An Unsettling Approach to Academic Freedom

Defenders of free inquiry owe a debt to an academic crank from the turn of the twentieth century. Edward Alsworth Ross taught economics and sociology at Stanford University in the 1890s. A gifted public speaker, he found a large audience beyond academia, and often gave addresses on left-wing themes such as workers’ rights, the plight of farmers, and the exploitative nature of railroad companies. But alongside these progressive views, Ross also espoused a stark nativism. The two sides of his thinking came together 125 years ago, in a speech to a labour association in San Francisco, in which Ross advocated helping white workers by turning away Asians. “Should the worst come to the worst,” he told his working-class audience, “it would be better for us to train our guns on every vessel bringing Japanese to our shores rather than to permit them to land.’’

Edward A. Ross | American Sociological Association

December 12, 1866 - July 22, 1951

American Sociological Association

Ross’s xenophobia is hard to stomach today. But that wasn’t the main thing that got him in trouble. It was that his San Francisco speech, along with another in which he urged the government to buy up urban railroads, upset Jane Stanford. A co-founder of her namesake school along with her late husband Leland, she wielded so much control after the latter’s death that she was called Mother of the University.

To be fair, Jane did express objections to Ross’s remarks on anti-racist grounds: in her letter to Stanford’s president demanding the professor’s ouster, she cited his rhetoric “drawing distinctions between man and man, all labourers and equal in the sight of God, and literally play[ing] into the hands of the lowest and vilest elements of socialism.” But whatever empathy she had for immigrants was outweighed by a less noble concern.

Stanford’s founding had been made possible by the enormous fortune that Leland had accumulated in the railroad business. And so Ross’s outspoken criticism of railroads and their corrupting effects on politics (“a railroad deal is a railroad steal,” he once purportedly told a class) caused Jane to seek his ouster even before he’d delivered his anti-Japanese speech in 1900. In fact, her previous attempts to end Ross’s employment had resulted in his transfer from the department of economics to sociology, a compromise arranged by Stanford’s president.

Ross’s San Francisco speech put an end to Jane’s willingness to compromise, likely due to the historical themes he’d evoked. One of the few groups that had taken on the railroads and won was the Workingmen’s Association of California, a nativist political party (slogan: The Chinese Must Go!). Party demagogues had helped whip up support for the Chinese Exclusion Act, an 1882 law that banned Chinese laborers from immigrating to the United States, thereby shutting off a source of cheap labour for Leland’s railroad. (This was why Jane associated Ross’s racism with socialism in her letter.) She now applied such strong pressure on Stanford’s president that he had no choice but to ask for Ross’s resignation.

Ross, however, did not go quietly. He released a statement arguing that being forced out for his political advocacy violated his academic freedom. As we would now say, Ross’s take on his case went viral. Over 800 newspapers editorialised on his behalf (and, regrettably, on behalf of his anti-Japanese views). Seven Stanford professors, then constituting ten percent of the faculty, resigned in protest. The American Economic Association launched an investigation, and academics across the country debated whether to subject Stanford to a national boycott.

Inside the university, little changed in the short term, as the scarcity of good academic jobs made it easy to replace the professors who’d left. But the case haunted Jane Stanford during her remaining years, as she often felt the need to defend her actions. As for Ross: Unlike other academics of the era whose political views had cost them their jobs, he attracted enough public sympathy to continue working as a professor at other universities.   

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) wasn’t established until 1915, 15 years after these events transpired. But many of the group’s founders had been involved in the Ross affair. The AAUP’s first president, John Dewey, as well as its first secretary, Arthur Lovejoy, were both distinguished philosophers. Dewey published a ringing defence of academic freedom in the aftermath of Ross’s resignation, while Lovejoy was one of the Stanford faculty members who quit. The AAUP established a committee on academic freedom that was chaired by the same economist who’d organised the American Economic Association investigation—a committee whose membership included another of the seven Stanford professors who’d resigned. This make-up meant that when the AAUP released its original declaration of principles, it was in part a response to the Stanford scandal.

Timeline of the First 100 Years

When the American Association of University Professors was founded in January 1915, higher education bore little resemblance to the system that exists in this country today. The degrees awarded each year by America’s colleges and universities numbered in the tens of thousands rather than in the millions, and the student body was overwhelmingly white, male, and drawn from the social elite.

