On Monday, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) announced it had abandoned its long-held, categorical opposition to academic boycotts. Since then, critics of the change have accused the AAUP of abandoning its commitment to academic freedom. Some, citing the group’s February call for a ceasefire in Israel and Palestine, have said it’s becoming anti-Zionist.
In 2005, the AAUP—which writes widely adopted policies defining and safeguarding academic freedom—spoke out against a proposed academic boycott of two Israeli universities. Such boycotts involve scholars and scholarly groups refusing to work or associate with targeted universities.
In the ensuing two decades, the AAUP maintained its opposition to academic boycotts against any universities in any country. That’s now changed, after votes by its Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure and its national council—both of which the group said were unanimous.
The AAUP’s new policy says that “when faculty members choose to support academic boycotts, they can legitimately seek to protect and advance the academic freedom and fundamental rights of colleagues and students” who face violations of their rights. It goes on to say that “in such contexts, academic boycotts are not in themselves violations of academic freedom; rather, they can be considered legitimate tactical responses to conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education.”
After Inside Higher Ed first reported on the statement Monday, another major advocacy group for academic freedom announced that it remains opposed to such boycotts. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a free-speech group with a historical focus on campuses, often takes the same positions as the AAUP in defending scholars. On Wednesday, though, it released a statement titled “FIRE’s position on academic boycotts has not changed.”
The statement said FIRE continues to defend individual students’ and faculty members’ right to boycott—or to criticize boycotts—but said it opposes them “as a threat to academic freedom.”
Alex Morey, FIRE’s vice president of campus advocacy, said that for the AAUP “to put out a statement like this that cuts a loophole a mile wide in academic freedom is incredibly disheartening, to say the least, and so we hope they take it back.”
Morey said that when academic boycotts are mandated or are “systematic,” they have a “really terrible trickle-down effect for academic freedom.” She said she’s seen students be unable to get a letter of recommendation to study abroad in Israel, and she asked how free an adjunct faculty member might feel trying to work with an academic in a country his department chair is boycotting.
“The word freedom in academic freedom is doing a lot of work,” Morey said. It means, she said, that scholars should be free from “exactly these kinds of constraints.”
The AAUP’s new statement does say “faculty members and students should not face institutional or governmental censorship or discipline for participating in academic boycotts, for declining to do so or for criticizing and debating the choices” of others. Boycotts, it says, “should target only institutions of higher education that themselves violate academic freedom or the fundamental rights upon which academic freedom depends.” But Morey said the statement leaves “wide open” the question of when boycotts are appropriate.
Keith Whittington, the founding chair of another group, the Academic Freedom Alliance, posted on X the day the AAUP’s new stance was revealed. He said the AAUP had changed. “The transformation of the AAUP continues,” Whittington wrote. “This particular switch seemed inevitable given how activist academia was trending.”
Whittington, who recently left Princeton University to become the David Boies Professor of Law at Yale University, told Inside Higher Ed Thursday that “it’s a challenge for a mass membership organization like the AAUP … as to how do they stay focused on their central mission, given the interests of large numbers of members and the particular things that they might be passionate about.”
Like the ACLU and other civil liberties groups, Whittington said, AAUP’s membership is politically engaged. “Academia leans very heavily to the left, so a lot of professors naturally bring left-wing political interests with them into their organizations,” he said. And in this historical moment, there’s real interest among politically activist academics in taking part in the boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, Whittington said, creating tensions between that movement and commitments to academic freedom.
“Something’s gotta give,” Whittington said, and “what has broken in this case, in order to resolve the tension, has been the AAUP’s long-standing commitments about boycotts.” He said the Academic Freedom Alliance hasn’t taken “an explicit position about boycotts,” and acknowledged that some might be more justifiable than others, but he’s “pretty skeptical” about whether they can be compatible with academic freedom concerns.
One thing that has indisputably changed about the AAUP is the increasing role of unionization within the organization. In 2022, it affiliated with the large and well-funded American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Many of AAUP’s campus chapters are now union locals. And the AAUP’s new president, Todd Wolfson, uses language associated with labor fights.
Wolfson told Inside Higher Ed Thursday he wants to make AAUP “a fighting organization.” Last week, he called Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance a “fascist” in a statement.
Regarding the criticism of academic boycotts as violations of academic freedom, Wolfson said “collective action of all sorts does not necessarily come into and undermine academic freedom.” He compared academic boycotts to the 2023 strike he helped lead as an associate professor and AAUP-AFT local union leader at Rutgers University. “We demanded that all union members join us, shut down their labs, stop their research, stop going to conferences, stop grading papers,” Wolfson said. “Is that any more a breach of academic freedom?”
“A strike is aimed at an institution, and it is asking faculty members not to research, not to teach, not to do service,” Wolfson said. “I would love to know the difference.”
Beyond the concerns expressed by academic freedom advocates about the AAUP’s change, criticism has arrived from social media, conservative media, pro-Israeli groups and one former AAUP president who has long criticized what he calls the group’s “anti-Zionist” shift.
Goodbye to a ‘Gold Standard’?
Miriam Elman, executive director of the Academic Engagement Network, a pro-Israel faculty and administrator organization, lamented the AAUP’s policy reversal. Elman said her group repeatedly cited the old policy, including in messages to university administrators when pro-Palestinian protesters demanded academic boycotts. “Now what do we do?” she asked.
“The AAUP will no longer be able to call itself the arbiter of academic guild rules,” Elman said. She said its call for an immediate ceasefire in Israel and Palestine “was already a sign.” But in her view, the new boycott stance is the “nail in the coffin” and a final step to the “hijack of a once-venerable association.”
Cary Nelson, a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign professor emeritus who was the AAUP president from 2006 to 2012, started a petition Thursday against the AAUP’s policy change with professors at two other universities. He said it’s an international petition because, “for better or worse,” attention is paid to the AAUP’s policies and definitions outside the U.S.
After he left the presidency, Nelson said he served on the AAUP’s Committee A for Academic Freedom and Tenure for three more years but wasn’t reappointed. At that point, back in 2015, “Committee A changed a great deal … since then I’ve watched a gradual move toward anti-Zionism,” Nelson said.
Committee A wrote the original statement against academic boycotts nearly 20 years ago, and now it’s unanimously passed a statement that in many ways reverses it. However, despite the changes he saw in the committee, Nelson said the reversal still “shocked” him. “Even though I could see the momentum, I thought they would never do it,” he said.
“Part of it is a simple question of priorities: What matters most, the unimpeached principle of opposition to boycotts or the delicious possibility that the AAUP will support your political agenda and endorse the boycott of the state of Israel?” Nelson said. Now, he said, “for nobody on Committee A at this point does the principle come first.”
Nelson wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education this week that “we must no longer use AAUP policy as the gold standard for academic freedom.”
But what organization does Nelson think could take the AAUP’s place going forward? “God only knows,” Nelson said. “There isn’t anything really.” He said he gets emails about starting a new AAUP, “and I don’t answer those emails.”