The AAUP Discredits Itself

When I began my academic career, my colleagues regarded the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) as the great proponent and bulwark of academic freedom. The senior colleague I admired most—a gentleman and scholar, the embodiment of what it meant to be a professor—was a long-time member.

My, how times have changed.

Yes, the AAUP still speaks up for academic freedom, but in some ways, it seems to have followed the path taken by the ACLU, associating the freedom it stands for mostly with left-wing causes. Indeed, my admired senior colleague abandoned his AAUP membership long ago, even before he stepped away from the classroom.

I don’t mean to say that AAUP is simply a partisan or ideological organization. My campus chapter, comprised of colleagues I respect, has advocated for a robust conception of shared governance, asserting appropriate faculty control over the curriculum. But I haven’t heard much talk about the Kalven Report or the Chicago Principles. Perhaps everyone thinks we can take the AAUP’s 1915 and 1940 statements for granted, but I’m unsure.

The new-look AAUP seems to have positioned itself as a combatant in the culture wars, defending an academy marked by intersectionality and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) initiatives against its extramural critics.

My doubts began with two books associated with prominent AAUP members: Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War and It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom. I can’t resist quoting my review of the first book devoted to the notorious philanthropic efforts of the Charles Koch network.

[W]hat underlies their appeal to ‘the rigors of academic scrutiny’ is evident from statements like the following: ‘Feminist and queer theorists do not find it necessary within their discipline to continually defend the established finding that gender is socially constructed.’ Having established a consensus in some areas of the academy that yields results they find ideologically congenial, they do not wish any longer to entertain challenges. They do not want to ‘roll back the current state of academic debates, especially on issues relating to race, class, and gender. I cannot help but quote John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty in reply: ‘However unwillingly a person who has a strong opinion may admit the possibility that his opinion may be false, he ought to be moved by the consideration that however true it may be, if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth.’ The spirit of the academy defended by Wilson and Kamola is not the spirit of the academy I entered over forty years ago.

I noted the threatening character of a proposed new variation on traditional peer review proposed in the other book.

[O]rdinary professional peer review and institutional review boards are, in their view, by themselves inadequate to guard against ‘racist … research and publication.’ Because these procedures are insufficiently attuned to the ‘structural inequalities’ mentioned above and because the faculty typically chosen for membership on the relevant committees may be insufficiently aware of their disciplines’ ‘complicity with white supremacy,’ this new committee has to be composed of faculty ‘with expertise in the relevant areas’ (8). In other words, political science research isn’t simply to be judged by political scientists or an assistant professor’s application for tenure to be judged by tenured departmental colleagues. They must be judged in addition or instead by specialists in race, racism, and so on.

What both books have in common is the desire to define and use academic freedom to protect from criticism and challenge an academy committed to a conception of social justice supported by activist scholarship. To use the language of the Kalven Report, the university, in their view, is “the home and sponsor of critics,” but only of critics of a certain sort, who are to be protected from both internal and external resistance. Having won sanctuary in the citadel of the university, the scholar-activists whose intersectional deconstruction of the traditional academic disciplines and of what seems now to be an old-fashioned understanding of American history and politics have become the dominant voice inside the ivy-covered walls will brook no further challenge.

Until recently, I might have been able to say that the AAUP was “the home and sponsor” of these critics but not simply identified with them. Not any longer.

Isaac Kamola, the author of the first book mentioned above, is now Director of its Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom and author of a new white paper,  Manufacturing Backlash: Right-Wing Think Tanks and Legislative Attacks on Higher Education, 2021–2023, which expands his original focus on the Koch Foundation to include a variety of other “well-funded think tanks,” whose aim, in his view, is to prosecute a culture war against higher education.

In other words, the new-look AAUP seems to have positioned itself as a combatant in the culture wars, defending an academy marked by intersectionality and DEI initiatives against its extramural critics. Those critics are mostly outside academe, in considerable measure, because the academy has, for various complicated reasons, become increasingly inhospitable to them.

