A Faculty Group’s Ideological Transformation Continues as It Ends Opposition to Academic Boycotts

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has announced that it no longer opposes academic boycotts, in a sharp departure from its previous acknowledgements that such boycotts — which involve faculty, scholars, and larger scholarly units refusing to associate with particular universities — “strike directly at the free exchange of ideas” by deliberately “impair[ing] the ability of scholars to write, teach, and pursue research” and introducing “political test[s] for participation in the academy.”

The AAUP — a venerable faculty membership organization which produced the landmark 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure — released a new position statement claiming that “when faculty members choose to support academic boycotts, they can legitimately seek to protect and advance the academic freedom and fundamental rights of colleagues and students who are living and working under circumstances that violate that freedom and one or more of those rights.” Politically motivated boycotts of entire universities, which the organization once characterized as a grave threat to academic freedom, are now seen as “legitimate tactical responses”; according to the chair of the committee that oversaw the drafting of the new statement, the AAUP’s previous stance against boycotts was itself “used to squelch academic freedom.”

What’s going on here is, of course, crystal clear: The faculty ideologues who in recent years have taken over the AAUP and transformed it into a hyperprogressive activist group were no longer content to see their anti-Israel professorial colleagues criticized over their support for discriminatory academic boycotts of Israeli universities. Recall that academic boycotts of Israel were a core demand of last year’s campus “encampment” protests — many of which were supported and advised by professors, and which are likely to return this coming academic year. Longstanding norms of academic freedom and of free scholarly inquiry — principles that the AAUP was expressly founded to protect and advance, and that its previous statements conceded were put at significant risk by wholesale academic boycotts — just didn’t stand a chance against the progressive ideological zeitgeist.

Perhaps the AAUP’s behavior is unsurprising given the lows to which it has recently sunk: Just last week, AAUP president Todd Wolfson released a ridiculous and totally inappropriate statement on behalf of the organization deriding Republican vice-presidential nominee Senator J. D. Vance (R., Ohio) as a “fascist.” Still, it is a profound shame that a once-respected organization originally committed to defending academic freedom without partisanship or viewpoint-based preference has, for plainly ideological purposes, ceased opposing a practice that, in its own words, endangers academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas on campus. Faculty who believe that norms of academic freedom should not be contingent upon viewpoint or ideological persuasion would do well to disaffiliate themselves from the AAUP and consider joining an organization like the Academic Freedom Alliance, which defends professors of all ideological stripes at risk of having their academic-freedom rights violated.