Last week, the president of my university’s Faculty Senate blasted out a warning—courtesy of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Their latest statement, Against Anticipatory Obedience, treats the second Trump administration as an existential threat to academia. The message to faculty? Brace yourselves—and whatever you do, don’t comply in advance.
The AAUP asserts that Trump and state governments are determined to “undermine tenure and academic freedom protections, eviscerate shared governance, diminish the faculty’s control over the curriculum, and redefine higher education to benefit private interests over the public good.” In response to such “attacks”—the document uses the word eight times in a little over two pages—the AAUP insists that “Now is not the time to be complacent. Now is the time to act.”
Thus, their problem isn’t really federal involvement in higher education. They love it—so long as the reforms flatter their political sensibilities.
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This emphasis on action is notable in a document that warns against “anticipatory obedience.” After all, a call to resist premature compliance is a call for inaction.
Earlier this month, my university issued “guidance” on how to respond if Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) visits our campus. Now, our Faculty Senate president circulates the AAUP statement, imploring my colleagues and me to “consider how [we] are best-positioned to express [our] agency at this moment.” These sentiments go a step beyond mere inaction—instead, they seem to be a call for open resistance to the federal government’s legitimate authority to regulate public universities.
But the fact that these invitations to civil disobedience only come now—after fifteen years of draconian tinkering with higher education by Democratic presidents—shows that this isn’t a genuinely principled defense of academic inquiry as much as it is partisan politics, masquerading as high-minded moralism. Ironically, this duplicity and the entrenchment of left ideology in the universities are why major institutional reforms are necessary.
Universities across the country were all too eager to over-comply when Obama’s Justice Department issued the Dear Colleague letter that weaponized Title IX and institutionalized left perspectives on sex, gender, speech, and procedural justice. Similarly, there was no organized effort to resist
Did the AAUP somehow miss that one billion dollars in diversity funds might produce curricular changes that infringe upon the sacred sovereignty that faculty supposedly exercise over the curriculum? Of course not. They saw these federal interventions as good policy, so there was no resistance. Thus, their problem isn’t really federal involvement in higher education. They love it—so long as the reforms flatter their political sensibilities. Their real problem is federal reforms that run afoul of their personal politics.
In the opening to the AAUP’s statement, the authors take a shot at the University of Chicago’s 1967 “Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action,” which affirmed the necessary ideological neutrality of institutes of higher education. The AAUP implies that institutional neutrality is a form of cowardice and complacency. But it is precisely because universities have unconditionally refused political neutrality that they now find themselves under attack.
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Since 1967, we have seen higher education become ever more politicized—and the politicization only moves these institutions further to the left. Professors’ blindness to the privilege of left-political perspectives in academia is proof of a disturbing insularity on campus that sees the universities as separate and above the larger society in which they operate. Indeed, as the AAUP makes clear, they even see themselves as above the law itself:
It is, perhaps, too much to ask that governing boards and administrations, much less faculty members, defy the edicts of those who fund their institutions, especially when attacks on higher education may occur under the cover of law. But resistance is necessary, and it can take many forms.
In statements like the one above, we see that the goal isn’t really to discourage “anticipatory obedience” with reforms but rather to encourage “anticipatory disobedience.”
This reflexive opposition to the legitimate power of government to regulate education is a major reason why such a wide swath of the public has a negative opinion of universities. It’s also why higher education now finds itself with a target on its back: they put it there themselves.
Image: “American Association of University Professors” by Mike Ferguson on Flickr.
This article was originally published at www.mindingthecampus.org
