Inside Higher Ed today has a news article, “When Professor Can’t Get Along” from editor Scott Jaschik, that resonates oddly with the AAUP’s report two weeks ago, “Freedom in the Classroom.” It seems the AAUP is shutting down its listserv because of the increasing acrimony of the professors who post there. One of AAUP’s worries is that the frequent ad hominem attacks might get the organization sued.
What’s happened at the AAUP? The organization that once upon a time stood for high-minded principle in higher education and for civil debate has been sliding down into partisanship and bare-knuckle dispute for some time. Jaschik’s article links the AAUP’s decision to eliminate its listserve with another AAUP controversy. It seems AAUP president Cary Nelson (author of Manifesto of a Tenured Radical) has stacked the AAUP’s nominating committee. Someone posted on the listserve “the fact that four of the five members of the nominating committee had publicly supported Cary Nelson, the association’s president, in his last campaign for AAUP office, and asked why a committee with such ties to Nelson should be in charge of nominating candidates (including Nelson and his opposition) in next year’s elections.” Goodbye listserve. Moreover, following the posting of this question, the information that these four members of the nominating committee were Nelson supporters disappeared from Nelson’s website.
Skullduggery like this isn’t something that we used to associate with the AAUP, but it is entirely consistent with the tactics on display in the “Freedom in the Classroom,” which I critiqued at Truths R Us and, more extensively (with Steve Balch) in A Response to the AAUP’s Report. The AAUP seems to regard “academic freedom” as a set of justifications for the academic Left to play rough and take no responsibility for the consequences. Perhaps that’s overstating it—but it squares with the Tammany Hall ethos on display in Cary Nelson’s AAUP.