The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) was founded in 1915 to defend freed0m of speech and academic freedom of faculty after a series of incidents resulted in faculty being fired for unpalatable political views. Up to the last five years, the AAUP had done a pretty good job fulfilling its mission.
But now things have changed—big time. The AAUP has taken a number of steps that are inimical to its mission. First, it defended DEI statements as an important tool for hiring and promoting professors, even though those statements constitute compelled speech, which the AAUP previously opposed. Then, though it was previously opposed to academic boycotts, the AAUP did a 180° and declared that such boycotts could be okay. It’s not coincidental that this, occurring in the summer of 2024, coincided with a number of academics favoring boycotts of Israel and the implementation of the BDS program. I can’t believe that any rational person would think that the AAUP’s complete change of position was not motivated by one thing: the desire to allow opprobrium to be directed at Israel.
But wait! There’s more! In January of this year, as my colleague Tom Ginsberg reported, the AAUP decided that institutional neutrality, as embodied in the University of Chicago’s Kalven report, wasn’t important. Ginsburg wrote about this, and the general decline of the AAUP, in The Chronicle of Higher Education:
Now comes a third statement, this one adopted in January: “On Institutional Neutrality.” Committee A unhelpfully declares that institutional neutrality is “neither a necessary condition for academic freedom nor categorically incompatible with it.” The main feature of its analysis is a rejection of the policies of the University of Chicago. But the statement contains several mischaracterizations, including a grave misunderstanding of academic freedom itself.
Institutional neutrality is important in ensuring that the speech of university members is not chilled by the school or its departments taking official positions on moral, ideological, or political issues. Ignoring it means that you don’t mind speech being chilled.
But wait! There’s STILL more, and it’s not a set of Ginsu Knives. Now the AAUP has published an article in its flagship magazine (Academe) arguing that a diversity of opinion in universities is not only something we don’t need, but could be positively inimical. The piece is called “Seven theses against viewpoint diversity“, with the subtitle “The problems with arguments for intellectual pluralism.” WHAAAAAAT? Isn’t intellectual pluralism one of the foundations of a university, necessary—along with empirical investigation guaranteed by academic freedom—for finding truth? More than that: intellectual pluralism among faculty guarantees that students get to hear different sides of an issue, which helps them hone their ability to form informed opinions.
The Academe article was written by Lisa Siraganian, identified as “the J. R. Herbert Boone Chair in Humanities and professor in the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University and the president of the JHU-AAUP chapter.” I think one can take this as a semi-official position of the AAUP itself, since it justifies the continued dismantling of the AAUP’s mission by giving left-wing views intellectual priority. (Remember, the vast majority of American faculty are left-wing, and there’s little viewpoint diversity. This has led many students and faculty to censor themselves.)
In an article in The Eternally Radical Idea, a website apparently run by Greg Lukianoff, the estimable president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), three authors, two of them from FIRE, join with a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College (Samuel Abrams), to take apart the AAUP’s article. They are not recommending an affirmative action plan for professors, so that hiring and promotion priority should be given to conservatives, but they do think that we need a greater diversity of viewpoints on campus, and are hoping that campuses will reform themselves without government pressure or blackmail.
Click the article’s headline to read it:
Lukianoff et al. begin in a defensive posture, saying that they have taken action against the Trump administration on several fronts, so they’re not simply shilling for Trump when they ask for more viewpoint diversity. A bit of their justification, which seems to me a little excessive, although some of it may be necessary. Here’s a small snippet:
When the State Department threatened to revoke students’ visas and deport them for protected speech, we sued to defend the right to campus expression.
And when the White House announced its “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” we called it out as an attempt to impose government-funded orthodoxy.
In other words, we’ve spent the better part of this year defending higher education from a White House intent on micromanaging its politics.
Those are the roses proffered to liberal academics. But then come the brickbats:
But we think those with the biggest vested interest in campus — professors and administrators — often don’t seem to have gotten the memo. At the faculty level, particularly in the humanities, the reflex too often remains obstructive.
No institution better embodies that reflex than the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Under its current leadership — President Todd Wolfson, who frames criticism of academia as part of “right-wing forces… striving to dismantle our institutions” — the AAUP has responded to legitimate calls for reform with a mix of denial and deflection. “Professors are not the enemy,” Wolfson recently declared. “Fascists are.”
While FIRE defends higher education from federal intrusion, the AAUP defends higher education from reform. It is a guild that sees itself as untouchable: the critic-proof steward of a trillion-dollar industry, allergic to feedback from a public it doesn’t seem to know it serves. It stands atop its Perfect Rhetorical Fortress, ready to (mis)label anyone who disagrees with it.
