Todd Wolfson wants the century-old American Association of University Professors to be a “fighting organization.” Since he took charge in July, the AAUP has caused a stir: It reversed its longstanding categorical opposition to academic boycotts, endorsed diversity criteria in faculty hiring, and issued a statement labeling Vice President-elect JD Vance as a “fascist.”
Many faculty members have cheered the bold pronouncements from the group, which casts itself as the chief advocate for scholarly interests and rights. At a time when Republican lawmakers and conservative activists are pushing to restrict what’s said and taught on college campuses, the professoriate needs to send a message, supporters say.
But the AAUP’s fresh vision has provoked a reckoning over how academic freedom should be defined and defended, particularly amid the ongoing war in Gaza and the incoming Trump administration.
The loudest criticism has come from a longtime counterpart: the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, a self-described nonpartisan free-speech organization. The AAUP and FIRE have spent the past month in a social-media sparring match that’s spilled over into a series of back-and-forth opinion pieces — including a 6,000-word essay from FIRE’s president chronicling “the fall of the AAUP.”
FIRE’s leaders claim that the AAUP turns a blind eye to attacks on conservative speech, alienating professors in its ranks. They say that academic institutions must maintain political neutrality to protect academic freedom and that the AAUP’s shift in priorities is undermining that core mission.
Wolfson and other AAUP officials counter that FIRE doesn’t practice the nonpartisanship it preaches, cherry-picking free-speech cases to suit a certain agenda and accepting money from donors who back right-wing higher-education reforms.
Moreover, Wolfson says that neutrality — or at least FIRE’s definition of it — is not an option with President-elect Trump’s return to office. “JD Vance and Donald Trump have clearly signaled that they aim to attack and dismantle and control the sector, and AAUP will not stay neutral in that fight,” Wolfson told The Chronicle.
After Trump’s election victory, Wolfson said in an AAUP statement that the outcome was “disappointing,” and implored academics to mobilize against the new administration. The missive sparked yet another spat with FIRE on X, featuring scathing subtweets, deleted posts, and community notes that clarified false or misleading claims.
The recent wrangling over the AAUP’s identity isn’t just about politics; it’s about the erosion of tenure — once a given, tenure is now a privilege for a shrinking minority. What does it mean to be the voice of the faculty as the profession becomes increasingly precarious?
One key point of disagreement about the AAUP is whether the organization made an intentional move into partisan activism, or whether the surge in Republican attacks on professors has inevitably politicized its work.
The AAUP’s current and recent leaders say its latest run of barbs is business as usual. “There’s no shift at all” in the association’s core values and methods, Wolfson told The Chronicle, pointing to similar anti-Trump statements from past presidents. (Rudy Fichtenbaum, who led the AAUP from 2012 to 2020, warned that the first Trump presidency would be “neoliberalism on steroids.”)
“If someone wants to argue that there’s this major shift in direction of the AAUP, I think they are probably not looking at the last four years under me and the years before that under Rudy,” said Irene Mulvey, Wolfson’s immediate predecessor. “We’re still fighting for the same things we’ve always been fighting for.”
No one’s asking the AAUP to be a neutral organization, but there’s a difference between being a neutral and a nonpartisan organization.
Some rank-and-file members of the AAUP believe that by acting more aggressively, the organization is making advances that were long overdue.
Ellen Schrecker, a decades-long member and a historian of McCarthyism, argued in an essay published by the AAUP last year that the association’s methods were sluggish, outmoded, and ill-equipped to combat Republican-led efforts to reform higher education.
“All too often it has failed to take advantage of its unofficial franchise over academic freedom to intervene more effectively in the current culture wars,” Schrecker, an emerita professor at Yeshiva University, wrote. “We can’t continue with business as usual.”
Throughout its history, the AAUP has gradually assumed a more-activist — but not necessarily progressive — posture, Schrecker told The Chronicle.
In its earliest years, Schrecker said, the association’s leaders “hunkered down and supported the established status quo.” They crafted “a body of quasi-judicial reports that could become the basis for a kind of [academic freedom] common law,” she said, and investigated individual infringements on faculty rights that sprung up from internal administrative feuds, not over politics. During the McCarthy era, Schrecker said the association “didn’t do a thing” to address the dismissals of more than 100 professors with suspected communist ties.
Things changed in the 1970s, when the AAUP got involved in collective bargaining — an effort meant to mend internal schisms with younger, reform-minded members, according to Schrecker. The organization also began wielding its censure power to sanction institutions that violated its standards of academic freedom.
But “detailed investigations of individual violations of academic freedom at relatively obscure institutions seem an inadequate response to the current war on higher education,” Schrecker wrote last year. “If the AAUP is to respond realistically to the right-wing war on higher education, it must adapt its traditional mode of operations to the academic community’s current condition.”
Asked whether Wolfson was a herald of said adaptation, Schrecker told The Chronicle “absolutely, yes.”
