leaders sure worked great last time.

The Beaver is thrilled to see ACRE Executive Director Saqib Batti deploy his trained cadres into the higher education fracas. He did such an inspiring job as an Antibigotry Convening Fellow at Ibram X. Kendi’s acclaimed “Center for Antiracist Research” at Boston University. And his words of wisdom perfectly encapsulate the philosophy of the long march through the institutions.

“In the United States, capitalism is designed to be the most egregious, extreme wealth-extracting tool, and racism is a strategic force used by capitalism to allow for incredible disparities to exist across the population.”

“Anti-Muslim bigotry is on the rise because corporations like Google, Amazon, and Fidelity have decided they are OK with white supremacy and anti-Muslim bigotry as long as they can make money off of it.”

How many university regents, trustees, and governing board members will have their homes and businesses attacked by AAUP members during the next Day of Action? That will surely convince the American people that their tax dollars should keep flowing to these enlightened professors.