Here’s what the AAUP has called various stands for academic freedom and free speech.
The genuinely politically diverse heterodox Academy? “Conservative.”
Critical of DEI, which has in fact been used to threaten academic freedom? “Right-wing.”
FIRE? “[C]omplicit with the attacks on higher education being led by the right” — and when someone demanded evidence, the AAUP hilariously pointed to the STOP WOKE Act, which FIRE successfully sued to block. (And then, of course, they deleted the tweet.)
Finally, Lukianoff et al. masticate the meat of Siraganian’s article, taking her seven arguments one by one. (they call her piece a “masterclass in how to lose the moral high ground”).
I’ll show Siraganian’s seven points in bold, and will give some brief excerpts from Lukianoff et al. (indented) refuting those points. Bolding in their quotes comes from the authors:
Thesis 1: “Viewpoint diversity functions in direct opposition to the pursuit of truth, the principal aim of academia.”
The piece starts out with this genuine banger. Siraganian treats “viewpoint diversity” as a threat to truth-seeking itself, tossing out caricatures about “flat-earthers” and “QAnon believers” (because of course it does) to avoid addressing the real question: How can you find truth in a system that systematically excludes dissenting voices?
. . .For decades the educational case for affirmative action was that diversity — of background and experience — improves the exchange of ideas. Last year, the AAUP put out a statement reading, “Progress toward diversity goals has resulted in better knowledge production that has started to fill in some of the gaps, expose and correct blind spots, and open entirely new vistas of inquiry that were not possible without it.”
If viewpoint diversity by racial proxy is good because it enriches the conversation, then direct diversity of viewpoints should be celebrated, not considered “direct opposition to the pursuit of truth.”
That’s a good analogy, but of course the purpose of increasing racial diversity was never really to provide viewpoint diversity but to produce racial equity. And it’s always assumed, in a patronizing way, that all members a given minority would have similar and “approved” opinions. No diversity wanted there!
Thesis 2: “Viewpoint diversity can only work as an instrumental value.”
In a nutshell, Siraganian is arguing that viewpoint diversity isn’t the real goal. Rather, truth is the real goal, and so it’s okay to remove viewpoint diversity in the pursuit of truth since it is merely “instrumental.”
. . . Call viewpoint diversity instrumental if you want, but it’s one of the most important instruments we have.
Thesis 3: “Viewpoint diversity assumes a partisan goal based on unproven premises.”
This is where the essay’s denialism crosses into comedy. Siraganian insists there’s “no proven problem” of ideological imbalance in academia — as if fifteen years of research documenting it, often by scholars inside the system, never happened.
In fact, the evidence is overwhelming. In 2012, Inbar and Lammers found that many social and personality psychologists admitted they would discriminate against conservatives in hiring or publication decisions. As Sam wrote in his initial response to Siraganian’s article:
Faculty surveys consistently reveal dramatic ideological imbalance. In many humanities and social science fields, the ratio of liberals to conservatives exceeds 10 to 1. In disciplines such as sociology, gender studies, and English, the imbalance is so extreme that it approaches a ratio of 100 to 0. A 2022 national survey found that nearly 80 percent of professors identify as liberal, while just six percent identify as conservative. These results have been replicated across multiple studies and over many years.
Thesis 4: “Viewpoint diversity undermines disciplinary and specialized knowledge and standards as well as the autonomy of academic reasoning and scholarship.”
The AAUP’s stance on DEI statements makes its hypocrisy on viewpoint diversity even worse. It has come to defend DEI statements — literal ideological litmus tests — as compatible with academic freedom. The same organization that sometimes rails against loyalty oaths now endorses their mirror image, provided the creed is fashionable. When Republicans want loyalty oaths, it’s “fascism.” When the test runs the other direction, it’s “progress.”
This extraordinary hubris merits no deference.
Thesis 5: “Viewpoint diversity is incoherent.” A remedy for the problem is contained in Lukianoff et al.’s response (via Jon Haidt):
The search for truth is the search for ever more complicated and refined questions. We pursue that search by considering competing possible answers. To do that, we need a diversity of speakers to postulate such answers, and more carefully refine the next question. Therefore, the search for truth requires a diversity of views. As Ohio State University professor Michel W. Clune explained in his own response to Siraganian, citing viewpoint diversity defender (and Greg’s The Coddling of the American Mind co-author):
The goal, for Haidt, is neither the proportionate representation of conservatives in academe nor the representation of every possible view on an issue, but “institutionalized disconfirmation.” There should be a sufficient diversity of views in academic units to enable teachers and researchers to identify and challenge claims that, in homogenous conditions, are often tacitly accepted.