AAUP

One reason Stanford had little trouble getting rid of Ross was that the concept of academic tenure didn’t exist at the time. In fact, the campaign for tenure rights was one of the issues that occupied the AAUP at the time of its creation. The group’s founders argued that if professors are to engage in unfettered inquiry, they require the security that comes with knowing they can’t be fired for expressing controversial views. In the modern era, the percentage of faculty with tenure-track positions has long been in decline. But to the degree that this idea has influenced modern academia, it owes much to the AAUP.

Recently, however, the AAUP has backtracked in its commitment to academic freedom. In October, it endorsed the practice of requiring candidates for academic jobs to submit statements demonstrating their ability to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). So long as certain conditions are met—such as that “colleges and universities should include the faculty in all stages of DEI policy development”—the AAUP maintains that obliging job candidates to submit DEI statements is not a violation of their academic freedom, even if a school’s DEI policy is based on controversial concepts that a job candidate rejects.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Criteria for Faculty Evaluation

The Association views the use of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) criteria in faculty recruitment, promotion, and retention within a broad vision of higher education for the public good. Since the 1990s, many universities and colleges have instituted policies that use DEI criteria in faculty evaluation for appointment, reappointment, tenure, and promotion, including the use of statements that invite or require faculty members to address their skills, competencies, and achievements regarding DEI in teaching, research, and service. Such criteria are one instrument among many that may contribute to evaluating the full range of faculty skills and achievements within a diverse community of students and scholars.

AAUP

The AAUP’s new stance is inconsistent with its distinguished legacy. While it is often reasonable to encourage professors to give some thought to how to teach diverse student populations, the AAUP has endorsed a top-down approach to doing so, one that not only disregards the intellectual freedom of individual academics but is likely to foster (further) cynicism about DEI itself.

The AAUP’s shift is in part a response to Donald Trump and the illiberal forces he’s energised, representatives of which have used anti-DEI arguments to justify their own assault on the independence of American universities. There is no question that Trumpism and its adjacent forces pose a major threat to academic freedom. But not only has the AAUP responded to that threat by diluting its own commitment to this ideal; as discussed in more detail below, its representatives have made cranky and intolerant remarks about other mainstream academic-freedom organisations that the AAUP should be embracing as allies.

The humorist P.J. O’Rourke once wrote that lawmakers get away with so much because they’re protected by a dictatorship of boredom: We may often dislike the outcome of the legislative process, but politicians can pass bad laws because few voters find the inner workings of government interesting enough to pay close attention. An outsider could be forgiven for thinking that academics are protected by a similar dictatorship. The administrative concept known as “shared governance,” in particular, may seem unexciting and arcane. But in reality, it is a crucial safeguard of academic freedom.

The AAUP has long insisted that faculty should have a significant voice in how universities are run—which is what “shared governance” signifies. The model gives professors a strong voice in academic matters, such as curriculum standards and admission requirements. Applied to hiring and promotions, such policies typically cast faculty as the primary decision-makers. Administrators may hold a veto, but they usually make sure to use it only rarely. Excluding faculty from personnel decisions makes it too easy for presidents, trustees, and other administrators to push out professors with incorrect views, as Stanford did with Ross (even though public opinion turned out to be on his side).

The need for faculty to retain the primary say in hiring and promotions becomes even clearer when academics arouse the ire of outside cancel mobs. This is because professors, while hardly immune from ideological conformity, are better insulated against fundraising and reputational pressure than full-time university managers.

The AAUP is a nonprofit membership association. What power it has is exerted through the release of influential public statements pertaining to tenure, shared governance, and other institutional measures that put boots on the idea of academic freedom. Historically, such statements have carried great weight—especially the famous 1940 iteration of its original Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure. That document has been cited frequently in court decisions on academic freedom, and has been endorsed by approximately 280 academic organisations. Indeed, the AAUP’s views on academic freedom arguably matter more than those of any other civic organisation. The fact that the group has recently wavered in its commitment to this ideal is therefore significant.

