Last month, the University of Michigan announced it would no longer use diversity statements in faculty hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions. The decision is a laudable one, especially from an institution that has, over the past decade and change, been a prime offender against campus free speech and open inquiry. As other observers have noted, the move is also surprising in that it represents one of the first selective public institutions to move away from their oppressive diversity, equity, and inclusion regime absent significant legislative efforts or state-level pressures.
Prohibiting the use of diversity statements — which are, in both intent and function, litmus tests on ideology and political affiliation — is the latest in recent steps by Michigan to move away from its invasive and, frankly, unconstitutional DEI “commitment.” In October, the university joined several other prominent institutions in adopting a position of institutional neutrality “on political and social issues that are not directly connected to internal university functions” and last January approved a new statement of principles on free speech and diversity of thought that is ”guided by the letter and spirit of the First Amendment” and “entirely consistent with our commitment to nurturing a diverse, equitable and inclusive community.”
While rumored cuts to the University of Michigan’s expansive DEI bureaucracy did not materialize at the Board of Regents meeting last month, the writing may be on the wall. As Michigan regent Mark Bernstein emphasized, “It is my hope that our efforts in DEI focus on redirecting funding directly to students and away from a bloated administrative bureaucracy.” Chris Kolb, vice president for government relations, painted an even starker picture to the regents: “I have been told pretty bluntly that Congress — this administration — will use whatever tools they have to have us yield to what they want us to do,” he said, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. “DEI is one of those things they believe should be eliminated from higher education. They will use whatever tools they have, including cutting off finances, to make that happen. … We may have to trim sails. We may have to tack left. We may have to tack right.”
There is much to appreciate with these developments. A university self-selecting to finally address some of its worst abuses in institutional ideological overreach is undoubtedly a step in the right direction. And the Trump administration, Republicans, and advocates of viewpoint diversity and free speech should be enthused that their efforts to pressure colleges and universities into upholding the Constitution and their intellectual obligations are bearing some fruit. University-level bureaucracies, turgid and damaging as they are, are only one element of the problem on campuses, however.
An oft-overlooked malefactor comes via the constellation of professional organizations, academic organizations, and putative support structures that orbit colleges and universities themselves. Indeed, it is often these satellite entities that offer some of the stiffest resistance to salutary campus reforms aimed at viewpoint diversity.
Take, for example, the American Association of University Professors. Once a premier defender of academic freedom and intellectual diversity, the AAUP has come to optimize what is often referred to as Robert Conquest’s Second Law of Politics: Any organization that is not explicitly right-wing will become explicitly left-wing.
The AAUP is a nonprofit membership organization of college faculty and other academic professionals that is purportedly committed to protecting and advancing academic freedom and educational quality. It has maintained this mission with differing levels of effectiveness since its founding in 1915, but over the past two decades, it has become increasingly apparent this protection extends in only one direction: toward its left-aligned members.
Upon the reelection of Donald Trump, AAUP President Todd Wolfson wrote in a news release that the election results were “disappointing” and that “attacks on academic freedom will only be intensified under the incoming administration.” Wolfson, a former union leader elected in a landslide last year, has called Vice President-elect J.D. Vance a “fascist” and repeatedly emphasized that under his leadership, the AAUP will not remain a value-neutral organization. As he told Inside Higher Ed, “There’s no way to be a neutral arbiter.” Within his first few months, the AAUP “released statements defending the use of diversity, equity and inclusion criteria in hiring and evaluating faculty and abandoning the group’s categorical opposition to academic boycotts.” The latter of these, it’s important to note, was done with clear, though not explicit, intent to promote boycotts of Israel.
The AAUP made some hay recently following a public spat with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which began, as these things so often do, on X. In response to Wolfson’s statement about the election and the need to “organize,” FIRE’s Alex Morey correctly warned, “If you’re a faculty member with anything other than ultra-progressive views, don’t count on the AAUP to defend you like it once would have. Trading almost a century of principle and the org’s good name for political expediency is a damn shame.” In turn, the AAUP account responded in a series of now-deleted posts that “FIRE is complicit [with] the attacks on higher education being led by the Right” and “has aligned itself with far right assaults on higher ed.”
