I have spent more than a decade studying American professors; documenting what we believe, cataloging how we teach, and trying to explain how we actually behave compared with how the public imagines us. Learning so much about academic culture made me a proud member and an admirer of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) early in my career. 

Its 1915 Declaration and its 1940 Statement gave American higher education much of its understanding of academic freedom, tenure, and due process. Few organizations have done more to protect the independence of my fellow academics than the AAUP. 

But things have changed with the organization in recent years.  

As I wrote in 2024, the AAUP has become a “deeply anti-Semitic organization.” And, last week, an Inside Higher Ed column by an author who also writes for the AAUP described that conclusion as “a bizarre lie.” 

But there are several reasons why I said what I said. 

In 2024, the AAUP abandoned its long-standing opposition to academic boycotts. In August 2025, the AAUP president told Inside Higher Ed that “no weapons should be sent to Israel, at all,” neither defensive nor offensive, called the war in Gaza a genocide, and dismissed federal Title VI investigations into campus anti-Semitism as a weaponization of such allegations.

In late 2025, the AAUP co-published a report with the Middle East Studies Association whose opening sentence refers to Israel’s “genocidal war.” And it adopted a position opposing arms transfers to Israel that the Chronicle of Higher Education reported was never put to the membership, noting that “no debate was ever had, at least not among the general membership.” 

Many Jewish and sensible faculty noticed all of this, as did five major Jewish organizations: the Anti-Defamation League, the Academic Engagement Network, the American Jewish Committee, the Jewish Federations of North America, and Hillel International, all of whose presidents wrote to AAUP leadership warning that the association had grown “insensitive and even hostile to the concerns of its Jewish and Zionist members.” Miriam F. Elman, executive director of the Academic Engagement Network, and Mark G. Yudof, chair of the Academic Engagement Network’s Advisory Board and president emeritus of the University of California, later wrote that the AAUP president’s language about weaponization “gaslights Jews.”

And let’s not ignore that the AAUP’s first political endorsement in its 111-year history went to Dr. Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. That the AAUP endorses candidates at all is troubling; that it chose El-Sayed is worse. He has called the war in Gaza a genocide, called the Israeli government evil, declined to say plainly whether Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state, and called for a total arms embargo that would cut off even defensive systems such as Iron Dome. He has only sharpened that language since: after clinching the nomination this week, he told MS NOW’s “Morning Joe” that his objections go beyond Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government to Israel itself, which he called “bloodthirsty.” Compounding my frustration with the AAUP’s endorsement of El-Sayed is that the decision was made by so few people. The AAUP said roughly 80 percent of those voting favored endorsing, and about 97 percent favored El-Sayed. But Inside Higher Ed has now reported that only about 40 of the AAUP’s roughly 4,000 Michigan members were involved in the decision.  

While any organization may back any candidate it likes, an association whose Jewish members have already told it, in writing, that they feel unwelcome has now bestowed the first endorsement in its history on this candidate. Couple that with the reversal on academic boycotts, the president’s own dismissal of anti-Semitism concerns as “weaponization,” and its broader anti-Israel activism, and what am I to make of the AAUP?

Certainly, people can weigh that this recent record isn’t reflective of anti-Semitic attitudes, and many will. But my characterization is a judgment, and judgments can be contested. A lie, though, is something invented, and I invented none of this.