‘The outlook for higher education is dire,’ group states
Scholars should “loudly oppose” and resist compliance with the Trump administration, the American Association of University Professors said in a new report.
Titled “Against Anticipatory Obedience,” the report, published this month, states the re-election of Donald Trump poses significant threats to higher education, including potential assaults on tenure and academic freedom.
“As Donald Trump assumes the presidency for a second time, the outlook for higher education is dire,” it states, adding:
The Trump administration and many Republican led state governments appear poised to accelerate attacks on academic freedom, shared governance, and higher education as a public good. They will attack the curricular authority of the faculty on a number of fronts, including professors’ ability to undertake “teaching, research, and service that respond to the needs of a diverse global public.” It is the higher education community’s responsibility not to surrender to such attacks—and not to surrender in anticipation of them. Instead, we must vigorously and loudly oppose them.
The report references the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report, which states that when society endangers the university’s core mission and its dedication to free inquiry, the university has a duty to oppose such actions.
“This is undoubtedly such a time,” the AAUP report states.
The union urges its “chapters and conferences, unions, and faculty senates across the nation” to “strengthen and reinforce faculty rights in the areas of curricular reform and course approval,” “reform policies to strengthen faculty oversight,” and “strengthen local capacity to protect tenure and academic freedom,” among other things.
In response, Lee Jussim, a professor of social psychology at Rutgers University, called the report a “riot” in a post on X.
“AAUP promotes UChicago Kalven report, the clarion call for ‘institutional neutrality,’ the idea that U’s should avoid taking stands on most controversial political issues, five months after it embraced academic boycotts as one way to address controversial political issues,” he wrote.
The AAUP announced Aug. 9 it would support academic boycotts despite its previous position, held since 2005, The College Fix previously reported. In response, over 1,000 scholars signed a petition opposing the faculty union’s new position.
The union also garnered attention last year after the union’s president, Todd Wolfson, referred to then-vice presidential candidate JD Vance as a “fascist.”
“With Vance, American Far-Right authoritarians have succeeded in elevating a fascist who vows to ‘aggressively attack universities in this country’ to within striking distance of their goal: the annihilation of American higher education as we know it,” Wolfson had said.
MORE: DEI is ‘compatible with academic freedom,’ AAUP says
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