The 1915 AAUP Warned the AAUP Not to Become the AAUP of 2025
A Tale of Forgotten Wisdom
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) is a major umbrella organization for faculty and also is a union (some institutions are unionized, many are not; the AAUP union does collective bargaining at Rutgers). It once was a principled organization advocating and articulating principles of academic freedom, and the justifications for it. It has become a vehicle for progressive activism. In this post I point out that, when it was organized around principled advocacy for academic freedom, it warned that academic freedom could be jeopardized if it was used for blunt political partisanship.
In recent years, the AAUP has adopted a slew of public positions reflecting progressive values:
The AAUP has endorsed using DEI criteria for faculty evaluation. This is despite the fact that there is little evidence bearing on the effectiveness of most DEI programming. It is despite there being many bases for believing that DEI as commonly implemented has more downside than upside. “Diversity” and “equity” are often left undefined and have many potential, and potentially conflicting, meanings none of which are articulated in the AAUP’s statement. And it is despite the fact that academia has done an awful job of “including” those who reject progressive values and dogmas, especially if they do so publicly.
The AAUP reversed its longstanding opposition to academic boycotts (as threats to academic freedom), which refer to calls to boycott academics from countries deemed “bad” in some way. Boycott, here, means something like “do not accept talk invitations or collabarotors from that bad country and do not invite scholars from the bad country here.”
The national AAUP seems to have endorsed an embargo of Israel1 and Rutgers’ AAUP chapter promptly voted to demand that Rutgers divest from all companies doing business in and with Israel, and included a long list of such companies including but not restricted to: Google, Amazon, Chevron, Boeing and Ford.2 The Rutgers AAUP demands include repeated references to Israeli “genocide,” despite the fact that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has, so far, steadfastly refused to grant the South African request to make such a ruling (see ICJ rulings here and here) and despite the fact that no other international court has even indicted any Israeli for genocide for the 2023-2025 Gaza War.3 It is of course possible that that will change in the future, but, as former Harvard President Derek Bok once wrote:
universities are not very good at passing collective judgments on political issues in the outside world … When political issues are at stake … discussions quickly become partisan, demogogic, and filled with inaccuracies and exaggerations.
The theme of this post is not whether the AAUP has the right to express its opinions, of course it does. Instead, the theme is whether it is wise for the AAUP to be acting like a progressive advocacy group. All three of these recent positions advance partisan progressive political agendas. Even the reversal permitting academic boycotts, which is nominally nonpartisan, in practice, will function to justify progressive-inspired boycotts because, really, when has any academic organization ever boycotted some extreme oppressive leftist or radical Islamist regime? Soviet Union? China? Iran? Sudan, whose former president has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for a genocide and ethnic cleansing that killed at least 200,000 people and displaced 2,000,000 more?
I asked Chatgpt this question:
Please list all academic professional societies that have endorsed boycotts of specific countries.
Here was its answer:
You can read the AAUP’s justifications for taking its positions (their statements are linked above). People with PhD’s can usually come up with seemingly sophisticated and superficially plausible-sounding justifications for pretty much anything no matter how ridiculous (infinity sexes? defunding police? reverse discrimination is a myth? Fidel Castro was a conservative? etc.) and this post is not about addressing the (de)merits of their justifications.
Instead, I am going to ask whether it is wise for the AAUP to be in the business of taking partisan political positions altogether.4 The great thing here is that I do not need to answer this question, because the AAUP answered it over 100 years ago. From their 1915 statement on academic freedom (emphasis added by me):
If this profession should prove itself unwilling to … prevent the freedom which it claims in the name of science from being used as a shelter … for uncritical and intemperate partisanship, it is certain that the task will be performed by others—by others who lack certain essential qualifications for performing it, and whose action is sure to breed suspicions and recurrent controversies deeply injurious to the internal order and the public standing of universities.