Thesis 6: “Viewpoint diversity has already been used, both in the United States and abroad, to attack higher education and stifle academic freedom.”
and the last one:
Thesis 7: “The argument for viewpoint diversity is made in bad faith.
This one is particularly rich, given the organization has frequently engaged in bad faith arguments — such as their recent approval of academic boycotts. Of course, the major boycott movement underway is BDS, a movement against Israel. But that’s not really why they did it, you understand. It’s only a coincidence that Todd Wolfson decided the very next thing he’ll do is support BDS at Rutgers.
It was transparent, and it thought people looking on were fools. Yes, the AAUP’s decision to abandon its position on boycotts while pretending there wasn’t one specific thing it wanted to boycott was made in bad faith. Indeed, it’s hard to take the argument that viewpoint diversity is anathema to academic freedom as anything other than bad faith, given that the AAUP, like many institutions, seizes the value of viewpoint diversity when it’s attached to identity, color, or sexuality, but not when it’s attached to actual diversity of opinion.
Done and dusted! The dissimulation of the AAUP when it rescinded its opposition to academic boycotts was definitely an example of bad faith, and if you think otherwise, you’re clueless. It was made to rubber-stamp boycotts of Israeli universities and academics.
THE SOLUTION: Here’s how Lukianoff et al. end their piece: by telling us what we should do (i.e., reform ourselves) and how the AAUP, which now seems completely worthless, is in fact buttressing the anti-academic authoritarianism of Trump:
Since these theses were a challenge, we have a challenge in return. If you’re serious about reform, prove it in two moves:
First, say it out loud: “We have a homogeneity problem that makes error invisible and dissent costly.”
Second, do the basics: End compelled statements and ideological screens. Adopt institutional neutrality and robust free-expression commitments. Protect due process. Build recurring, in-house debates across real schools of thought.
If you can’t do those two, you’re not serious. You’re just ideological bullies looking for protection against a much bigger, scarier ideological bully.
Where this ends.
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: FIRE will fight government overreach from any administration. But the AAUP’s current posture — insisting that higher ed has nothing to fix while the public’s trust in academia plummets — is a gift to every demagogue who wants to control it.
This is how Trump wins — not because his administration understands or cares about free speech and academic freedom, but because the people who should have been steadfastly defending those principles decided they were optional.
Reform is coming either way. The only question is whether universities will do it themselves, or have it done to them.
This is getting long, so I’ll just recommend that you read the critique of the AAUP by attorney and legal scholar Jonathan Turley on his website (click below):
A quote from Turley, who has another solution, though he does seem to approve of some government interference (“public-funding legislative bodoes”). To me, pressure from donors are fine, but not so much the government.
The current generation of faculty and administrators has destroyed higher education by destroying diversity of thought and free speech on our campuses. The effort of the AAUP and faculty like Siraganian to rationalize the basis for this intolerance is evidence of the hold of such bias. Faculty members would prefer to allow higher education to plunge to even lower levels of trust and applications than to allow for greater diversity in their departments.
Once again, we cannot rely on faculty members to restore balance. We will need to focus on donors (as well as public-funding legislative bodies) to withhold money from these departments. Universities will not allow for opposing or dissenting views unless they have little financial choice. In this sense, we need to focus on public universities as the best ground to fight for diversity of thought. These schools, directly subject to First Amendment protections, can offer an alternative to schools like Johns Hopkins and Harvard for those who want to learn in a more diverse environment.
From: Len Gutkin
Subject: The Review: The AAUP’s president called me ‘straight TRASH.’ Here’s what happened.
Back in August, the president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), Todd Wolfson, told Inside Higher Ed that his organization believes “strongly that no weapons should be sent to Israel, at all. Not defensive or offensive, nothing.” I was surprised. I pay a lot of attention to higher ed’s politics, and this was the first I’ve heard of the AAUP supporting an arms embargo against Israel. Wolfson’s follow-up interview with the Chronicle’s Emma Pettit failed to clear things up. I looked around the AAUP’s website and found nothing.
I called them up. Things got kind of weird. Wolfson abruptly ended a call with me when I asked him about the arms embargo. Over a couple of weeks, I spent a lot of time being lectured to by an AAUP public-relations representative about my misplaced interest in this trivial question. No one at the group would send me any documentation. I contacted some AAUP members, none of whom had heard of support for an arms embargo until the Inside Higher Ed interview.