FIRE is a nonpartisan legal organization that has defended students and professors on campus of all ideological stripes, ranging from Turning Point USA activists to Students for Justice in Palestine. They do not require my defense, nor do I have the space to do so here, though I would do so happily. What is important in these exchanges is the repeated line from the AAUP that disagreements with its partisan statements and ideological positions are right-wing attacks on education. Wolfson and his cronies are happy to upend two-plus decades of AAUP precedent against boycotts to promote those against Israel and to explicitly screen prospective professors based on equally explicit leftist ideological commitments. Disagreement with these policies, which Wolfson himself has declared come from non-neutral agents, the AAUP brands as not only “right-wing” (implying quite clearly they see themselves as “left-wing”) but attacks on “education” itself. Do not let the flimsiness of this bait and switch detract from its stupidity. It is as Michigan regent Bernstein said in response to vehement attacks from the university’s chief diversity officer following the ban on diversity statements: “It is astonishing that we are not approaching this with any degree of self-reflection or curiosity. And it is yet another example of how this area of activity considers itself beyond scrutiny.”
In invoking Conquest’s law above, I do not argue that the AAUP should be a right-wing organization, as opposed to the left-wing one it has become. It is that the organization has metastasized from its original purpose of academic freedom into one whose sole purpose is to maintain the progressive stranglehold on higher education. The advocacy of this ideological monoculture has become fanatical to the point that any attempt to allow for different or competing viewpoints is viewed as anathema. Wanting fair hiring practices that do not screen for leftist orthodoxy has become an “attack” not just on the AAUP but on education itself.
As the ever-stalwart Greg Lukianoff, free-speech lawyer and president of FIRE, put it in a recent blog post, “The AAUP’s public support for DEI criteria for faculty hiring might be the worst thing they have done in terms of undermining their mission of defending academic freedom. … The idea that anyone, particularly a group of professors, could look out at the overwhelming left-leaning slant among faculty and administrators on campus today and think that the problem is too much political and viewpoint diversity is insane. As FIRE has been saying for a very long time, required DEI statements are clear violations of academic freedom and free speech rights.”
The AAUP has also spent the better part of this decade attempting to separate the idea of academic freedom from that of free speech, relying on similarly thin misdirections to obfuscate the obvious political motivations at play. Leading lights among the AAUP have attempted to argue for a division between the two because, as Yale professor Robert Post argued in 2017, the concept of First Amendment free speech can interfere with a professor’s ability to manage his or her classroom, among other such canards. “The point of this weirdly dishonest exercise was to argue that First Amendment law couldn’t hope to understand the academic environment and could therefore never really be applied, completely ignoring the fact that the First Amendment had been handling academic freedom cases quite well for 60 years,” as Lukianoff correctly explains.
These policy failings should also be viewed in light of the AAUP’s increasingly uneven defense of professors on campus. While the organization is happy to come to the defense of professors investigated for any range of leftist scholarship or advocacy that falls within academic freedom (as it should, I’ll note), it is suspiciously mum when it comes to those of center or right-leaning persuasions. Whether Amy Wax at the University of Pennsylvania, Nicholas and Erika Christakis at Yale, or Sam Abrams at Sarah Lawrence — each an instance in which professors were harassed by students and wrongly investigated by their universities — the organization designed to protect professors was nowhere to be found.
The American Association of University Professors deserves singling out more than most, as it should be the foremost actor in defending academic freedom, free speech, and intellectual diversity on campus. That it is in fact now acting against that mission in a directly partisan and ideologically narrow manner is a travesty. That does not mean it is the only academic or scholarly organization that is promoting rigid ideological conformity while masquerading as nonpartisan or neutral. Far from it.
According to a report last year from researchers Jay P. Greene and Frederick M. Hess, too many academic associations that have a long history of connecting scholars and promoting scholarship “have traded their scholarly mission for a political one.” They examined 99 separate academic associations and found that “81 percent have issued at least one official position on race or affirmative action, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Israel-Hamas conflict, immigration, or climate change. These statements almost uniformly reflect progressive orthodoxy.” These organizations include the obvious culprits, such as the AAUP, but also those far afield, such as the American Mathematical Society and the American Society for Engineering Education.
Moreover, Greene and Hess estimate that “public colleges and universities spend nearly $200 million a year subsidizing faculty dues and paying conference registration fees to politicized associations. While faculty certainly have a right to participate in such organizations, they have no right to do so with public funds.” So, not only are these organizations enforcing a particular intellectual monoculture, but they are doing so on the public dime.
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Many campus chapters and individual members of these associations and organizations doubtless disagree with their official stances. Certainly, there are those who believe it improper for their scholarly association dedicated to mathematics to have a position on the Middle East. But just as with individual teachers in K-12 who might disagree with the position of the American Federation of Teachers, the union’s position isn’t necessarily aligned with their interests. Indeed, such as in the case of the AAUP, it might be actively working against that interest.
If institutional change such as that at the University of Michigan is going to be worth anything in the long term, the supports that exist to serve the academic enterprise must reorient themselves back toward intellectual diversity and free inquiry. At the very least, those opposed should stop being rewarded with taxpayer largesse.
J. Grant Addison is deputy editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
