American Association of University Professors (AAUP) President Todd Wolfson: “No Weapons Should be Sent to Israel”

American Association of University Professors (AAUP) President Todd Wolfson: “No Weapons Should be Sent to Israel”

In an interview with Inside Higher Ed earlier this week, American Association of University Professors (AAUP) President Todd Wolfson made one thing clear: “No weapons should be sent to Israel.”

It was the only coherent policy position (not counting “college for all”) Wolfson articulated during the softball Q&A. The conversation was all about the fight—against Trump, of course, whose name came up 29 times, followed a distant second by Chris Rufo.

Trump’s “weaponization” of antisemitism under Title VI has put academic freedom under attack, said Wolfson. So the group’s focus is now “getting our people into the streets, fighting back.”

“We need to be able to militantly show how concerned we are.”

As a reminder, the AAUP used to be the gold standard for academic freedom, but now, for all practical purposes, it’s an ultra-progressive labor union. The scholarly organization historically stood firmly against academic boycotts as assaults on the free exchange of ideas, but that has changed as anti-Israel activists have captured its agenda.

In fact, from the moment he took office last year, Wolfson vowed to turn the once-esteemed group into a “fighting organization.” And the side it’s always fighting against is Israel, as I’ve written here:

• American Association of University Professors Capitulates To Anti-Israel BDS, No Longer Opposes Academic Boycotts
• Anti-Israel Politics Trump Academic Freedom Under AAUP Professor Association’s New President
• American Assoc. University Profs (AAUP) Threw Away Credibility To Become An Anti-Israel “Fighting Organization”
• Rutgers Professor Resigns From AAUP Over Radical Anti-Israel Activism
• Anti-Israel AAUP Leader Addresses ‘Comrades’ At Socialism 2025 Conference

By this spring, the AAUP’s “anti-Zionist transformation” was complete. The group was no longer limiting itself to performative policy statements like the one we covered last year here. It promoted its own anti-Israel programming—a “Scholasticide in Palestine” webinar to explore “Israeli attacks against Palestinian education.” And it jumped 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.

During this week’s interview, Wolfson talked about these recent tactics used by the AAUP to bash Israel in defense of its members’ academic freedom to bash Israel:

Q: You mentioned Palestine. What position, what action, if any, does national AAUP need to take on Israel and Palestine at this moment? 

A: We believe strongly that no weapons should be sent to Israel, at all. Not defensive or offensive, nothing.

What do we do in the U.S., where antisemitism has been used as a weapon, in many ways, by the Trump administration to bring universities to heel—and many times stripping out, or threatening to strip out, hundreds of millions of research dollars that often affect Jewish faculty members? Versus what our position should be on the conflict in the Middle East?

First and foremost, our job is to safeguard ourselves at home and to set a vision that aligns with what we’re trying to do in the United States. We need to stand up for academic freedom, for freedom of speech, for freedom of assembly for our students so they can protest the war—the genocide, excuse me—that’s taking place in Gaza.

We need to stand up to the weaponization of antisemitism in the Title VI process. And we need to make sure that we defend our members.

We think the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, which does not get involved with questions of the Israeli state at all, is a much more apt way of defining antisemitism.

The numbers of universities and faculty and university presidents [in Gaza] that have been killed and universities that have been destroyed in this war is mammoth. We are certainly educating our members on this concept of scholasticide. [*]

It seems pretty obvious that they are—but if, in fact, Israel is purposefully destroying the educational infrastructure, both K–12 and higher ed, of Palestine, and of Gaza, that stands against our values of academic freedom. And if that’s the case, and we can unify around that, then we will take a stand and call for an end to the scholasticide. [emphasis mine]

For Wolfson, Israel is a rallying point that will unite the AAUP with other left-leaning groups in the fight against Trump:

Higher ed workers alone cannot beat back the Trump administration. It needs to be a multisector fight. Federal workers—who are also under attack—we need to build alliance with them. K–12 teachers, health-care workers, immigrant workers, progressive community organizations all need to build an aligned front that is ready to take risks[.]

Only now that the AAUP has abandoned its founding mission, that fight is a fight to perpetuate the group’s own political power—by feeding off an age-old, “multisector” grievance.

[*][Note that there’s no evidence Israel intended “scholasticide”—but Hamas has been shown to embed their operations within school buildings and other civilian centers, leading to collateral damage, according to Jewish advocacy groups who protested the AAUP webinar.]

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