So what really happened? I got to the bottom of it, more or less, although not without Wolfson taking to Bluesky to call me “straight TRASH” and “Pathetic!” I confess I was initially taken aback by this rhetorical posture on the part of a person in his position. But on reflection, it seems of a piece with the stimulating, if also disorienting, coarseness of our moment, when the leaders of august institutions — from the president of the United States to the president of the AAUP — enjoy an expressive latitude unindulged by their predecessors.
Clearly the AAUP isn’t institutionally neutral, for it has taken explicit political stands—and without the approbation of its member!
Seriously, the AAUP has no credibility left. We can no longer count on this institution to do what it was founded to do. In that respect it’s going down the drain along with the ACLU and the SPLC.
Ladies and gentlemen, friends and comrades, here’s the AAUP President going after not only Gutkin, but the respected Chronicle of Higher Education. Such gravitas!
Thank you for this. It’s incredibly important that this criticism comes from inside the academe.
Another interesting paper on the issue of monoculture in the academe in Persuasion: https://www.persuasion.community/p/we-analyzed-university-syllabi-theres?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=61579&post_id=176281694&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=aly7w&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
It is not surprising that, as much of academia, especially administration, is riddled with neo-Marxists, that the AAUP would be, too. NMs seem to be joiners and love taking over organizations. For them “truth” (a bourgeois concept) was established by Marx 150 years ago. They are not in the Popperian business of getting closer and closer to truth through research and argument. They know the truth. They are just writing books that re-explain everything in oppressor/oppressed terms, now based on sex and race, rather than class. Viewpoint diversity would just be the reintroduction of bourgeois false consciousness.
Very well put.
Hmm, this tactic sounds familiar. They all seem to be using the same playbook.
It used to be infuriating; at this point, it’s gotten tedious.
They seem to be trying to remove diversity of opinion in thinking too. A lot of DEI people stick to their playbook because it makes them feel safe and they can’t think outside the box. One of the best ways to learn is by challenging others and by being challenged in return. That’s how you are taught to think. I may even have learned more from people I disagree with than those with whom I agree. Presumably the AAUP will want to close down all debating societies in universities. Where will it end?
Any idea what “the Department of Comparative Thought” actually means? How can one compare thoughts without having them expressed? My guess is that the comparisons are between their already known received truths and other, evil, ideas.
Someone who has the time and the stomach for it might want to look at the DoCT’s course syllabi and let us know how dire things are.
From their website…”The Department of Comparative Thought and Literature comprises scholars who share a commitment to philosophical questions as they relate to art, literature, film, and history. Collaboration, exchange of ideas, and intellectual freedom are at the department’s core.”
I’d like to know how they discuss any of that without diversity of opinion.
Prof: Barbie is a good film.
Students: Yes.
End of lesson.
I think the film Memento is incredible. A friend thinks it’s the worst film she has ever seen. Siraganian doesn’t think we should have different opinions.
The AAUP’s 1915 Declaration of Principles provides useful context for today’s debates. (Forgive me if I missed a link to it in any of the above.) I won’t attempt to summarize the 10-page document here, but I’ll highlight two excerpts:
“If this profession should prove itself unwilling to purge its ranks of the incompetent and the unworthy, or to prevent the freedom which it claims in the name of science from being used as a shelter for inefficiency, for superficiality, or for uncritical and intemperate partisanship, it is certain that the task will be performed by others . . .”
“It is, in short, not the absolute freedom of utterance of the individual scholar, but the absolute freedom of thought, of inquiry, of discussion, and of teaching, of the academic profession, that is asserted by this declaration of principles. It is conceivable that our profession may prove unworthy of its high calling, and unfit to exercise the responsibilities that belong to it.”
Hat tip to Provost William Inboden, UT-Austin, whose recent article “Restoring the Academic Social Contract” in “National Affairs” alerted me to the first of these.
https://aaup-ui.org/Documents/Principles/Gen_Dec_Princ.pdf
This post, thanks, just read the J. Turley link and a link embedded in that article. It’s quite good, overall very strong, though with its own unneeded soft spots that don’t detract too much from the general argument. There’s some muddle-headedness about DNA and chromosomes, not surprising, considering the sources.
But I’ve never been a professor so I don’t know if I have standing.
One interpretation is that Siraganian actually believes that DEI critics are analogous to flat earthers. Under this view she would of course reject institutional neutrality. One wouldn’t open the door in academia to flat earthers; neither can one open the door to DEI critics. To ideologues, the need for DEI is as obvious as acceptance of the spherical earth. They’re blind that way.
And yes, indeed, the sudden change in the AAUP’s position regarding boycotts cannot be interpreted as anything other than setting the groundwork for demonizing the State of Israel and those who support it. The AAUP seems to have declined into moral bankruptcy.