1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure

Statement promoting public understanding and support of academic freedom and tenure and agreement upon procedures to ensure them in colleges and universities. Institutions of higher education are conducted for the common good and not to further the interest of either the individual teacher or the institution as a whole. The common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition.

AAUP

In its October statement on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Criteria for Faculty Evaluations, the AAUP argued that it’s perfectly appropriate for universities to use DEI criteria when appointing or promoting faculty, “including the use of statements that invite or require faculty members to address their skills, competencies, and achievements regarding DEI in teaching, research, and service” (my emphasis).

Of course, DEI is currently the subject of controversy in many contexts. Even before Trump signed an Executive Order in January that banned DEI programs in the federal government, large corporations were racing to drop diversity policies they’d adopted in 2020, during the summer of George Floyd. And in 2022, as part of the backlash against the DEI movement, Florida passed the Stop WOKE Act, which served to censor what instructors could say in class: They would not be allowed to “espouse” that a person’s status “as either privileged or oppressed” is determined by their race or sex. (Criticisms of such views, on the other hand, would remain perfectly legal, in open violation of viewpoint neutrality.) While the Stop WOKE Act’s restrictions on classroom discussion are currently the subject of a legal injunction, since 2021, 22 other Republican-controlled state legislatures have passed similar laws seeking to restrict speech at public universities, most of which also do violence to academic freedom.

The AAUP need not pick one target or the other: Mandatory university-imposed DEI statements and legislatively mandated restrictions on classroom discussion both impinge upon academic freedom.

Given this context, criticising the AAUP’s support for mandatory DEI statements may seem to pick on the wrong target. But if one believes—as I do—that academics should have the freedom to make up their own minds about contentious matters, then it follows that one need not pick one target or the other: Mandatory university-imposed DEI statements and legislatively mandated restrictions on classroom discussion both impinge upon academic freedom.

The AAUP’s founders had the right approach. Their purpose in presenting a new framework for academic freedom, after all, was hardly to endorse Ross’s hysterical vision of California as the “latest and loveliest seat of the Aryan race.” Rather, Dewey and the others foresaw that the institutional arrangements that made it easy to dispose of him could be used against other professors with inconvenient views, including views very different from Ross’s own.

The AAUP’s October statement, drafted earlier in 2024 by a subcommittee of the Association’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, argues that universities’ use of compelled (my word) DEI statements are defensible because they are consistent with the goal of promoting “diversity in higher education, including a diverse faculty and student body.” When the issue is described in this way, it seems hard to rebut the AAUP’s position. In my own case, when I moved from an Australian university to an American one, I stopped using so many Australian examples in my political philosophy classes and started using more American ones, in order to engage my audience. It hardly seems crazy that there may be better or worse ways to present material that resonates with students at the level of their race or ethnicity, in addition to their nationality. But many DEI programs seem to go well beyond recognising diversity in this anodyne way.

Consider, for example, the California Community Colleges system, which educates over two million students, and whose DEI program was recently subject to a legal challenge. In 2023, the system updated its faculty contract to include new evaluation standards. Among other criteria, faculty would now be evaluated on their “[d]emonstration of, or progress toward, diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA)-related competencies, and teaching and learning practices that reflect DEIA and anti-racist principles, and reflect knowledge of the intersectionality of social identities.”

After FIRE lawsuit, California community colleges will not enforce DEI mandate in classroom

The California Community Colleges system and a community college district attested in court that DEI regulations do not require community college professors to teach and endorse the state’s pro-DEIA views in the classroom.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and ExpressionFIRE

A group of six professors challenged the new standards in court, arguing that they would cast “a pall or orthodoxy over the classroom”; among other ways, by discouraging critical discussion of DEI (or, as in this context, DEIA) and related concepts. But the judge who heard the case sided with the defendants—albeit only after the Chancellor’s Office assured the court that it would not “take any action against plaintiffs” in regard to the content of their classroom teaching. The judge concluded that there are many ways faculty could meet the new standards, including by discussing feedback with students or having flexible office hours. “These do not require a professor to teach any viewpoint or content concerning DEIA principles,” the judge wrote in dismissing the case.

