Joe Lockard argues that while there is a culture war underway in US higher education, one that contests vital DEI initiatives and racial and gender justice, the AAUP wants to fight the Gaza war, a region where its voice is meaningless.
The American Association of University Professors, once the reputable home of defences of academic freedom and shared governance, has fallen victim to entryism. It has become a roost for anti-Israel academics and supporters of the pro-Palestinian BDS boycott movement.
Under the current leadership of its president Todd Wolfson, a media studies professor from Rutgers University, the AAUP has shifted away from its historical model of principled neutral defence of academic freedom, towards a labor union model. The AAUP affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers in 2022 as part of this reorientation.
An energised activist spirit is a positive development, yet also one that has attracted and empowered membership from faculty who would have been limited a few years ago by the organisation’s mission and scope. This limitation no longer holds.
Today, the AAUP has been converted into a front for Palestine advocacy and BDS boycott organising. The AAUP-sponsored National Day of Action on 17 April is heavily an anti-Israel call. More than half the sponsoring organisations are avowed anti-Zionists, including the off-the-wall Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism quartered at University of California-Santa Cruz.
Internal opposition has been marginalised within the AAUP. The Academe blog, the AAUP’s platform for current discussions, published just over 70 essays in the past six months. Nearly half concerned Gaza, antisemitism, or campus protests. They have a monolithic pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel voice. From personal experience of repeated rejection, counter-voices are unwelcome. Instead, readers meet uncontradicted and biased essays, such as Katherine Franke’s highly inaccurate account of her departure from Columbia University.
Given the Trump administration’s vicious attack on colleges and universities, scientific research, and campuses as sites of liberal thought and protest, the AAUP’s preoccupation with Palestine and Israel misses the mark by miles. Or in a worse interpretation, it targets Israel and Jewish communities as the true sources of the Trump administration’s attacks on higher education.
Anti-Israel animosity within the AAUP and its leadership takes different expressions. Its recent ‘Scholasticide in Palestine’ webinar employed a hotly-contested term, one invented by British-Palestinian scholar Karma Nabulsi in 2009 for application exclusively to Israel. It posits, contra-factually, that denial and destruction of education has been a core feature of Israeli policy since 1948, with Gaza only its latest iteration.
Part of the ‘scholasticide’ argument has become that it is now not just Gaza, but extends to US higher education, as the Trump administration seeks to decimate and control the intellectual and political life of universities. Thus, Gaza and the fate of US higher education are linked. This has become a rationalisation for the AAUP joining the pro-Palestine movement.
When Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League wrote on behalf of several Jewish organisations to criticize the ‘Scholasticide in Palestine’ panel, he spoke within an older understanding that the AAUP’s mission was ‘to promote balanced and informed discourse’ and foster scholarly dialogue. That is no longer true. In indirect response, the AAUP published Emmaia Gelman’s claim, one that resonates with the history of claims of malevolent Jewish control over institutions, that the ADL and a handful of Jewish organisations are behind the Trump administration’s education policy.
This is an AAUP that sponsored a recent talk on ‘false charges of antisemitism‘ at a time of intense concern over this topic within the Jewish community at-large and massive documentation of campus antisemitism. It is difficult to imagine the AAUP sponsoring a talk on false discrimination charges involving African American, Hispanic or Asian communities.
Based on its statements and blog, the AAUP manifests an institutional inability to distinguish between charges ginned up by frothing right-wingers to generate Title VI-based attacks on universities from the reality of left antisemitism. Finger-pointing rightwards, even if correct, does not exempt the left from antisemitic bigotry. It fails to recognise that left-wing dismissals of statements from Jewish communities as false claims are secular versions of millennial anti-Judaism.
Nowhere in its recent public statements does the AAUP recognise the legitimacy of Jewish community complaints about campus antisemitism, such as is clearly on display at Columbia University Apartheid Divest and its ‘glory to the martyrs’ pro-Hamas rhetoric. Instead, we read invocations of free speech rights and academic freedom. In current AAUP group-think, rather than being universal, these ideals are bounded for some, those with disliked ideas, and unbounded for others.
