Colleges are entering what is likely to be their greatest crisis since the McCarthy period. We have lost public confidence, and the Trump administration has made clear that business as usual is no longer an option. Winter is coming.
Instead of rising to meet the challenge, the organization nominally committed to defending us has chosen to double down on some of the very policies that have attracted so much hostility to higher education. In so doing, the venerable American Association of University Professors — founded over a century ago to defend academic freedom — is putting us all at grave risk.
The past several months have seen a series of confused reports by the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. Each takes a particular policy and defines it to be consistent with academic freedom, if conducted in a particular way. In each case, the actual facts are elided. The reports are tellingly silent on how the policies they insist are compatible with academic freedom have in fact been deployed. And each emphasizes “shared governance” as a way of authorizing practices that are in fact highly contestable — and routinely in significant tension with academic freedom.
The first salvo came last summer, when the committee issued a statement legitimating academic boycotts, reversing a prior position from 2006 that had declared systemic boycotts to be incompatible with academic freedom because they limit the capacity of scholars to collaborate with whomever they choose. That had been a sensible position. But the new iteration of Committee A suggested that academic boycotts were a “legitimate tactic” and were acceptable against colleges that had themselves violated academic freedom. A bitter debate about Israel is the barely veiled subtext. Whatever the proponents of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions movement say about it being limited to institutions and not individuals, it has led to hundreds of cancellations of collaborations with and invitations to individual Israeli scholars, both Arab and Jewish, at a time when that country’s democracy is in deep trouble. In other words, the AAUP has endorsed a practice that interferes on the ground with the academic freedom of individual scholars — precisely the outcome the prior committee had foreseen — while claiming to be neutral on the specific issue of Israel.
The organization nominally committed to defending us has chosen to double down on some of the very policies that have attracted so much hostility to higher education.
Next, in October, the AAUP blessed diversity statements as compatible with academic freedom. Mandatory diversity statements are in fact orthogonal to academic freedom, as they do not concern research or teaching. Faculty are divided on their use: Some view them as providing mechanisms to enhance racial diversity among the faculty without running afoul of the law, while others see them as devices to ensure ideological homogeneity. There is significant concern about their legality. The AAUP affirmatively defends them: “Meaningful DEI faculty work,” the organization says, “should be evaluated as part of the core faculty duties of teaching, research, and professional service.” It is hard to imagine that any college receiving federal funds will be able to sustain this posture over the next month, much less the next four years. No leader should have to fight for an already controversial enterprise, one essentially unrelated to academic freedom, when the academic enterprise is under existential threat.
Now comes a third statement, this one adopted in January: “On Institutional Neutrality.” Committee A unhelpfully declares that institutional neutrality is “neither a necessary condition for academic freedom nor categorically incompatible with it.” The main feature of its analysis is a rejection of the policies of the University of Chicago. But the statement contains several mischaracterizations, including a grave misunderstanding of academic freedom itself.
The AAUP starts with the Kalven Report of 1967, whose authors it criticizes for referring to a “tradition it helped to invent.” But the report goes on to acknowledge, as Harry Kalven and his colleagues understood, that the idea of institutional neutrality was part of a tradition at Chicago, having been first articulated under the leadership of William Rainey Harper in 1900. Harper, the AAUP argues, adopted institutional neutrality as a defensive and pragmatic policy in the face of donor pressure. But the report elides the critical fact that — 14 years before the founding of the AAUP and more than two decades before the United States Supreme Court began to develop modern free-speech law — Harper’s statement guaranteed freedom of speech for scholars. Surely Harper (after some early missteps of his own) should be celebrated as a great advocate of academic freedom. He clearly conceived of institutional neutrality as helping to secure it.
The Kalven Report does not directly address academic freedom, but it conceives of institutional silence as being conducive to individual scholars pursuing truth. As it famously says, “[t]he instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.” One thing this conception clearly precludes is the now-popular practice of departmental statements on extramural matters. Such a restriction, Committee A tells us, “potentially deprives society of the collective voice of experts in the fields most relevant to the controversy at hand and constitutes an internal restraint on academic freedom.” The AAUP therefore defends collective statements as an exercise of academic freedom.