But whether or not the policy contravenes professors’ First Amendment rights, as the plaintiffs contended, there remains something troubling about the colleges’ policy, in that its standards of evaluation are based on concepts about which reasonable people can disagree.

Take intersectionality, which is often formulated as a theory of how different demographic categories operate to define a person’s identity. As one intersectional theorist puts it, it’s a mistake to believe that “a woman’s identity consists of a sum of parts neatly divisible from one another, parts defined in terms of her race, gender, class, and so on.” Applied to discrimination, intersectionality suggests that individuals who belong to more than one oppressed group will experience their corresponding disadvantages in a manner that is qualitatively different from individuals who are members of just one group. So African-American women, for example, are said to experience a form of discrimination that is not reducible to sexism and racism, but combines both into a new form of discrimination specific to them.

But why stop at race and sex? The logic of intersectionality suggests that if a black woman is also Muslim, for example, this third aspect of her identity is equally important in understanding her and the discrimination she may face. Now intersectionality yields a new and unique identity that cannot be understood solely by reference to three constituent categories. And so on, with sexuality, gender identity, age, class, and disability all potentially functioning as fourth, fifth, and still further analytical dimensions.

Because the theory of intersectionality presents no principled basis for limiting the further addition of new categories, the doctrine would seem to rule out the possibility of generalising about collective experiences, as every individual will represent some unique combination of the many different identity categories that intersectionality emphasises. As the philosophers Katherine Gasdagalis and Alex Mavda have put it, quoting feminist legal theorist Nancy Ehrenreich, “it would seem that intersectionality, which begins as an insistence on the importance of group-based categories for understanding social identity, knowledge, and justice, would devolve into another form of individualism, such that the individual becomes ‘the only unit of analysis, making group-based critiques of power hierarchies impossible.’”

Intersectionality as a Regulative Ideal

Ergo an Open Access Journal of Philosophy[email protected]

Whether intersectionality can avoid a vicious regress in this way is currently the subject of a lively academic debate. Someone who ultimately rejects intersectionality will clearly have a harder time demonstrating their “knowledge of the intersectionality of social identities” in the way that the California Community Colleges policy now calls for.

In this way, the colleges’ evaluations standards go beyond encouraging skills helpful in teaching diverse students, and make it easier or harder for faculty to meet their promotion standards, depending on where they stand in regard to ongoing debates about intersectionality and other contested concepts.

The AAUP’s policy statement acknowledges the argument that compelled DEI statements are “a threat to faculty members’ academic freedom because they allegedly require candidates to adopt or act upon a set of moral and political views.” But the document mentions this objection only in order to rebut it.

“The AAUP does not consider it a violation of academic freedom per se,” the document states, “when an appropriate larger group, such as a faculty senate or a department, collectively adopts an educational policy or goal and evaluates individual faculty members’ performance by reference to them even though they dissent.”

The argument here is that mandatory DEI statements are permissible insofar as the policy requiring them is collectively decided on by faculty. Such an argument certainly reflects the traditional AAUP focus on shared governance. But administrators and outside groups aren’t the only entities that can undermine academic freedom. If faculty are involved in running universities, then they have a form of collective power, which can in principle stifle the intellectual freedom of individual professors. If faculty collectives can oblige their members to take an interest in diversity, and by extension other values, how do we guard against this power being abused?

In other areas of political life, rights safeguards reduce the tyranny of the majority by imposing limits on what can be put up for democratic debate. The AAUP’s new policy, however, employs a purely majoritarian understanding of democracy. It gives dissenting faculty the opportunity to speak against a measure when it is still at the proposal stage. But once the vote is in, while they remain free to criticize the resulting policies, they are compelled to abide by them.

The inadequacy of a majoritarian approach to academic freedom can be understood by noting what results it would have yielded during America’s McCarthyist era. In 1950, at the height of the country’s anti-communist social panic, professors at the University of California were asked to vote on a resolution stating that, “members of the Communist Party, by reason of such commitments to that party, are not acceptable as members of the faculty.” The measure passed by a wide margin, 1025 to 268 (with thirty abstentions).

