Anti-Israel Politics Trump Academic Freedom Under AAUP Professor Association’s New President
Last August, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) announced its newfound respect for a policy it had long ago considered and rejected: anti-Israel boycotts. That’s not what they called them, of course. The faculty group’s statement carefully avoided any reference to Israel, Palestine, or the ongoing war with Hamas.
It was just that, as the AAUP academic-freedom committee chair Rana Jaleel put it, “in the context of Israel and Gaza,” the AAUP had reached a better understanding of academic boycotts—measures they had opposed for nearly 20 years as assaults on the free exchange of ideas. Actually, Jaleel explained, it was the old policy of no boycotts that was the problem: It had “been reportedly used to squelch academic freedom.”
Now it’s fixed: Under AAUP’s new policy, “academic boycotts are not in themselves violations of academic freedom.” They “can be considered legitimate tactical responses to conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education.” While the AAUP stopped short of endorsing a boycott of Israeli universities or the BDS (Boycott, Divest, and Sanction) movement, I wrote last summer that it might just be a matter of time until it crossed that line.
That time came last month, when AAUP’s Rutgers chapter joined with the school’s Adjunct Faculty Union and—citing the new AAUP policy—approved the group’s first BDS resolution. Newly elected national AAUP president Todd Wolfson announced the victory—because he’s also chapter president of the Rutgers AAUP-AFT. [Note: The Rutgers AAUP-AFT and the Adjunct Faculty Union X posts went private, reportedly after facing backlash over the resolution.]
The timing was no coincidence, as Professor Jacobson noted at the time on X:
Anti-Israel faculty activists have captured and damaged the integrity of the organization that once was the protector of academic freedom.
And it was no surprise:
Leading the AAUP’s Anti-Zionist Transformation
Wolfson won the election for the group’s national president in a landslide last June. Professor, union activist, and a founding member of the Rutgers chapter of Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP), he was the perfect candidate to lead today’s AAUP in the direction it was already going: hard left and anti-Israel.
Established in 1915 to guard academic freedom and tenure, the AAUP is now for all practical purposes a progressive labor union. In 2022, the national AAUP joined the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Many of its local university chapters, including the Rutgers AAUP, are also affiliated with the AFT.
It’s part of a national trend we observed here, where university faculty and graduate student groups affiliate with broad-based national labor unions, frequently radical groups known for their anti-Israel activism. Prof. Jacobson has warned that these new alliances raise concerns of a renewed BDS effort on college campuses. That’s exactly what happened at the AAUP. The faculty group began walking back its longstanding opposition to the BDS movement in 2018 and 2022—the year it combined collective bargaining forces with the AFT.
Last February 2024, the AAUP took a major stand against the Jewish state when it voted to join with a group of national labor unions calling for an immediate ceasefire in “Israel and Palestine.”
The ceasefire vote was a departure from the group’s time-honored nonpartisanship. Prof. Cary Nelson, AAUP president from 2006 to 2012, said the AAUP had been “slowly transforming itself into an anti-Zionist organization since 2015.” But its call for a ceasefire in Gaza marked the first time the AAUP had “actually abandoned its commitment to political neutrality and adopted what amounts to a foreign policy.”
The anti-Zionist transformation of the AAUP is only accelerating under Wolfson, who told Inside Higher Ed he wants to make the scholarly group a “fighting organization.” The recent Rutgers faculty union vote to divest from the “genocide in Gaza” and cut ties with Tel Aviv University was an early win in that fighting. But it’s just one of “many fights ahead,” Wolfson wrote in a letter with Bryan Sacks of the Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union, announcing the December victory. They signed off in solidarity, “Together we fight, together we win!”
The problem is, engaging in anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian activism undermines the group’s mission. As Nelson argues, “You can’t defend neutral principles and academic freedom at the same time that you take contested political positions.” He believes Wolfson and the current leadership are going to “kill off the AAUP.”
While a professor in the Rutgers media department, Wolfson has made his mark leading the school’s AAUP-AFT chapter since 2019. In 2023, he organized the first faculty strike in Rutgers’ over 250-year history. It was a huge success for the three unions he led, who won significant pay increases for adjunct faculty and grad students.