The AAUP’s present concept of academic freedom, stripped of idealistic verbiage, reads ‘we can do politics – politicians and taxpayers can pay and shut up.’ The short-sightedness of this view is obvious to all but those who shout ‘McCarthyism!’ whenever external political opposition manifests.
Politics created and have shaped public universities, the backbone and muscle of higher education in the United States, since the Morrill Land Grant College Act of 1862. The question is not whether there will be politics involved in higher education: this is a foundational given. The question is whether these will be enlightened politics? What structures can facilitate voices outside campus and what will be their limits? Will there be respect for free speech and educational equity?
Will involvement be the politics of Governor Ross Barnett trying to prevent a first Black student, James Meredith, from attending University of Mississippi in 1962, or will they be the politics of the Kennedy administration in its support for Ole Miss desegregation and civil rights?
In its anti-DEI campaign within higher education, the Trump administration updates the white supremacist bilge of George Wallace standing in a doorway at University of Alabama. Only now it is being restated as a putative defence of civil rights of white people, heterosexual men, and two-flavours-only gendering. The response will be inevitably political, involving understandings shared between campuses and communities.
Yet the AAUP treats college and university campuses as isolated noble islands from which faculty political expression can issue while remaining exempt from external criticism or influence. It is a position that solicits mobilised community support but rejects community objections, as in the Raz Segal case at University of Minnesota. In its brutal use of federal monies as leverage against Columbia and Johns Hopkins, modeling the means of intimidation and subordination as the rest of US higher education watches with alarm and asks who will be the next victim, the Trump rampage reminds us forcefully that universities are political creations.
A faculty ‘stay out of our politics’ attitude nonetheless manifests time and again. AAUP president Wolfson wrote a letter to New York governor Hochul protesting her intervention against a Hunter College announcement for a Palestine Studies hire that read like an indictment of Israel written by Hamas, not a job announcement. He wrote in defence of an impossible proposition that faculty exercise of political discrimination at a public institution under the attempted camouflage of field expertise was of no concern to the public or their elected representatives.
This was a claim for absolute faculty sovereignty. That claim failed and will fail when used again, an academic nothing hand laid down against a gubernatorial straight flush. Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University, comments that a profound insularity in US academia has led to deep public resentment. Wolfson’s letter and the AAUP leadership evidence little or no sense of that resentment and their consequent weakness as an organisation. That is profound arrogance.
Whether such political arrogance is remediable is open to question. The AAUP has been moving towards worse territory. There has been a build-up towards swinging the AAUP into support for the BDS movement. Major scholarly organisations recently defeated similar efforts, such as the Modern Language Association and the American Historical Association where its executive council overturned a convention meeting vote favouring BDS.
This build-up took an enabling step forward with the 2024 repudiation of the AAUP’s previous opposition to academic boycotts. The new statement endorses academic boycotts with the contradictory illogic that by restricting academic freedom a boycott can ‘legitimately seek to protect and advance’ academic freedom.
Influential voices within the AAUP are calling for the organisation to adopt the BDS program, as some of its current senior officials have for years. Were that to happen, the damage to the AAUP’s reputation likely would be fatal, a terrible prospect at a time when academic freedom is under crushing pressure from an authoritarian Trump administration driven by a fascist imperative to obliterate dissent.
There is a culture war underway in US higher education, one that contests vital DEI initiatives and racial and gender justice. The AAUP wants to fight the Gaza war, a region where its voice is meaningless.
Far better and more productive alternatives are available for involvement from AAUP members. These include such as encouraging cooperative Israeli-Palestinian-US educational projects or campus anti-racist education opposing both antisemitism and Islamophobia. Peacemaking needs to be at the heart of progressive politics.
Anti-Zionist zealotry rendered as a moral absolute has injured the reputation of one of the oldest academic organisations in the United States. This squanders over a century of hard-won credibility in the defence of academic freedom. The AAUP is in danger of tumbling into the BDS black hole and being lost entirely.