The academics who voted were being pressured to accept even more draconian measures, but this does not explain the outcome. As historian Ellen Schrecker notes in her 1986 book, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, “most of them believed that active communists were intrinsically unfitted for academic life and would have supported an anti-communist resolution even if they were not under pressure [to do so].” The University of California measure passed the majoritarian test. It is no small loss that the AAUP’s new conception of academic freedom cannot condemn the full horror of McCarthyism.

Some DEI advocates may reject this criticism. Given how many classrooms are racially and ethnically diverse, they sometimes argue, the average instructor must adopt some stance toward diversity; and the only question is whether he or she does so in a conscious and enlightened fashion. Whereas nothing in the nature of teaching obliges a professor to adopt any particular stance toward an issue such as communism, they would further argue, a conscious concern with diversity can only improve their teaching. By this analysis, my analogy with McCarthyism—or any ideological mania—is inapt, since respecting diversity isn’t really an ideological position at all, but rather just an essential aspect of sound pedagogy.

The question of what good teaching requires, however, is itself contested. During the McCarthyist era, for example, a rejection of the Communist Party was widely seen as a prerequisite of effective instruction. Because Party members had to follow the party line, they were said to lack the intellectual independence that made a disinterested search for truth possible. In this way, they abdicated, in the words of one university president at the time, “the first obligation and duty of the teacher.” While this analysis may sound implausible, it’s notable that the AAUP’s majoritarian mechanism does nothing to discourage a faculty with a similarly dubious theory of good teaching from imposing that theory on dissenters.

One need not go back to the Cold War to find analogous controversies. Following Israel’s invasion of Gaza in 2023, many faculties revealed themselves to be deeply divided over Israel-Palestine. In November 2023, for example, nearly 300 faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles, released a letter, “UCLA Faculty Against Terror,” that condemned pro-Palestinian demonstrations. The letter was on strong ground criticising speakers at campus rallies who’d praised Hamas’s atrocities against Israeli civilians. But the letter also urged the university to combat “anti-Israelism,” a concept of ominous generality that could easily be weaponized to censor legitimate criticism of the Israeli government. As the letter put it in a passage that referenced UCLA’s substitute acronym for DEI, the school should “enforce [its] EDI program to fight antisemitism in all its insidious manifestations, including anti-Israelism, by designating a special envoy to coordinate this fight.”

Op-ed: UCLA must condemn Hamas attacks, fight antisemitism on campus - Daily Bruin

This post was updated Dec. 6 at 7:59 p.m. Editor’s Note: This submission is an updated version of an open letter to the university. More than 350 members of UCLA faculty signed this submission.

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It is now apparently official AAUP policy that if proponents of this view formed a majority in a department or other voting unit, it would be no loss to academic freedom for them to leverage hiring and promotion criteria as a means to favor professors who support Israel. It would be equally consistent with the AAUP’s stance for a pro-Palestinian majority faction to apply its own (opposite) litmus test. For all that majoritarianism requires is that they have the numbers on their side.

As academic freedom is the main basis for opposing mandatory diversity statements, nothing I am arguing here should be taken as ruling out non-mandatory policies aimed at advancing diversity goals. If a university were to offer, say, workshops on teaching diverse classes that faculty could choose to attend, such workshops might or might not be valuable, depending on their content. But they would pose no threat to academic freedom.

The optional nature of such measures would actually make it easier for universities to identify faculty who care about DEI. Policies that oblige a job candidate to describe his or her DEI “skills, competencies, and achievements” invite obvious rote answers. Because aspiring candidates have an incentive to present themselves as DEI enthusiasts, it’s hard to know if they are sincere. Someone who freely chooses to participate in DEI activities, on the other hand, is more likely to actually support DEI, an attribute that mandatory statements are supposed to uncover in the first place.

In fact, it’s arguably better for the long-term health of the DEI movement itself if DEI skeptics aren’t driven out of the universities. Policies intended to meet the needs of diverse populations, as they apply not only to classrooms but the wider campus and beyond, come in many different forms. Recently, for example, The New York Times documented how the University of Michigan has spent over a quarter of a billion dollars on a decade-long diversity effort that appears to have resulted in little more than “wary disdain” on the part of the students who were its supposed beneficiaries. Someone who favours diversity initiatives in principle can still see the value in avoiding broken models like Michigan’s. And the diversity frameworks that academia releases into the world will only be strengthened if there are intelligent skeptics around to subject them to vigorous criticism at their conception. As John Stuart Mill wrote, the best people to present critical views are “persons who actually believe them, who defend them in earnest and do their very utmost for them.”

