2024 AAUP In the News

“Regardless of their intent, the UNT administration conducted a campaign of censorship of content in more than 200 courses,” said Brian Evans, president of the Texas Conference of the American Association of University Professors. “It’s censoring what topics students can discuss and think critically about. In order for students to have the freedom to learn, faculty need to have the freedom to teach.”

“The unilateral and secretive decision-making that produced these policies is indicative of Penn’s unaccountable system of governance,” the Penn chapter of the AAUP said. “It underscores the need for faculty, staff, and students to work together to create legitimate, transparent, and democratic forms of decision-making. Those of us now subject to these rules had no part in creating them.”

“I decided to run for president of AAUP because I felt like we need to be able to respond to this,” Wolfson said. “We need to be able to fight back. There may have been a time when it was OK for us to pretend like we were in the ivory tower and the outside world didn’t matter. This is not that time; 2024 is not that time.”

“We have to, as faculty, organize and demand the sort of shared governance that gives us a right to review and challenge these policies,” said Todd Wolfson, a journalism and media studies professor at Rutgers University and the president of the American Association of University Professors. “They’re not made by people coming out of the academic arm of our institutions.”

“The most powerful response to the university administration’s actions is the collective power of organizations opposing the university’s actions,” she said. “When we act collectively to push back, then the university is in a position to have to respond to us. That kind of collective solidarity is essential to assert academic freedom, freedom of expression, rights of job security, [and] respect for governance.” - Risa Lieberwitz, professor of labor and employment law at Cornell and president of Cornell's AAUP chapter.

“Workers were asked to dream big for PSU this year,” PSU AAUP president Emily Ford said. “I don’t understand how workers, how the faculty can dream big when they might not have a job in June.”

“This is the first case that we’ve seen,” said Anita Levy, senior program officer at the AAUP, an organization that advocates for faculty rights and academic freedom and seeks to hold higher education institutions accountable when standards are violated. “The apparent violations of her academic freedom are quite egregious, especially because they appear to primarily involve her posts on social media, what we would call her extramural speech.”

“We are taking this case seriously.”

Florida professors are still eyeing jobs in other states, and those who remain say it’s getting harder to fill vacant positions at their universities, according to a recent survey of faculty in Southern states administered by several state conferences of the AAUP.

A 2023 AAUP report found that 68% of all college and university faculty were on contingent appointments in 2021, compared to 47% in 1987. Among faculty with full-time appointments, 24% held tenure in 2021, a substantial decrease from 1987 when 39% were tenured. As the conversion from tenure-track faculty to contingent instructors continues, the rate of faculty unionization can be expected to increase as well.

“We are seeing multiple schools adopting new restrictions on speech without respecting governance procedures. They will discourage protests, have a chilling effect on freedom of speech and threaten harsh sanctions without due process.”

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.

It is Nelson, not the AAUP, who has politicized the question of academic freedom by objecting to its extension to faculty and students who, for principled reasons, might support academic boycotts in the name of those systematically denied it. Careful, thoughtful AAUP policy is still “the gold standard for academic freedom.” The alternative Cary Nelson offers — a selective principle, an exclusionary practice, driven by a hardline Zionism — is a corruption of that enduring standard.

“By suppressing academic freedom and the free speech rights of students and faculty and inviting punitive discipline and a brutal police crackdown on student protests at Columbia, Shafik failed to protect basic tenets of higher education and capitulated to a new McCarthyist witch hunt against the Academy,” AAUP President Todd Wolfson said Thursday. “This is her legacy.”

The AAUP issued a statement  condemning “overly restrictive policies” that could discourage free expression. “Our colleges and universities should encourage, not suppress, open and vigorous dialogue and debate even on the most deeply held beliefs,” said the statement, adding that many policies were imposed without faculty input.

“I think right now we are seeing a resurgence of repression on campuses that we haven’t seen since the late 1960s,” said Risa Lieberwitz, a Cornell University professor of labor and employment law who serves as general counsel for the AAUP.

“This is extremely alarming for academic freedom,” said Anita Levy, a senior program officer in the AAUPs’ Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure and Governance. Faculty members who lack tenure “teach in precarious positions,” she said, and don’t “have economic security and may feel that they need to either self-censor or revise their curricula or their teaching methods.”