“He’s got energy. He’s got foresight. He’s really been in the trenches, and he’ll put up a fight,” she said. Wolfson’s approach, she added, isn’t so much a pivot as an escalation.
In recent years, the AAUP has jumped more forcefully into battles against Republican-backed proposals. Last year, Mulvey, then the president, and a handful of AAUP members testified against a Texas bill, now law, that banned diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in public colleges — arguing that the measure would harm faculty recruitment and censor classroom discussions.
Amid the uptick in legislative efforts to regulate campus speech and teaching, the AAUP often found an ally in FIRE.
Both groups, for instance, opposed Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act,” which restricts how racism, oppression, and other subjects can be taught. The foundation successfully sued the state in district court to block some of the law’s key provisions in 2022, and the AAUP filed an amicus brief the following year, urging an appellate judge to uphold the decision.
Alex Morey, FIRE’s vice president for campus advocacy, said that the foundation often pulls from the association’s library of statements as “academic-freedom canon” in its own lawsuits.
If the AAUP has gone off the rails in a way that’s really actually threatening academic freedom, we are beholden to call it out.
But over the last couple of years, a rift emerged. Increasingly, the two groups didn’t agree on whether upholding academic freedom required upholding the broadest-possible view of free-speech rights.
Some AAUP leaders say that conservatives have weaponized free-speech issues as a Trojan horse to exert control over curriculum and diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. They say that the foundation’s belief in “free-speech absolutism” doesn’t comport with the association’s definition of academic freedom. FIRE, meanwhile, argues that academic freedom “encompasses both the freedom of expression and the freedom of inquiry,” and is inherently conditioned by the First Amendment.
That divide was the basis of the groups’ first spat this year, when the association reversed its categorical opposition to academic boycotts, the practice in which a scholar or group of scholars refuse to work with other faculty members or institutions — typically in a particular country or region — to try to force policy change.
The association’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, which sets definitions and standard practices for academic freedom, began to reconsider its stance on boycotts before Wolfson took office.
For years, some professors expressed confusion about the 2006 policy, which opposed “selective academic boycotts that entail an ideological litmus test” and asserted that “the search for truth and its free expression suffer if a boycott is in place.” Some Committee A members have said that renewed debates over how academics should be able to protest the war in Gaza factored into the reconsideration.
The association now says that academic boycotts “can be considered legitimate tactical responses to conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education.” Such decisions, the policy continues, “should target only institutions of higher education that themselves violate academic freedom or the fundamental rights upon which academic freedom depends.”
FIRE quickly voiced its disapproval. So did Cary Nelson, who served as the AAUP’s president in 2006, when it issued its last statement on boycotts. He wrote in an essay for The Chronicle that the committee’s revision was a “political decision based not on fact but rather on prejudice” against Jewish students and faculty.
Nelson, a fierce advocate for Israel, told The Chronicle in an interview that he thinks the change was driven by anti-Zionism and changes in Committee A’s membership. When he was president, he said, the committee was made up of “high-prestige lawyers.” His successors “wiped the slate clean” and tapped a “career anti-Zionist” as chair, he said.
That chair is Rana M. Jaleel, a professor of gender, sexuality, and women’s studies at the University of California at Davis. In an interview, she described the association’s new stance on boycotts as a “more-measured and less-politicized correction” of the 2006 statement. It is “inviting people to just think about whether or not it’s a good idea.”
She said that “certain vocal critics” have built a skewed narrative about the intent and contents of the association’s recent batch of statements. “There’s a chance to dunk on the AAUP,” said Jaleel, who has served under four of the association’s presidents. “But the dunks aren’t actually founded in what the statements say, or what our policy is, or what we’re doing.”
The association’s next big move invited more dunks. In October, the AAUP endorsed some diversity criteria in faculty evaluation, in which colleges require professors to demonstrate a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion to be hired or earn tenure or promotion. In its new statement, the association rejected arguments that such criteria are “categorically incompatible with academic freedom,” so long as they are decided upon through shared-governance procedures.
FIRE, meanwhile, views DEI criteria as “vague or ideologically motivated” policies that “cast a pall of orthodoxy” on campuses.
Robert L. Shibley, FIRE’s special counsel for campus advocacy, wrote at the time that the association’s endorsement marked “yet another departure from the organization’s roots as a stalwart protector of faculty members’ right to dissent from the orthodoxies of the day.”
To some at FIRE, it seemed like the AAUP had suddenly decided, incorrectly, that academic freedom and limitations on speech — such as boycotts and diversity mandates — were compatible. Morey, FIRE’s vice president for campus advocacy, said that in the past year, the association was “threading the rhetorical needle” with “gobbledygook-type” statements.
“The AAUP can say, ‘Oh, it’s not a change,’ but how else can it be read?” Morey said. “If the AAUP has gone off the rails in a way that’s really actually threatening academic freedom, we are beholden to call it out.”
If we don’t fight back, they will demolish higher education as we know it.