But Wolfson’s struggle isn’t limited merely to traditional trade union goals. In 2023, he co-founded the Rutgers FJP, a faculty spinoff of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). It’s one of over 100 chapters that sprung up at universities after the October 7 Hamas massacre with the express purpose of promoting anti-Israel boycotts, according to a recent report by AMCHA Initiative, a campus antisemitism watchdog group.
The Rutgers FJP celebrated the faculty union BDS win:
Wolfson stood with Palestine last year, “as a Jew,” during the anti-Israel campus protests at Rutgers. “Antisemitism’s been weaponized — weaponized! — to stop people from fighting to stop an unjust war,” he told the New Jersey Monitor, adding that he’s Jewish.
He accused Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu of murder in Gaza:
And he accused Israel of conducting its own “BDS” campaign:
Continuing along this line last month, Wolfson defended Columbia law Professor Katherine Franke, a longtime pro-Palestinian activist and BDS supporter. According to a detailed investigation in The Chronicle, Franke was found to have harassed Israeli students on the basis of national origin. Though she was not fired, she did retire early and registered her protest at the AAUP’s Academe blog.
Wolfson called her “firing” “shameful” and a “repression of pro-Palestinian speech”:
Franke’s pro-Palestinian comments reportedly encouraged the chaos that ensued at Columbia’s anti-Israel protests—“If there’s anything we try to teach you,” she says in this video, “it’s that”:
Even the Biden White House agreed there was nothing peaceful about the violent takeover. Nonetheless, the AAUP decried the “crackdown on peaceful dissent” at the Columbia campus uprisings and at other schools throughout the country. When Columbia finally called in law enforcement to remove the agitators, the campus AAUP chapter condemned the “horrific police attack on our students.”
Similarly, at Rutgers, Wolfson’s chapter AAUP issued a statement defending the pro-Palestine encampments. While they avoided taking a position on their demands, faculty were “prepared to ‘put [their] bodies on the line’ and get arrested to protect students’ right to protest,” Wolfson told the New Jersey Monitor.
To be clear, he was referring to the right to make statements like “Free Palestine. Divest Now,” “F**k colonialism,” and “Globalize the Intifada” —a euphemistic call for Jewish genocide:
The Rutgers’ SJP organized the campus protests that forced the university to postpone over 28 exams for more than 1,000 students. When Rutgers later suspended the SJP over the disturbances, Wolfson’s AAUP chapter ironically condemned the school for taking sides in the Gaza conflict as an attempt to suppress academic freedom.
Alienating Members and Betraying the Group’s Mission
But to Rutgers Professor Jessica Methot, the real assault on academic freedom is the AAUP’s anti-Israel activism. It’s alienating Jewish faculty who don’t want to pay dues to fund the union’s pro-Hamas teach-ins:
And it’s driving away professors like Rutgers’ Richard Elbright, who cancelled his membership over the group’s mission failure:
Aside from alienating its members, pitting faculty against faculty, turning Jew against Jew, and destroying its own credibility—whatever the AAUP has achieved so far under Wolfson, it’s not a boycott. Its chapter’s “calls” for boycotting Israel are not binding on Rutgers leadership. Nor should they be, seeing how they run afoul of New Jersey law prohibing the state from doing business with entities that boycott Israel. In fact, boycotting Israel is prohibited in many states, a concern that recently prompted the Modern Language Association to decline a vote on BDS, citing the risk of a financial hit under anti-BDS laws. That may also explain why at Rutgers last year, then-president Jonathan Holloway pledged (before pro-Hamas protesters ran him out of the room) not to cave to student demands to boycott Israel.
It’s a point that’s often lost in the fray: Unless the university actually divests, as I wrote here, BDS resolutions are wins on paper, little more. They’re good for publicity, virtue signaling to the base, and demoralizing Israel supporters—perhaps—but all at the cost of radicalizing the once-esteemed AAUP away from the academic freedom it was founded to protect.
Professor Wolfson has not responded to our request for comment.
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