Here is the key difference between the AAUP and the University of Chicago. The university’s 1970 Shils Report defines academic freedom, which is a function of disciplinary expertise, as “the freedom of the individual to investigate, publish, and teach in accordance with his intellectual convictions.” The AAUP, conversely, conceives of academic freedom as allowing collective units within the university to adopt, by majoritarian vote, policies and statements on external issues, so long as those statements are arrived at in the name of “properly shared governance.” As even Committee A acknowledges, this practice has the obvious ability to intimidate junior members of the department. It certainly disincentivizes inquiry on the issues in question. It also invites capacious claims of expertise. Nothing, of course, prevents groups of scholars from signing collective statements on anything. But departments are not bearers of academic-freedom rights. When departmental power is deployed to establish orthodoxies, it inevitably disincentivizes dissent and undermines individual inquiry.
The Kalven Report is not hostile to the “shared governance” that is the committee’s mantra in justifying the various practices it defends. Indeed, the report embodied shared governance, produced as it was by a committee of distinguished scholars, rather than being a top-down command. It would not restrict departmental statements on matters related to internal governance or the educational mission of colleges. But it does not conflate shared governance with the collective dimension of academic freedom, which concerns the ability of colleges and disciplines to make academic decisions on the basis of academic merit. Shared governance is helpful for securing such collective freedom, but it should not serve as a tool for majorities to place an official stamp on ongoing political debates.
On divestment, the AAUP correctly notes that “[n]o decision concerning a university’s investment strategy counts as neutral,” and so the practice has an only limited relationship to academic freedom. It reiterates an earlier AAUP decision calling for colleges to be “responsible” for how they manage their investments, only adding that they should do so in consideration of “their impact on academic freedom and inclusion within the university community.” Of course, the ubiquitous “shared governance” is required. When feasible, considering investment impact on academic freedom is a good idea. There is no principled reason faculty cannot opine on investment decisions, though another AAUP document, the 1966 “Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities,” suggests that decisions ought to rest with the trustees.
When departmental power is deployed to establish orthodoxies, it inevitably disincentivizes dissent and undermines individual inquiry.
Finally, the AAUP turns to protest. “(I)t is hardly neutral,” the committee tells us, “to assume that protest is inherently inconsistent with the university’s mission.” (Interestingly, despite its apparently deep research into the history of the University of Chicago, Committee A makes no mention of the 2014 “Report of the Ad Hoc Committtee on Protest and Dissent,” which states unequivocally that “dissent and protest are integral to the life of the University.”) I have not encountered a claim by any college that protests are to be restricted in the name of institutional neutrality per se, but presumably the committee has found such a claim or else would not conflate the issues by bringing protest into its statement.
The real concern seems to be with time, place, and manner restrictions used to limit encampments, which do not relate to academic freedom directly. Such restrictions are required by the First Amendment to be content-neutral, and many private colleges apply similar rules. The AAUP suggests that the rules adopted in response to the recent encampments were not content-neutral, and thus the ideal of neutrality is a sham.
We cannot know in the abstract whether rules are being applied neutrally, but that surely must be the ideal. It is true that many of the rules adopted after the Gaza protests of 2024 are overbroad and restrict protest more than they ought to. But the freedom to protest, like free speech generally, is not academic freedom, and rests on a totally different rationale. It is therefore odd for the AAUP not to grapple with the possibility that encampments might disrupt the life of the university, interfering with people’s ability to learn and hear from who they want to.
The Kalven Report warns us that higher education should not become a “second-rate political force.” But the AAUP itself has become a third-rate defender of academic freedom against a powerful enemy. Rather than focusing on the academic freedom of the individual scholar, Committee A emphasizes collective academic freedom, which it conflates with “shared governance.” It offers us a vision of higher education in which departments promiscuously opine on politics, diversity screening is imposed in hiring and promotion, and unlimited encampments have the warrant of academic freedom. Let’s see how that works out. In our moment of crisis, we need principled leaders able to navigate the storm — and to defend real academic freedom.