The AAUP’s majoritarian phase has coincided with its representatives offering increasingly defensive and ill-judged criticisms of other academic-freedom organisations. It is as if the AAUP cannot even entertain the thought that groups that dissent on the issue of mandatory DEI statements might also be truly committed to free inquiry.

This problem first came to light in October, when Racket News, a Substack site operated by author and reporter Matt Taibbi, published a 2021 email by a prominent member of the AAUP, which questioned the legitimacy of the Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA), a smaller group of college and university faculty members (of which I am a member) with a similar focus.

It is as if the AAUP cannot even entertain the thought that groups that dissent on the issue of mandatory DEI statements might also be truly committed to free inquiry.

That email, an image of which appears below, was written by Henry Reichman, a professor emeritus of history at California State University who then served as chair of the same committee on academic freedom and tenure that the AAUP established over 100 years ago. Reichman was writing to the executive director of the National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement, which is based at the University of California, Irvine, and which promotes dialogue about issues related to the First Amendment. He was unhappy that the centre was organising a conference at which the only speaker on academic freedom would be someone from the newly established AFA.

“That group’s professed goals may be noble, but what has it done to merit center stage instead of, well, the AAUP?,” Reichman asked. He questioned what purpose a new organisation could serve, given that academic freedom was already defended by established groups such as the AAUP.

“While I find the right-leaning tilt of the alliance’s members [concerning], including several whose well-known ideas on both academic freedom and free speech I consider deeply problematic, that is not my objection here,” Reichman added. “I am simply troubled by the fact that you would give a prominent platform to a group when its purpose is unclear and as far as anyone can tell it has so far done nothing but announce its presence—and, I assume, try to raise money.”

Reichman’s attempt to gatekeep a presentation on academic freedom was bizarre. It is not just that free inquiry benefits from being defended by more than one organization. The AAUP’s own history shows that we cannot always rely on established organizations to protect free inquiry.

In addition to standing for a set of principles, the AAUP has always had a second mandate regarding academic freedom—which is to defend professors under fire and censure institutions that try to punish them. But if the AAUP has long been an effective champion of academic freedom as an ideal, it has not always been effective at intervening in such actual cases.

“The organisation’s stated devotion to the principles of academic freedom remained firm throughout [the McCarthyist] period,” Schrecker writes in No Ivory Tower. “But it did not censure any schools which had violated those principles. And it did not even publish any reports about them.”

Reichman’s attempt to gatekeep a presentation on academic freedom was bizarre. The AAUP’s own history shows that we cannot always rely on established organisations to protect free inquiry.

Closer to our own time, AAUP members complained in 2012 that its academic freedom committee was stretched too thin to adequately investigate violations. This history explains why we need groups such as the AFA, a non-partisan, non-political organisation that offers legal and other support to professors under fire.

Reichman’s depiction of the AFA as right-leaning was ill-informed. It is not just that the organisation has members (like me) who support Bernie Sanders and Black Lives Matter. A primary function of the AFA is to issue public statements protesting academic-freedom violations, and it regularly does so on behalf of academics with left-wing views. Institutions the AFA has condemned include the University of Idaho, for threatening consequences for faculty who “promote” abortion in the classroom; Texas Tech University, for suspending a professor who criticised Israel and its war in Gaza; and Texas A&M University, for suspending a professor who criticised Texas’s Lieutenant Governor, a Republican. 

It was disappointing enough that the chair of the AAUP’s committee on academic freedom would try to delegitimise an organisation devoted to the same cause. But the AAUP soon made more extreme statements about a different group. This time, the target was the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which defends academic freedom as part of a larger commitment to protecting free speech (and to whose volunteer faculty network I also belong).

In November, Alex Morey, a FIRE vice-president, criticised the AAUP on social media. Morey linked to a news story in which the AAUP’s president called the 2024 presidential election results “disappointing,” and which he took to show the need for organized resistance on the part of academia. According to Morey, this was only the latest sign that the AAUP had become too partisan.