The AAUP’s 1915 analysis was prescient. Academia has utterly failed to prevent its freedom from being used for uncritical and intemperate partisanship. This includes but is not restricted to AAUP 2025, as documented in numerous posts at Unsafe Science but especially this one:
And, just as AAUP 1915 warned, that task of preventing academic freedom from being used for intemperate partisanship is now being performed by others whose policies are indeed deeply injurious to the internal order and public standing of universities. The actions of the AAUP pretty much ensure that:
The Beatings Will Continue
This is a reposting of an essay by Matthew Lutz, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Wuhan University. You can find more at his Substack, Humean Being. He works mostly on metaethics, and if you want to know what "metaethics" is, you can check out his book (with Spencer Case),
Commenting
Before commenting, please review my commenting guidelines. They will prevent your comments from being deleted. Here are the core ideas:
Don’t attack or insult the author or other commenters.
Stay relevant to the post.
Keep it short.
Do not dominate a comment thread.
Do not mindread, its a loser’s game.
Don’t tell me how to run Unsafe Science or what to post. (Guest essays are welcome and inquiries about doing one should be submitted by email).
Footnotes
AAUP’s kinda sorta embargo of Israel. This article in The Chronicle of Higher Education lays it all out:
Divestment from companies doing business in Israel, such as Google, Microsoft, Ford, Chevron, etc. If you: 1. Believe that divestment from such countries is justified and 2. Have a stock portfolio (whether in a retirement fund, which is very common, or elsewhere) that includes a diversified mutual fund (such as one based on any common stock index, the two most common in the U.S. being the S&P500 and Total Stock Market indices) you should, before proclaiming your support for divestment, sell those funds because they almost always include the companies listed above. Else you are a gross hypocrite demanding others do something that you yourself have not done.
Not indicted for genocide. The International Criminal Court has indicted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Neither Israel nor the U.S. are member states that have agreed to be bound by the ICC rulings. The article linked above includes quotes from Israeli politicians, including opposition ones, denouncing the indictment and rejecting it. It also includes this:
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said President Joe Biden’s administration was “deeply concerned by the prosecutor’s rush to seek arrest warrants and the troubling process errors that led to this decision.”
The Gaza War has been a horror. War usually is. Most wars have involved some level of what would now be considered war crimes, even historical wars that predate international law on war crimes, including wars many of us in the U.S. consider justified (such as WWII, where allied aerial bombings of German and Japanese cities and the atomic bombings wreaked horrendous levels of damage and indiscriminate death on civilians). This raises all sorts of questions that are beyond the scope of this essay.
Disclosure. I was a member of the AAUP from somewhere in the mid 1990s through 2024. They actually have done a pretty good job as a faculty union when negotiating with the administration. If only they stuck to their knitting. I resigned after the Rutgers AAUP voted to diverst from Israel, but not exactly because of that vote. It was more like, coming on the heels of their endorsement of using DEI criteria to evaluate faculty and endorsement of academic boycotts, that was the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back.
I left my position at the university in 1973 as the progressive professors and students created more and more ways to destroy the institutions that fed them. I certainly have no remorse as I view the destruction continuing.
One part of my job as an international educator was teaching in the former USSR during perestroika. I never met a person who did not suffer from destructive trauma. After reading and hearing about the destruction of poor farmers who worked hard enough to have a pump at the well, or other signs of creativity, I could see similar signs all over American radicals.
—When has any academic organization ever boycotted some extreme oppressive leftist or radical Islamist regime? Soviet Union?
Quite the opposite, most of our academic clerisy were quite fond of the Soviets, even into the Stalin years and beyond. Don't take it from me, take it from Susan Sontag, queen of 20th-century New York intellectuals: ''Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Reader's Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation or The New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?'' (1982)
And speaking of the Soviets, there's not a syllable of Free Palestine! jargon that wasn't created by the USSR, as it began its own purge of Jews and launched the modern campaign to make Israel a pariah state. Most famous is the culmination of their decades-long campaign of Jew hate, UN resolution 3379 (1975), which determined that “Zionism is a form of racism and discrimination.” Every slur hurled at Israel—imperialism, colonialism, apartheid, racism, ethnic cleansing, genocide, Nazism—all began with the Soviets.
We may have won the Cold War, but they won the universities. Suddenly the political intolerance of the professoriate and their embrace of punitive dogmatic moralism and vicious attacks on enemies and dissenters makes perfect sense.