Todd Wolfson, president of the AAUP, called for greater transparency, including student, faculty and staff involvement.

“This should be an open, transparent process,” he said. “We don’t think Florida has done a good job with transparency. … No one knows if Ron DeSantis put some candidates on a dartboard and threw a dart.”

“We need [the new UF president] not to be a political hack who knows nothing about higher education,” he said. “If you don’t understand it, you don’t value it.”

For an industry that employs four million Americans and attempts to educate 15 million more, higher education is, strangely, routinely ignored in presidential elections. But there’s hope for 2024, though not for the best of reasons. IHE asked a range of higher ed leaders, thinkers, reformers and skeptics what they’d ask Biden, Trump or both candidates if CNN magically handed them the microphone.

Here are some of their sharpest questions: 

An attorney defending Florida's STOP WOKE Act argued that a state can “insist that professors not offer—or espouse, I should say, and endorse—viewpoints that are contrary to the state’s.”

But AAUP Risa Lieberwitz, general counsel for the AAUP, says: “the state of Florida is making an extreme argument about the First Amendment that would eliminate academic freedom completely in the classroom, and that is an argument without merit under the First Amendment.”

"What this sends is a very strong message that OU is going to do minimal and certainly doesn’t seem to have anybody’s back," Michael Givel, an OU professor and member of the OU chapter of the American Association of University Professors, said. 

"DEI, the words need to be reinstated. We’re engaging in cancel culture here. We need to reinstate all the programs that have been canceled."

“The message is that these politicians are entitled to have authority over what happens on a college campus,” said Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors. “And that’s just unacceptable in a free society. It’s really … political repression.”

Mulvey condemned antisemitism but said it is being weaponized by bad actors to delegitimize higher education as a pillar of democracy.

"Our goal on college campuses is free and open inquiry and debate. What we’ve seen is immediate silencing of speech, without any genuine attempt to talk to the students and understand the concerns that led to the protests, to think about and hear their demands. I’ve spent my entire career on college campuses, and this silencing of speech feels like a crisis of repression," said Irene Mulvey, AAUP president.

Despite the uphill battles to reach agreements on campuses, open dialogue with student protesters is what the American Association of University Professors has promoted as the best route forward in this heated moment, said Irene Mulvey, president of AAUP.

It’s one thing to see university presidents fail to defend academic freedom” in front of Congress, and it’s “quite harrowing to see that cowardice followed up by the sanctioning of police violence on campus," said Isaac Kamola, Director of the AAUP'd Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom.

Today, university leaders are twisting themselves in knots to appease angry donors and legislators. But when Columbia University President Minouche Shafik called in the NYPD to quell protests, she was met with a firm rebuke from the American Association of University Professors.

“Wednesday, before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, President Shafik threw academic freedom and Columbia University faculty under the bus instead of providing what higher education and democracy require: a robust defense of academic freedom and its essential protection of extramural speech,” AAUP President Dr. Irene Mulvey said.

At the hearing, Dr. Shafik divulged that two of the professors — Dr. Massad and Ms. Franke — were under investigation for making “discriminatory remarks,” and said that Dr. Abdou “will never work at Columbia again.” Such responses drew a sharp rebuke from some professors and the American Association of University Professors, which said she capitulated to political grandstanding and, in the process, violated established tenets of academic freedom.

“We are witnessing a new strain of McCarthyism in the U.S. where instead of going after Hollywood, it is professors and higher education that are under attack,” said AAUP president Irene Mulvey. “Like the original McCarthyism, people’s lives are being upended, their careers are being ruined, and they are losing their livelihoods based on narratives being pushed to further a political agenda that have no basis in reality.”

Dr. Brian Evans, the interim president of the Texas Conference of the AAUP, said he’s heard from at least 66 UT faculty members who said they received a notice of termination. He thinks that number could grow. "They lost staff who provided the academic advising, the scholarships, connections with internships, counseling, health services, food pantries, and ways to connect with other students," said Evans.