“If you’re a faculty member with anything other than ultra-progressive views, don’t count on the @AAUP to defend you like it once would have,” Morey wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “Trading almost a century of principle and the org’s good name for political expediency is a damn shame.”

The AAUP could have responded to Morley by addressing her criticism on a substantive level. (It might have pointed out, for example, that the AAUP’s work on behalf of academic freedom still includes efforts that benefit academics in general, regardless of their politics.) The AAUP instead attacked Morey and her organisation. “FIRE receives major funding from groups with clear and well-known political, ideological and economic interests,” the AAUP account stated. “FIRE is complicit w/ the attacks on higher education being led by the Right. You know this but still push the line that you are somehow nonpartisan. How hypocritical.” Such ad hominem spasms were beneath the organisation.

But the AAUP’s social-media manager wasn’t done making the association look bad. When an X user asked for evidence of FIRE’s complicity, the AAUP account cited Florida’s Stop WOKE Act. The problem with this response was noted in a community note that was added to the AAUP’s post, which pointed out that FIRE had brought a lawsuit against the Act (which ultimately resulted in the temporary injunction against the implementation of its key provisions), on the basis that—as one FIRE attorney put it—“in the college classroom, you’re supposed to learn from an exchange of ideas, which means that it’s not one viewpoint that’s being inculcated to students.”

The note might also have mentioned that the AAUP had intervened in a case that had started as a separate challenge to the Act, only for the two lawsuits to be deemed so similar that the court heard them together and consolidated their appeal into one case. In other words, the AAUP attacked FIRE while the two organisations were on the same side of a major lawsuit (along with the AFA, it should be mentioned, which submitted its own brief).

The AAUP soon deleted the tweets in question. But it never acknowledged why it had done so, revealed who’d written them, or publicly apologised to Morey. And when it came to FIRE, the AAUP still had more to say. Ten days after the exchange on social media, another AAUP representative published an article in Inside Higher Ed arguing that “FIRE is no defender of Academic Freedom.”

The author, Joan Scott, was a former chair of the AAUP committee on academic freedom. She sought to discredit FIRE by pointing to the group’s founding in 1999, at which time, Scott argued, “an initial motivating force was the endorsement of the right of racist expression on the University of Pennsylvania campus. This is a telling choice of where their political affiliations lie.” As the AAUP’s X account had done, Scott characterised FIRE as being under the sway of conservative donors. (“Of course,” she allowed, “they cover themselves by litigating on behalf of the occasional liberal or even leftist.”)

In fact, Scott’s reference to the University of Pennsylvania recalled a famous incident in which a student was wrongly disciplined for racial harassment. The case certainly raised concerns for the civil libertarians who went on to found FIRE, but they were not acting out of sympathy for racism, or even defending an actual racist. But even if FIRE’s origin story had involved racist speech, what of it? That would have only placed FIRE in the same tradition as the AAUP, whose own founding owed a debt to Ross’s anti-immigrant tirades.

Scott’s attempt at guilt-by-association ignored one of civil libertarianism’s oldest lessons, yet one that seems to require constant repeating. Often, it is the people who hold views far removed from genteel opinion—rabble-rousers and cranks, criminals and radicals—who present test cases for freedoms in which many others have a major stake.

As for FIRE’s defence of liberals and leftists, it is far from “occasional.” As noted by Morey, the VP targeted on X, in 2024 FIRE intervened in sixty cases involving campus censorship from the right—and only forty cases in which it came from the left.

Scott’s article did highlight an important difference between the AAUP and FIRE, however. As she put it, “their version of free speech is only about individual rights, while academic freedom is about the individual and collective rights of faculty.” This difference between the two organisations is evident in how they diverge on shared governance. FIRE, as its name suggests, is concerned with academic freedom insofar as it involves the rights of individuals, such as professors. The AAUP shares that focus, but also advocates for the right of faculty to engage in collective decision making, as when they vote on hiring decisions. By the AAUP’s lights, whatever requirements faculty collectives may impose on job seekers are presumptively valid, whether they concern mandatory DEI statements or anything else.