The white paper begins by describing an ecosystem of think tanks funded by “dark money,” a term borrowed from the partisan discourse over campaign finance, which is intended to give these organizations a negative valence, even though they’re doing what all think tanks do—explore and promote policies at the state and national level—and they’re funded in the same way as all think tanks are, by donors—some anonymous—who support their political orientation. Kamola also professes to find something nefarious in the fact that there are conservative and libertarian policy networks around issues in higher education, with experts and scholars who—shudder!—talk to one another and share ideas. Who would have thought there’s anything wrong with the collaborative creation of model legislation? Indeed, at the state level, with—for the most part—part-time legislators and small staffs, there’s inevitably a heavy reliance on what we in higher ed call “best practices.”

Despite the many footnotes, extensive bibliographies, and elaborate appendices, we’re already a long way down the road toward advocacy.

The second part of the white paper examines five different areas of legislation: “academic gag orders,” opposition to DEI, weakening tenure, weakening accreditation, and undermining governance. It is impossible in a relatively brief essay to discuss in detail all five topics, so I’ll focus on the first two, restricting myself to a single question regarding each of the other areas of concern. Is the establishment of post-tenure review an entirely unreasonable response to the widely-acknowledged problem of “dead wood”? Are regional accreditors defenders of academic freedom and institutional autonomy or gatekeepers for federal funding, thereby imposing a certain uniformity on the colleges and universities they accredit? Is it altogether beyond the pale for state legislatures to care about whether the universities they fund are doing an adequate job of educating citizens?

It’s possible to offer thoughtful, nuanced answers to all those questions, but don’t look for them in Manufacturing Backlash.

The first two areas—“gag orders” and opposition to DEI—are closely connected since the former largely responds to the recent embrace of “antiracism,” and the latter is prompted by one of its principal fruits, the rapid growth of DEI bureaucracies on college campuses. Once again, there’s room for nuance here, but it’s hard to find in the report.

First, as they apply to training or K–12 education, one can certainly object to gag orders as matters of public policy but not as a matter of academic freedom or freedom of speech. Regarding K–12 education, public officials almost always set the curriculum. And trainings are typically administratively imposed, not voluntarily adopted by faculty. Leaving aside the fact that training that prescribes an attitude or a practice surely at least threatens freedom of speech and academic freedom, I can’t remember the last time a colleague actually looked forward to attending a mandatory workshop—maybe only if we were promised wine and cheese afterward.

To the degree that legislative efforts address and seek to limit what professors say and how they design their courses, they surely overreach and are very vulnerable to the sort of legal challenge readily undertaken by an organization like FIRE. In this respect, the AAUP White Paper is on solid ground, mainly when it describes the chilling effect that vaguely or confusingly worded laws can have on speech in the classroom and on campus. But the tendentious and one-sidedly political character of its presentation vitiates its appeal.

Perhaps reaching out to centrist, conservative, and non-ideological faculty members doesn’t matter to the AAUP—better to rally the base to protect the campus political monoculture.

The DEI bureaucracies that have grown rapidly in the last few years pose a different issue from those of the gag orders. I suppose one could generously describe their growth as an example of “institutional autonomy,” but certainly not as an expression of academic freedom or, for that matter, shared governance. Manufacturing Backlash presents their establishment as a response to a “grassroots movement,” but—leaving aside the tendentious character of this description—that almost by definition suggests that they’re not examples of shared governance. Any faculty member will tell you that when a university moves quickly and adds more administrators, it is not working through established procedures that reflect the deliberate and considered will of the faculty.

Shouldn’t we then applaud efforts to roll back the size and authority of a university administration? According to the AAUP, apparently not—at least not if the new administrators serve the ideological interests of a certain proportion of the professoriate.

I end by noting a very limited area of agreement with the AAUP here. Yes, we have seen a spate of state legislative activity regarding higher education. The white paper’s explanation amounts to a conspiracy theory—an oligarchic minority financed by dark money. I prefer to suggest that we inside the ivy-covered walls take a look in the mirror to get to know ourselves, as Socrates recommends. In that respect, Manufacturing Backlash offers ample evidence for what ails too much of American higher education. It is ideology dressed up in scholarly attire, questioning the motives of those who disagree, ignoring or downplaying inconvenient facts, and vastly oversimplifying what should be very complicated and nuanced arguments. That this is the product of the American Association of University Professors screams out for the unwelcome spotlight that state legislators have directed our way.

Image credit: Mike Ferguson/AAUP — Flickr, edited by Jared Gould (Black & White effect)