“If it’s being done through an anonymous complaint process, then that indicates to me that it’s a political hit job,” said Isaac Kamola, director of the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom at the American Association of University Professors.  “It’s a mockery of academic peer review.” An allegation of plagiarism “needs to be evaluated outside of a right-wing ecosystem that is committed to destroying the careers of Black scholars,” he said.

Alice Pawley, a professor of engineering education at Purdue University and president of the univeritity's AAUP chapter, said that many faculty members in Indiana were angered by the new restrictions, and that “nobody trusts that this is actually going to be fairly applied.” Many felt discouraged about their job security, believing it would be at the mercy of trustees who are not experts in their fields and would be making decisions on the basis of highly subjective criteria.

The bill “seems to be deeply problematic; it assigns to the Board of Regents powers that it really should have delegated to faculty,” said Mark Criley, a senior program officer for the American Association of University Professors’ Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance. A faculty member’s right to assign the grades he or she believes a student deserves is considered a pillar of academic freedom.

"It is a blank check to fire any faculty member for any reason, at any time, regardless of tenure. I think people find that hard to believe, because it is so shocking and so radical and so un-American, but that is what the text says.”

Since 1915 and urgently since Oct. 7, the A.A.U.P. has advocated a robust concept of academic freedom. We have urged administrators to provide an environment in which no voices are silenced, no ideas are suppressed, and the most deeply held beliefs are subject to challenge.

Jonathan Rees, president of CSU Pueblo's AAUP chapter, said his hope is that the survey convinces the administration to move faculty economic concerns way up the priority list. "If we explain how bad the problem is, then maybe we won't be the last thing they worry about when they are putting together next year's budget."

“These measures would severely constrain academic freedom,” says a joint statement by the Purdue at West Lafayette and Indiana University at Bloomington chapters of the AAUP. “The security imparted by tenure is the fundamental protection of academic freedom; its loss would make university positions in Indiana undesirable. Recruiting and retaining top faculty, who will always have alternatives, will no longer be possible.”

This strike at sociology is very on-brand for the Florida GOP. We know about DeSantis’ ongoing crusade to commandeer all leadership positions at New College of Florida. Elsewhere, a proverbial Florida Man (with the checkered past and absence of relevant credentials that such an identity entails) has been installed as the leader of South Florida State College. The American Association of University Professors chronicled this and other outrageous Sunshine State power grabs in a report so full of absurd details that it reads like a campus novel.

There is no more important place for colleges to spend their money than hiring the best instructors they can find and providing fair pay, benefits and reasonable working conditions.

“This is an anti-democratic attack unfolding, not just at Penn, but all across the country, including at public universities in Florida, in Texas, Ohio and beyond,” said Offner, the president of the university’s chapter of the AAUP, a professional faculty organization.

Penn, she said, had become “ground zero of a coordinated national assault on higher education, an assault organized by billionaires, lobbying organizations and politicians who would like to control what can be studied and taught in the United States.”

what makes the labor movement in higher ed different from the larger labor movement is that in addition to bread-and-butter issues, there’s always demands for academic freedom and often racial justice, equity issues, mental health issues, social justice issues,” Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors, told The Hill.

“Universities don’t exist to serve private interests. They are not tools for the business interests or political agendas of donors and trustees." - AAUP Penn president Amy Offner

"Given how quickly the focus of the people claiming to be concerned about antisemitism on our campuses shifted to plagerism, it certainly appears that the focus was never really about antisemitism and protecting students," Irene Mulvey, the president of the AAUP told Salon. "It's part of a long-running, well-funded effort to create a false narrative for the public that higher education is broken."

This plagiarism charge was never about integrity. “If the plagiarism accusations didn't stick, they would’ve dropped them and moved on to something else,” Irene Mulvey, President of the AAUP, told Salon.

There's something illegitimate about these accusations, mainly because of the way they were entered into the “public sphere,” she added. The unfairness of what happened to Gay is visible for everyone to see, but faculty of color have always navigated extra challenges in academia.

“It is creating a chilling effect on people of color and queer students and our allies who want to come to places like UT-Austin. Why would you come to an institution that makes you hide parts of yourself or does not give full dignity to all parts of yourself?”

The confusion and despair on campus is profound, said Karma Chavez, a UT Mexican American and Latina/o Studies professor and an executive committee member of the UT chapter of the AAUP.