A better approach would be to hang on to shared governance while rejecting a majoritarian view of academic freedom. In practice, this would require a set of norms that protect faculty’s ability to make important decisions collectively, but which also encourage them to view their power as having proper limits. The best way for the AAUP to encourage such norms would be for it to revise its DEI statement such that it is no longer committed to the view that faculty majorities can never violate academic freedom, as the California professors who endorsed McCarthyism surely did.

In the current climate, the academic freedom of pro-Palestinian academics may be especially at risk if its scope is determined through majoritarian procedures. But if not them, some other group with unpopular views will be at heightened risk. As an organisation devoted to defending academic freedom, the AAUP should not uphold principles that legitimise majoritarian violations in advance.

In its policy statement on DEI, the AAUP drew attention to our cultural moment. “Debates about the appropriateness of DEI criteria cannot be understood in isolation from the current political context of higher education in the United States,” the document stated. “Wholesale opposition to the use of DEI statements has often gone hand in hand with partisan legislative and other efforts to restrict or ban certain subjects of research and teaching.” The suggestion that opposition to mandatory DEI statements must be rooted in hostility to DEI is false. But the organisation is right to warn against the ongoing legislative assault on academic freedom.

Perpetrators of that assault often justify it as a necessary means of saving free inquiry from intolerant DEI ideology. In 2019, for example, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis called on the state’s public universities to welcome diverse views. “The role of the university is not to shield students from speech that makes them uncomfortable,” DeSantis said. “The cure for speech that one disagrees with lies not in prescription but in open debate and free inquiry.” Yet just three years later, DeSantis signed the Stop WOKE Act. In 2019, similarly, Texas governor Greg Abbot signed a law that, in his words, “protects free speech on college campuses.” In his State of the State Address six years later, Abbot denounced a central pillar of shared governance: “We need legislation that prohibits professors from having any say over employment decisions.” If academic freedom were a child, proponents of this view would pose as caregivers in order to abuse it.

Thankfully, many of these efforts have met with strong legal resistance—including from FIRE, the organisation that has been repeatedly attacked by the AAUP. But since Trump’s re-election, the assault on universities has broadened to include an attempt to slash National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding for medical and other research (which is also subject to an injunction). The funding measure has been met with multiple lawsuits, including one brought by a group of universities and academic organisations. In seeking to beat back Trump, the academic parties in the suit have not been precious about who they will work with. One of the lawsuits’ lead attorneys, for example, has been described as a “conservative legal stalwart.” Outside the context of the lawsuit, wealthy private universities have also hired Republican lobbyists to put pressure on Trump’s administration.

An effective defence of academic freedom will likely also require many people to look past their differences and work together. As political organizers say, if you’re comfortable with everyone in your coalition, it’s too small. But the AAUP’s recent hostility toward its natural allies suggests it has little interest in being part of an effective coalition, let alone leading one.

The common theme running through Reichman’s email, the AAUP’s posts on X, and Scott’s article is that defenders of academic freedom must choose between the AAUP and a destructive conservativism. This theme is most pronounced in Scott’s piece, which mentions Martin Heidegger’s decision to join the Nazi party after he became rector of the University of Freiburg in 1933. Scott cites vice-president J.D. Vance’s despicable remark that “universities are the enemy” as evidence of a parallel between Heidegger’s time and ours. What we most need to avoid, she suggests, is quietism and complicity of the kind Heidegger represents, given that once again, “the very mission of the university [is] at stake.”

An effective defence of academic freedom will likely require many people to look past their differences and work together. As political organisers say, if you’re comfortable with everyone in your coalition, it’s too small.

Scott was right to view Trump as an existential threat. But our situation is already bad enough without likening it to the year Dachau was established. Although Scott is a historian, her analogy to Nazi Germany sloganises history at the expense of understanding it. She and the other representatives of the AAUP have engaged in delegitimisation, smears, historical distortion, and other tactics better left to the Trumpian right.

Trump and Vance will someday be gone. And with them, let us hope, will go the swaggering, snarling hostility to intellectual freedom they have unleashed. The AAUP is correct to combat such an obvious threat. But it needs to do so without posing a more subtle and insidious threat to academic freedom of its own.