The AAUP Has Always Defended Academic Freedom. We Still Do.

Since its founding, in 1915, the American Association of University Professors has been the most prominent guardian of academic freedom for faculty members and students, defending that freedom against threats that range from political interference in higher education to the exploitation of contingent academic labor. Yet the former AAUP president Cary Nelson alleges that the AAUP has somehow destroyed its “hundred-year defense of academic freedom” with a single act: the adoption of its recent “Statement on Academic Boycotts.” Others, like Jeffrey Sachs, lament that they are “not quite certain what the policy means” and that, “even worse, the AAUP doesn’t seem to know either.” The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has reiterated its opposition to academic boycotts as “a threat to academic freedom.”

Criticism of the AAUP and its new statement proceed from the premise that its 2006 report “On Academic Boycotts,” which elaborated on a brief 2005 statement opposing academic boycotts, was noncontroversial, unambiguous, and fully up to the task of securing academic freedom for all faculty members and students. It was not.

Further Reading

• The AAUP Abandons Academic Freedom
• The AAUP’s Incoherent New Boycott Policy
• The AAUP Is Right. Supporting Boycotts Is Academic Freedom.

Written and approved by the association’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure and adopted by the AAUP’s national Council, the new statement finds that academic boycotts “can be considered legitimate tactical responses to conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education.” The statement does not advocate for academic boycotts generally or support any existing academic boycott specifically. Instead, it holds that “individual faculty members and students should be free to weigh, assess, and debate the specific circumstances giving rise to calls for systematic academic boycotts and to make their own choices regarding their participation in them.” The statement also stresses that while “faculty members’ choices to support or oppose academic boycotts … may be criticized and debated, faculty members and students should not face institutional or governmental censorship or discipline for participating in academic boycotts, for declining to do so, or for criticizing and debating the choices of those with whom they disagree.” The new statement does not speak to boycotts aimed at anything other than “institutions of higher education that themselves violate academic freedom or the fundamental rights upon which academic freedom depends.”

The new statement supersedes Committee A’s 2005 statement and the 2006 report. The report categorically opposed as violations of academic freedom what it called a “systematic academic boycott.” Committee A initiated an examination of that prior policy due to a contradiction at its very core. The 2006 report recognized “the right of individual faculty members or groups of academics not to cooperate with other individual faculty members or academic institutions with whom or with which they disagree,” but categorically opposed “noncooperation … [in] the form of … systematic academic boycott” as a threat to “the principles of free expression and communication on which we collectively depend.”

The new statement addresses the core analytical and practical tension within the 2006 report. How is the protection of “groups of academics” who deny cooperation in some unspecified collective manner meaningfully distinct from systematic academic boycotts, the alleged death knell of “free exchange”? The purported distance between the two forms of collective action is a recent, incoherent imposition on what had been the AAUP’s nearly hundred-year official silence on academic boycotts. Far from a longstanding or foundational concern, the issue was not formally considered by the association until 2005. In the years since, the AAUP’s position has proved controversial, and one of the 2006 report’s authors, the former Committee A chair Joan Wallach Scott, has publicly denounced it.

You would not know this from reading Nelson, who insists on the timelessness of a report that isn’t even old enough to drink. You would not even walk away with a serviceable account of the new statement’s content. But even measured and careful critiques often avoid directly grappling with the substance of the new statement and its rationale: to recognize 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.”

There are real principles at stake in these omissions. And pulling back from the rhetoric makes clear that criticisms of the new policy often share two fundamental confusions about academic freedom. The first fails to appreciate the relationship between the individual and collective dimensions of academic freedom. The second could be summed up in the following question: Who is the subject of academic freedom?

Academic freedom protects the rights of faculty members to pursue and discuss all relevant matters in the classroom; to explore all avenues of scholarship, research, and creative expression; and to speak or write on matters of public concern as well as on matters related to professional duties and the governance of colleges and universities. Central to this understanding of academic freedom is the ability of the faculty to engage in collective decision-making through appropriate democratic processes.

Faculty members possess academic freedom as individuals and as the faculty — as a collective, decision-making body. The AAUP’s new “Statement on Academic Boycotts” recognizes the collective and individual rights of faculty members to decide democratically to support a systematic academic boycott as long as that boycott does not “involve any political or religious litmus tests [or] target individual scholars and teachers engaged in ordinary academic practices, such as publishing scholarship, delivering lectures and conference presentations, or participating in research collaborations.” The faculty’s collective decision-making does not automatically violate an individual’s academic freedom, generally, and in the case of academic boycotts specifically, we further stipulate that individuals should retain the ability to participate or not in the collective decision with impunity. There is and should be no academic-boycott police.