Some local chapters of the AAUP are fully in step with the national party line, and of course they censor local list-serve outlets to contain as little diversity of thought as possible. [It is fortunate that AAUP’s membership has declined so much that its pretense of speaking for the professoriate is now risible.]
But our US academia somewhat resembles what the USSR’s would have looked like if entrenched careerists of Lysenkoism had tried a stiff resistance to their overthrow. We will see, in the next few years, whether US academia can recover from its DEIshchina as well as the USSR did from its period of Lysenkovshchina.
How odd that these professors seemed to have decided that they have arrived at THE TRUTH and viewpoint diversity is no longer required. Pretty sure that’s how the Catholic Church had also viewed all matters until that pesky Galileo started his take on celestial matters.
Give this sort of person a little bit of power and they turn into demigods of autocratic righteousness brooking no dissent.
Reminds me of the old joke that if only professors could vote, the US would be a Communist dictatorship.
So the AAUP is joining the ACLU in the drain
How can anyone write this with a straight face:
“But those of us who want good ideas to win and bad ideas to lose should understand that viewpoint diversity will not get us there; it can only ensconce more bad ideas.”
How lost is academia when a professor at an elite university does not understand that the problem lies not solely in the bad or good ideas themselves, but in whom and how it is decided that they are to be counted as good or bad ideas?
In addition she seems to have no understanding of the difference between various forms of viewpoints, she confuses the epistemic with the ideological like she’s never ever heard of the difference of the two cultures. It is likely she is one of those academics who sincerely believes that the “research’ she produces in ‘comparative thought and literature’ is knowledge proper, on par with scientific knowledge and not discourse or theorization. This is not just any old nonsense she is espousing, but seriously worrisome nonsense.
The first comment that occurred to me was that “flat earthers” and the Church WERE the consensus at one point.
10/17 in substack by coincidence one writer noted that identifying the cause of cholera required breaking with consensus:
https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/no-consensus-friday-october-17-2025
This is not so clear. The Church was the consensus at one time. However, educated people new that the world was roughly round. For example, Eratosthenes calculated the size of the Earth with considerable accuracy in 240 B.C.
Columbus thought that if he sailed west he would hit Asia. He was correct about this, but grossly underestimated the size of the planet and didn’t know about the continents in his way.
A flat earth was probably never learned consensus in the Hellenic tradition at any time after the time of Aristotle, or in the Christian Church. As Frank says, Eratosthenes was confident enough that the earth was round to go to the mental effort and trouble — requiring travel — to estimate its circumference. He was measuring something that everyone who knew anything knew was round anyway. It doesn’t seem as if the idea of a flat earth ever reappeared in the Western Christian tradition after that except for a few contrarians in the Dark Ages. There is no theological reason for the Church to insist the earth should be flat and not round. The important thing was it was fixed and immovable at the centre of God’s creation.
Wikipedia says the idea that medievalists believed the earth was flat was a piece of fake news cooked up by early Protestants in the 17th century to discredit their Catholic rivals. This libel spread virally in Protestant countries and persists to this day. We all like to believe unflattering things about our enemies. People who sincerely believe the earth is flat today are a 19th-century phenomenon made up out of whole cloth.
Even uneducated illiterate medieval mariners would have noticed that high points on land disappear later and reappear earlier during an out-and-back voyage than seacoast harbour villages, no matter which direction the ship sails. This is consistent only with a spherical earth. The danger in long voyages out of sight of land was getting lost and dying of thirst, not sailing off the edge. It was obvious that the horizon was always far away and never got closer, even as land heaved up and showed itself. There is a nice photo in Wikipedia of the faraway towers of an offshore wind turbine farm appearing to disappear progressively into the sea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth
No, flat-earth was a real thing in Late Antiquity, thanks to the influence of the “Christian Topography” of Cosmas Indicopleustes in the mid-6th century. He believed the surface of the earth was the flat bottom of a box shaped like the Tabernacle — see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmas_Indicopleustes. The earlier Christian author Lactantius, in the 4th century, had ridiculed the idea of a spherical earth, although unlike Cosmas he didn’t have a developed cosmology of his own.
So yes, some early Christian writers did reject the notion that the earth was round, and in both the above cases did so explicitly because that idea was associated with pagans. The fact that Cosmas had actually sailed from Egypt to India and back, and thus really had no excuse not to know better, shows the extent to which his cosmology was religiously derived and held with zealous ideological conviction.
What’s unclear is how widely this belief was shared, either among educated people or the populace as a whole.