So when Wolfson said, on behalf of the AAUP, that Trump’s victory was “disappointing,” Morey threw the first punch.
“If you’re a faculty member with anything other than ultraprogressive views, don’t count on the AAUP to defend you like it once would have,” she wrote on X. “Trading almost a century of principle and the org’s good name for political expediency is a damn shame.”
The AAUP’s X account — run by a group of people, a spokeswoman said — shot back in a now-deleted response that Morey’s post was a “laughable, utterly false, and unwarranted attack from an elite, politically motivated and funded” organization with “no base that has aligned itself with far-right assaults” on higher education.
In separate exchanges with critical professors, the association accused FIRE of accepting money from donors who back laws that “damage academic freedom” and “aim to remake higher education toward an ideological agenda.”
“Keep digging social-media manager person,” one professor said. “It’s only going to get worse for you.” (The AAUP account responded with a yawning GIF.)
Two weeks after the post-election sniping, Joan W. Scott, a long-serving Committee A member, wrote in Inside Higher Ed that Morey had begun an “unprecedented attack” against the association.
Scott said that Wolfson’s post-election remarks “simply echo” statements from the presidents of Wesleyan and Trinity Washington Universities.
“Wolfson’s words were thus not a sign of a radical takeover of the AAUP, but a commitment — not apparently shared by the ideologues at FIRE — to the values that have made U.S. higher education the envy of the world,” she wrote. “The AAUP continues to stand for those values and leaves FIRE, its associates and funders, to reckon with what will, hopefully, be the judgment of history.”
Asked about the column, Morey told The Chronicle that “if the AAUP is making unprecedented departures from its founding commitments, it shouldn’t be surprised to receive unprecedented criticism.”
She added: “We simply call the threats as we see them. Would much rather have the AAUP back as a trusty ally. Hoping for precedented times ahead.”
Then Greg Lukianoff, FIRE’s president and chief executive, who has grown increasingly disgruntled about the association over the past few years, stepped in with a prolonged, scathing essay about the AAUP’s downfall.
The AAUP, Lukianoff wrote, has “gone from being principled (if slow and plodding) defenders of academic freedom to increasingly partisan critics of freedom of speech and the First Amendment — taking institutional positions that directly threaten academic freedom.”
Lukianoff also touted FIRE as the association’s “most effective competitor” in defending academic freedom. He denied criticisms that the foundation was biased toward conservatives, and listed a half dozen instances in which the association never “lifted a finger” to address infractions of speech that “did not fit the politics of the new AAUP.”
The post’s subtitle reads: “Before accusing FIRE of dishonesty, partisanship, and ideological capture, they should really look in the mirror.”
The feud has quieted in recent weeks, but Nelson, the former AAUP president turned critic, said there’s an existential question at its center that remains unanswered: “What is the AAUP for?”
“Is it for a political commitment to the guiding principles of the academy?” he said. “Or is it for activism in favor of the causes that AAUP members may well support?”
The question is timely as higher ed finds itself increasingly playing in a politicized arena. College leaders have been mulling over whether to adopt institutional-neutrality policies, many of which were put in place after the Hamas attacks on October 7 and the beginning of the war in Gaza. The AAUP, meanwhile, must figure out how to stand up for a faculty that’s less protected from institutional and political whims.
Wolfson told The Chronicle that the AAUP presidency “is not a neutral position” in the current political climate, particularly in the face of Trump’s return to office and ongoing Republican-led efforts to restrict what is taught in classrooms.
Trump has floated punishing colleges that fail to protect Jewish students and deporting “pro-Hamas radicals,” advocated for a crackdown on “left-wing indoctrination” on campuses, and promised to wield the accreditation system as a lever to change campus policies.
“There is no way we are being neutral in the face of that,” Wolfson said. “If we don’t fight back, they will demolish higher education as we know it.”
On that point, some of Wolfson’s critics agree.
Lukianoff said that Wolfson’s statement about Trump was “not a big deal” and that he was “annoyed” by his colleagues’ criticisms of it.
“Academia should probably be concerned about some of the things that the Trump administration has in store,” he said. “FIRE is ready to fight the administration if it does some of its worst ideas.”
Amna Khalid, a history professor at Carleton College, in Minnesota, who frequently writes about academic freedom, said that she thinks Trump’s return to office is a threat to academic freedom, but it was “unnecessary” for Wolfson to make a statement about it.
“We’re not fools,” Khalid said. “We can all see what’s happening. We get that everything is ‘small P’ political. No one’s asking the AAUP to be a neutral organization, but there’s a difference between being a neutral and a nonpartisan organization.”
Khalid said that the academy needs to take a “cold, hard look” at how well-intentioned actions and statements like Wolfson’s post-election rallying call can inadvertently threaten academic freedom.
“But I don’t see it as being possible in this environment where the AAUP, which has been the stalwart of academic freedom, is becoming ideological,” she said. What’s needed is for both sides to calm down “and recognize that higher education is not a political football.”