Still, Sachs is correct that “not everyone can be accommodated” under the AAUP’s new policy. But he is wrong to imply that they were under the old one. For example, Sachs raises the question of whether, under the new statement, a faculty member could ethically refuse to write a letter of recommendation or “submit materials” for a student to study at a particular university. This is not a new question. The same issue arose — and Sachs cites an example — while the previous policy was in place. While divisive debates continue about whether a refusal to write a letter of recommendation is an exercise of academic freedom, under both policies there are strong arguments that the refusal to write a letter of recommendation is protected when ethical concerns motivate the faculty member. The same is true for a department’s or a university’s decision to suspend a study-abroad program at a boycotted university. While such decisions are consistent with the new policy, even before the AAUP adopted the new statement, universities had chosen to cancel or suspend certain study-abroad programs for ethical reasons. What allows critics to ignore this history?

Perhaps because doing otherwise would require them to recognize that these issues are not a unique feature of either the current statement or academic boycotts in general. While ethical choices, including those in support of a systematic academic boycott, do have consequences for individuals and institutions, academic boycotts do not inevitably infringe on academic freedom in ways that exceed the risks of other forms of collective action that faculty members and students could legitimately choose to undertake. For example, while there are differences between a solidarity action like an academic boycott and the local decision to strike on an individual campus, if the point is to assess how academic freedom fares under various actions, then the difference between a solidarity action and a labor action might not be as germane as we’ve been led to believe. In an economic strike, which the AAUP has consistently viewed as a legitimate tactic, individual choices to refuse to engage with the university employer result in canceled classes; the cessation of administrative labor, including the writing of letters of recommendation; lab shutdowns; and canceled visits by invited speakers.

Economic strikes and academic boycotts are intended to have consequences. Both place pressure on the institution to comply with demands, whether those are economic demands such as paying a living wage to the workers on strike or demands that a university provide fundamental rights such as academic freedom or physical security for all individuals associated with or seeking access to it.

Yet in the history of the AAUP, no other form of collective action has received the same scrutiny and categorical dismissal as academic boycotts. Academic boycotts, it seems, cannot be thought about apart from the polarizing geopolitics of Palestine and Israel — the context that spurred the AAUP’s 2006 report. Committee A reconsidered the question of academic boycotts to ensure that academic boycotts as a tactic are not overwhelmed by politics and evaluated differently in AAUP policy than other collective tactics that faculty members and students might adopt.

The extreme politicization of academic boycotts, abetted by the 2006 report, has fed the temptation to promote a categorical “no” to them as an antidote to, in Nelson’s words, the “Manichean notion that Palestinians are but a force for good and Israelis a force for evil.” This has resulted in severe violations of academic freedom, where, for example, faculty and student senates’ democratically determined policy has been summarily dismissed, rather than honored or debated. Nelson’s and others’ categorical opposition to academic boycotts replicates the polarized thinking that pits a people against a people, pulling our focus away from where it should be: on “conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education.”

How is academic freedom not harmed and the advancement of knowledge not stalled when scholars are imprisoned or murdered for their beliefs and associations or when universities are razed? What does a commitment to the free exchange of knowledge and ideas actually mean in that context?

The AAUP’s previous policy essentially ignored, if not actively suppressed, such questions. For example, how do we weigh claims to academic freedom — the loss of a study-abroad program, for instance — against the slow or rapid destruction of systems of learning and the people who would teach and learn within them? There is no right to a study-abroad program, much less to one in a particular country or location. How does that alleged infringement by absence compare with the arrest and imprisonment of scholars based on the subjects of their research or their political activity? And speaking of absences, how does one create a study-abroad program or host a joint conference with a university that no longer exists? How, to flip Sachs’s concern, could a university “facilitate [a] partnership” between its faculty and an imprisoned faculty member in another country? What about a dead one? Or even a department purged in the name of “anti-cancel culture”? Where is the clamor and outrage over what should have been possible but can no longer be ours to lose? What of our colleagues who can’t return to their countries of origin, much less host a conference there? A pious emphasis on an abstraction — “the free exchange of knowledge” — means little if we do not admit to the many ways that such exchange may be compromised.

Committee A reconsidered the 2006 report in order to expand choice, to invite more debate, more dialogue in academic discussions, in unions, in chapter meetings, and in organizing campaigns about what tactics might best push against the repressions — multiple, global — of the moment. Again, the goal of the AAUP is not to promote or discount boycotts. The current statement is clear: “the decision to participate in an academic boycott should be situationally sensitive and consider the full range of alternative tactics available to achieve the desired goals.”

The goal of the AAUP, however, is to further the ability of its members to engage in reasoned debate and ultimately to further academic freedom for all — just as we do and have always done with all of our policy, advocacy, and collective-bargaining work. Debate and discussion are appropriate and necessary components of shared governance, including debates and votes on proposals such as a faculty senate’s call for an academic boycott, a department’s support of an academic boycott called by a disciplinary organization, or consideration of proposals describing the implementation of support for an academic boycott.

As Nelson Mandela told the African National Congress: “In some cases … it might be correct to boycott, and in others it might be unwise and dangerous. In still other cases another weapon of political struggle might be preferred. A demonstration, a protest march, a strike, or civil disobedience might be resorted to, all depending on the actual conditions at the given time.”

Both the 2006 report and the 2024 statement cite that quotation approvingly. Cary Nelson nonetheless thinks otherwise. Between the two Nelsons, the AAUP sides with Mandela.