If you’ve been following the decline and fall of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) at Legal Insurrection, you know the faculty group has been completely captured by left-wing activists. Founded in 1915 to guard academic freedom and tenure, the AAUP is now, for all practical purposes, an ultra-progressive labor union.
So May 1st was perfect timing for last week’s membership meeting. “I think we were all waiting for May Day,” said AAUP’s national president, Todd Wolfson, who led the program.
The video of the online conference is available on YouTube and embedded below, thanks to @thestustustudio’s outstanding investigative work. Stu also posted a great thread highlighting the speakers at the meeting here.
Wolfson was in his element last week as he introduced himself to the audience with his he/him pronouns, then guided the hour-long back-and-forth among staff and AAUP members across the country.
Wolfson is a professor at Rutgers, but at heart, he’s a union guy. He’s made his mark leading the school’s AAUP-AFT chapter since 2019. Notably, in 2023, he organized the first faculty strike in Rutgers’ over 250-year history. It was a huge success, as I wrote here.
He is also a founding member of the Rutgers chapter of Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP).
Shortly after his election in a landslide last year, Wolfson announced he wanted to make the AAUP a “fighting organization.”
And, as you would expect, the online meeting was “all about the fight”—against the Trump administration’s “authoritarian right-wing attack” on higher ed. The battlefront in that fight is shifting from Trump’s executive orders to the Republicans’ budget proposals in the fall, explained Mia McIver, the AAUP’s Executive Director.
The Republicans’ threatened $330 billion in budget cuts are not only attacks on higher ed and higher ed workers, McIver warned. They’re attacks on the working class: They’re going to make a college education “accessible only to the wealthy few”:
Wolfson agreed: “When Trump attacks higher ed, he attacks everybody’s imagination of having a better life.” [17:08]
So, with an eye toward the budget resolutions in the fall, he laid out a battle plan, including: lawfare, the fight at the ballot box, and countering the right-wing narrative. But most important of all, “taking it to the streets.” “We have to meet force with force.” “There’s a broad understanding,” Wolfson later concluded, “that we have to escalate our tactics.” [28:27]
Guest speaker Saquib Bhatti knows how to escalate. He’s Co-Executive Director of the Action Center on Race and the Economy (ACRE) and a key organizer of May Day Strong.
As Stu points out here, Bhatti doubled down on the meeting’s core theme: disruption. “We need to figure out how we’re actually making the actions more disruptive. So it’s not business as usual; it actually starts to hit them where it hurts,” Bhatti advised the group. [20:25]
Bhatti also knows how to do what leftists do best: tap into grievance. “People are fed up, angry and have had enough,” he said. “We need to develop the analysis … of who’s responsible for the pain that we’re suffering.” In other words, to exploit people’s worst sensibilities for our own political gain, we need to find someone on the right for them to blame for their unhappiness.
Wolfson loved the next guest speaker, Jessica Tang, president of AFT Massachusetts and a national vice president of the American Federation of Teachers. A leader of pre-K/12 organizing, Tang brought the “disruption” theme to life, joining the meeting from the middle of a street protest in Boston. “We need to have larger mass mobilization,” she urged as she stepped away from the crowd for a moment. “The way we fight back is by getting in the streets.” “We’re shutting down the streets in Boston here.” [26:14] Wolfson cheered her on: “Jessica, you’re the best! Now get back to that rally!”
Toward the end of the meeting, and to his credit, Wolfson opened the floor to Rutgers Professor Stanley Weiss, a longtime member who then and there announced his resignation over the AAUP’s radical turn: [46:00]
I’m very concerned with the radicalization of AAUP. … There are people who are now resigning from AAUP because of your radicalization. … Your incorporation of many of the pro-Hamas oriented organizations is misplaced. … Your bashing of Israel continually is misplaced. I don’t think it belongs as part of the AAUP program. And I have personally resigned effective today from being a member of AAUP here at our university despite my being a leader here and it’s all because of your leadership and that of your executive committee.
Wolfson listened politely but then shrugged Weiss off as an outlier: AAUP membership was growing “by leaps and bounds” he said, and its leadership had no intention of reversing course: “We are not standing down, we are stepping forward.” [47:00]
“Organizing and building our power, that’s how we win,” Wolfson said, emphasizing the need for a broad coalition. “Higher ed workers alone cannot protect against the attacks on higher ed.” [59:00] They need an “aligned strategy” that includes other sectors under threat: “our K-12 brothers and sisters,” “the May Day folks,” higher ed workers, federal workers—and yes, “the people standing up around Palestine.” You know, the ones who want to “globalize the Intifada“—a euphemistic call for Jewish genocide.
As the meeting drew to a close, it was obvious that Weiss’s protests over the faculty group’s mission failure had come far too little, far too late. Under Wolfson’s radical leadership, the AAUP doesn’t stand for anything anymore. It’s “a fighting organization”—fighting to perpetuate its own political power.
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