American Assoc. University Profs (AAUP) Threw Away Credibility To Become An Anti-Israel “Fighting Organization”
After our deep dive into anti-Israel activism at the American Association of University Professors earlier this year, this follow-up post was supposed to turn to the faculty group’s other progressive policies. It was supposed to be a fresh take on the AAUP, not another report on their obsession with the Jewish state.
However, the once-esteemed faculty group is making it hard to change the subject. The AAUP isn’t letting up on Israel; it’s just getting started. And those far-left policies aren’t a separate topic: They underlie the group’s anti-Zionist agenda—an agenda now unburdened by any commitment to neutrality, a core principle the AAUP officially rejected earlier this year.
No longer is the group limiting itself to performative policy statements like the one we covered here. It’s now promoting its own anti-Israel programming. And it’s jumping on the lawfare bandwagon against the White House, filing two federal complaints on the same day targeting the administration’s efforts to combat campus antisemitism. These developments all took place over the past month.
On March 6, the AAUP offered a “Scholasticide in Palestine” webinar to explore “Israeli attacks against Palestinian education.” The event came to light when a group of Jewish organizations called the faculty group out in a letter posted on X:
It was a nasty smear coming from the faculty group founded to defend fair-minded inquiry. “Scholasticide in Palestine” refers to the purported systematic destruction of the educational system in Gaza during the conflict with Hamas. There’s no evidence Israel intended to do that—but Hamas has been shown to embed their operations within school buildings and other civilian centers, leading to collateral damage, according to the Jewish groups.
“We note with dismay that this divisive event is taking place within a wider context of the AAUP being perceived as increasingly moving in a virulently anti-Israel direction,” the ADL letter says, pointing out that the event’s promotional material omits any reference to the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre in Israel that instigated the war in Gaza.
Such a one-sided presentation of the Gaza conflict, the letter states, undermines the AAUP’s mission to promote the free exchange of ideas.
But taking sides is exactly what AAUP President Todd Wolfson promised to do as soon as he took office last year when he told Inside Higher Ed he wanted to make the scholarly group a “fighting organization.”
In fact, it already was. Although it was 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 are also affiliated with the AFT.
The ultra-progressive faculty group has been taking partisan positions since last year, to name a few:
- In its first major departure from neutrality, the faculty organization voted to join with a group of national labor unions calling for an immediate ceasefire in “Israel and Palestine” in February 2024.
- Over the summer, the AAUP endorsed academic (read: anti-Israel) boycotts—measures they had opposed for nearly 20 years as assaults on the free exchange of ideas.
- As we wrote here, in December, the AAUP Rutgers chapter, led by AAUP President Todd Wolfson passed a resolution to divest “from the genocide in Gaza.”
- In October, the organization also endorsed the use of mandatory DEI statements in faculty hiring, even as the tide was turning against them, with many colleges ditching their DEI mandates.
The AAUP’s transformation into a full-fledged, anti-Israel “fighting organization” was a foregone conclusion by the time the group formally rejected institutional neutrality this January.
In a vaguely worded, mealymouthed statement, the AAUP takes seven single-spaced pages to “reaffirm” that “institutional neutrality is neither a necessary condition for academic freedom nor categorically incompatible with it”:
A university’s decision to speak, or not; to limit its departments or other units from speaking; to divest from investments that conflict with its mission; or to limit protest in order to promote other forms of speech are all choices that might either promote or inhibit academic freedom and thus must be made with an eye to those practical results, not to some empty conception of neutrality.
Whatever any of that means.
Echoing its endorsement of academic boycotts “in the context of Israel and Gaza”—and signaling to its base—the AAUP states that calls for institutional neutrality came “[i]n the wake of protests surrounding the war in Gaza.”
But while those protests prompted a growing list of schools to stay out of the fray by staying neutral, the AAUP doubled down, insisting that a neutrality commitment “is not some magic wand that conjures freedom.”
So then, what exactly is it? According to the AAUP’s deconstructionist logic, there is no such thing as neutrality.
That is the argument they make regarding divestment: “Whether a university accepts or rejects specific calls for divestment,” according to the AAUP, “it makes a substantive decision little different from its decision to issue a statement that reflects its values.”
In other words, not taking a stand on divestment is taking a stand on divestment. “No decision concerning a university’s investment strategy counts as neutral,” they say, rationalizing what the faculty group has been doing all along: taking political sides.
And the side they always take is the side against Israel.
The AAUP is now suing the government over its withholding of $400 million from Columbia for the school’s failure to protect its Jewish students during the terror campaign waged by anti-Israel protesters on its campus—a decision the AAUP recently condemned.
Prior to filing its complaint, on March 12, the AAUP protested the “illegal abduction” (i.e., arrest) of pro-Hamas activist Mahmoud Khalil by ICE over his leadership role in Columbia’s Apartheid Divest, the group behind Columbia’s anti-Israel protests, and which allegedly acted as Hamas’s propaganda arm, according to a recent lawsuit.
And now, Khalil has the AAUP on his side. At a press conference earlier this month, AAUP chapter Vice President Professor Michael Thaddeus claimed Khalil’s only offense was exercising his constitutional rights to free speech[15:51 – 19:26]:
But as Professor Jacobson points out, if your pro-Hamas protests are preventing students and faculty from getting to class, or taking over a building and trashing it, that’s not free speech.
Last week, the AAUP also sued the Trump administration over its plans to deport other terror-supporting noncitizens like Khalil. That threat violates their own free speech rights to engage with like-minded colleagues, they say in the court filing.
I had a brief showdown with them over it:
“Wholly inaccurate?” The AAUP didn’t seem too concerned about accuracy when it sponsored its “Scholasticide in Palestine” webinar:
I wasn’t looking for conflict, so I was relieved that our run-in on X didn’t last very long.
That’s because, for all their harping on “free speech,” when confronted with the facts, the AAUP had nothing to say:
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY