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But in 2024, Committee A released two new statements that drew substantial criticism from defenders of academic freedom, including from one if its former chairs, the law professor Matthew W. Finkin (who has also served as the AAUP’s general counsel) and from the English professor Cary Nelson, a former AAUP president. The first, a “Statement on Academic Boycotts,” reversed an earlier boycott declaration from 2006, which had considered academic boycotts incompatible with academic freedom. The second, the “Statement on DEI Criteria and Faculty Hiring,” determined that “when implemented appropriately in accordance with sound standards of faculty governance, DEI criteria — including DEI statements” can be used in faculty hiring and promotion without violating academic freedom.
Skeptics of these statements (I was among them) found them confusingly argued and difficult to square with the demands of academic freedom. In a letter to The Chronicle published earlier this month, Committee A’s chair, the cultural-studies scholar Rana M. Jaleel, joined by two of its current members, the historians Michael Meranze and Joan W. Scott, suggested that I had misread the statements. Where I and other critics saw the statements authorizing violations of individual faculty autonomy, they saw the expansion of the faculty’s freedom to determine its own procedures.
This disagreement took place against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s attacks on the sector. To the AAUP’s critics, the 2024 statements seemed to defend a project of identitarian politicization that had rendered colleges extremely vulnerable to political interference — and without reform, will continue to do so in the future. As the philosopher Susan Neiman wrote recently in a related context, “plenty of people will argue that, in view of the right’s onslaught on everything it can stigmatize as woke, the time for criticizing … is over. They are mistaken. In one form or another, the phenomenon will be with us until we understand where it went wrong.”
To the AAUP, conversely, this is not the time to criticize political excesses on the left, because those have little to do with the current crisis. As Scott put it to me, “I’m perfectly comfortable with the notion that there were all sorts of things on the left that were ridiculous or problematic, but if they hadn’t existed the right would have found ways to target us anyway. So I’m uncomfortable with easy causalities: that we opened ourselves up, and in they marched. They would have marched in no matter what.”
My own sense is that Scott is half correct, but only half. It was obvious by 2017 or so that developments on campus — very much including the use of mandatory diversity statements in hiring and promotion — would eventually provoke a backlash. Red-state legislative interference was predictable and avoidable. At the same time, the Trump administration’s maximalist tactics, dubiously legal at best, can hardly be blamed on overzealous campus politics.
I talked with Jaleel, Scott, and Meranze about academic freedom, boycotts, diversity statements, and the AAUP’s priorities. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Len Gutkin: I want to begin by asking a general question: What is the AAUP’s role right now, in this moment?
Joan W. Scott: It’s standing up for what we think of as academic freedom. That is, for the self-regulating autonomy of universities, and the right of faculty to determine those four principles that Justice Felix Frankfurter enunciated in the Sweezy case: who teaches, what’s taught, how it’s taught, and to whom it’s taught.
Right now both the Department of Education and various red states are attempting to intervene in all of those areas. The job of the AAUP is to call their bluff.
Rana M. Jaleel: I don’t think the role of the AAUP has changed. It’s the same role, different political circumstances, different context, different set of pressures — some reminiscent of historical moments in the past and some that feel very new.
Michael Meranze: I know, Len, that you’re concerned with some recent Committee A statements, but if you look at the long haul of AAUP policy, statements and investigations, what you’ll see is a tremendous amount of continuity with the current Committee A positions. The only other thing I would add is that in the AAUP view, you can’t separate out the academic freedom of individual faculty members from the collective right to shared governance.
Gutkin: I certainly agree that the paramount threat at the moment comes from the right, especially the Trump administration’s process-free executive actions. And I take your point about AAUP continuity. But to me it does look like there have been doctrinal changes in AAUP policy. One such change is the 2024 statement on academic boycotts, which replaced the 2006 statement. What is the major difference between those two statements?
Scott: The first statement said that academic boycotts interfered with academic freedom by ostracizing or refusing to deal with individual faculty members at universities in states or countries in which academic freedom was being denied by a state. That was taking a substantive position on academic boycotts, saying that they interfered with the exchange of ideas across nations. That was worrisome for the principles of academic freedom.
I think the 2024 statement is more in line with the AAUP’s procedural positions. It moves away from substance. We are not endorsing academic boycotts. We’re saying that those who do endorse academic boycotts are protected by academic freedom.
Gutkin: But the 2006 statement doesn’t say that you can’t endorse an academic boycott as an individual faculty member, right?
Meranze: Since 2006 we’ve seen a lot of efforts to use the 2006 statement in fact to punish people who were calling for boycotts. As a member of Committee A, it seemed to me that there was a necessity to clarify. The second thing — and I don’t like to speak ill of AAUP statements, especially when Joan’s involved in them —
Scott: Well, it was Cary Nelson who wrote that first one.
Meranze: The statement was very confusing. It said one thing here and another thing there.
Gutkin: I found it closely argued and not confusing. Tell me why it’s confusing.
Meranze: Because, on the one hand, we’re categorically opposed to academic boycotts. On the other hand, we’re not opposed to individuals boycotting. On the third hand, we do realize that in South Africa we had supported an academic boycott.
Gutkin: It said that AAUP supported divestment, but not an academic or cultural boycott. It preserved a very specific space for actual academic activity, right? It said divestment is okay. It said striking labor actions are okay. But it said boycotts on academic exchange are never okay.
Meranze: But again, there’s nothing in the 2024 statement that says there can’t be academic exchange. Plus, if you read the 2024 statement, the committee tried to lay out the different ways in which one could think about academic boycotts — again, without endorsing them — but with acknowledging that there may, in fact, be circumstances where an academic boycott may be necessary to protect the academic freedom even of the people at the institution that is being boycotted.
Jaleel: It asks the question of whose academic freedom matters. What kind of collaborations can be made by people in the U.S. academy with academics who are situated elsewhere and whose academic freedom, or very existence, is under attack? How does this matter for debates about academic freedom? It is intended to spark more debate.
I will also say that not only do we not endorse boycotts, or any particular boycott, but we also encourage explicitly in the statement that individuals not be punished. Todd Wolfson and I wrote about all of these issues at length.
Since the boycott statement, how many boycotts are we hearing about? A lot of the supposed harms that people bring up around academic boycotts happened under the old policy as well. Those included universities canceling study-abroad programs. It included people not writing or choosing not to write letters of recommendation that involved places that they believed were violating academic freedom or human rights. It’s immensely complicated, and neither statement necessarily solves for the incredible degree of complexity around these issues. But a categorical ban is not the only or the best way.
Gutkin: Here’s the basic nitty-gritty practical question that I have always had about the second statement. Let’s say that I’m in a literature department that votes to join the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction [BDS] movement. And let’s say that this department has funds for research travel that they disburse. And let’s say that I want to go to Tel Aviv for a conference on narratology. Can my department, having voted to join BDS, not grant me those funds according to the AAUP’s current doctrine?
Scott: Where are you getting this sort of collective decision from?
Gutkin: A boycott is going to involve a corporate decision on the part of some larger group. What does a boycott mean? If a department joins a boycott, or a university joins a boycott, then there are consequences for the individual members of that university or that department, involving funding, permission to travel, and so on. Just as if you’re a member of a union that goes on strike, you can’t go to work, right? That’s the difference between a boycott and a censure, which the original statement makes quite clear. What I’ve never been able to get an answer to is: Can my department or my college, if I’m an individual faculty member, choose to join a boycott and thereby deny me funds, access to research resources, I would otherwise have if that boycott weren’t in place, even if I myself am opposed to the boycott? That strikes me as a major academic-freedom issue for individual faculty members who disagree with the majority will of their colleagues.
Scott: Faculty members ought to be free to support or not support a boycott, if a collective decision has been made about it. I wonder how many examples we have of that happening. The examples we have are of people being punished for supporting BDS or supporting Palestinian rights. You’re right, in theory, that were there to be a case of the kind that you’re talking about, the faculty member would have a legitimate claim to having their rights of academic freedom interfered with by the denial of funds for travel.
Gutkin: In that case, it seems to me that the AAUP still prohibits academic boycotts. If a boycott is a real boycott, and not just a statement of moral suasion, it should prevent me from some activity.
Jaleel: If we’re talking about boycotts introduced by faculty associations, for example, people make their own choices about whether and how much to comply. There’s often not a lot of muscle behind anything like an academic boycott. It can be more of a symbolic statement and a last resort than anything else.
A lot of this is less about an academic boycott as a conceptual or theoretical question, and more about a politicized understanding of academic boycotts in this particular moment, which was introduced by the first statement. The issue with the 2006 boycott, and Cary Nelson’s actions — Joan has detailed this — is they politicized an issue that shouldn’t have been politicized. If we’re going to think about the academic boycott as a concept, we have to not import all of the politicized history around the statement into the discussion that’s happening now.
Gutkin: It seems to me that you’re importing it. I don’t need to know anything about Cary Nelson and the backstory. I do know about that stuff; I edited Joan’s piece for us on this. But the statements themselves are statements of legalistic doctrine that stand up or fall down on their own. I am now understanding that there is an intention behind the second statement that was maybe not entirely realized, which was to protect individual supporters of academic boycotts while also protecting faculty members from, say, living with the consequences of a boycott.
Jaleel: I want to be clear about politicization. I’m talking about the fact that we had an academic-boycott policy in the first place instead of a case-by-case assessment of ones that were called. That was not a neutral policy. It was not brought up because everyone was just thinking abstractly about boycotts.
Meranze: Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t know of any academic-boycott call that has said you can’t work with individual faculty at an institution. I’m not part of any boycott, so I don’t really know. But usually they make it quite clear that what they’re talking about are formal institutional connections. Len, you’re creating a problem that doesn’t exist. Your question about funding is an interesting one in the abstract, and I would personally — I can’t speak for the organization —agree with Joan that if somebody was trying to block funding to go to a conference that was located in some boycott area, that would be very problematic.
Gutkin: Going back to the 2006 statement, there’s a long disquisition on the kinds of activity that different boycotts affect, and academic exchange of the kind that we’ve been talking about is, in theory, absolutely one of them. But it is clarifying to know that, at least for you two, that is not what academic boycotts are meant to prevent. They’re meant to prevent, if I’m understanding you correctly, only formal institution-level collaborations.
Jaleel:. We agreed at the start of this conversation that the biggest threats to academic freedom weren’t AAUP policy, but our federal government, the weaponization of federal antidiscrimination law, compliance deals, the compact.
Gutkin: My interest in AAUP doctrine is that this moment will pass, the Trump administration will not be in power forever, and the doctrinal changes to the AAUP — if there in fact are any, and that’s what I want to get clear about — will need to be reviewed.
Scott: I think “doctrinal” is the wrong way to think about it. If you look at the long history of the AAUP, its good and bad moments, they are always in response — with a certain set of principles — to prevailing political conditions. So during World War One, the AAUP was supporting the war effort, and even said things like, Civil liberties might have to be suspended in the interests of the war. In the McCarthy period, the AAUP was not outspoken in its condemnation of the Red Scare.
What our statements represent now are attempts to identify the places where the attack on higher education is most pernicious. Title VI, Title IX, dismantling DEI — we have statements on all of those things.
Gutkin: Let’s talk about the DEI statement, which has aroused various kinds of controversy — both strong support and strong critique. That statement reads, in part: “Since the 1990s, many universities and colleges have instituted policies that use DEI criteria in faculty evaluation for appointment, reappointment, tenure, and promotion, including the use of statements that invite or require faculty members to address their skills, competencies, and achievements regarding DEI in teaching, research, and service. Such criteria are one instrument among many that may contribute to evaluating the full range of faculty skills and achievements within a diverse community of students and scholars.” What does the AAUP mean by diversity?
Scott: My sense of it is the obvious — a student and faculty body that is not all male and all white.
Meranze: And not all upper-class. I’ve spent my entire career in the public sector, and I’ve faced students that both are diverse in the sense of not being all white and all male, but also students who were white and male but were the first in their families to go to college, who came to me from community colleges.
Jaleel: It’s about homogeneity and not assuming that everyone who enrolls at a university or college is going to be the same thing.
Scott: But it’s also an interpretation of what you might call principles of democracy. Equality means the extension of opportunity and access beyond elite control, or beyond special groups who for long periods have had access. In that sense, it’s a kind of literal reading of democratic principles.
Gutkin: That all sounds great to me. I think one of the reasons that some people reacted critically to the statement is that actually existing diversity statements, as it were, have struck a lot of people otherwise. I’ll quote David Rabban, a former general counsel for the AAUP, a former chair of Committee A, who has recently written a major book on academic freedom. In it, he observes “the irony that diversity statements reduce the diversity of views among professors, including views about diversity itself.” For instance, “Before submitting to the central administration the diversity statement of a law professor at UC-Davis, the law school deleted her description of her white, rural, and working-class backgrounds and references to her scholarship about rural poverty.”
This suggests that DEI statements had come to instantiate a narrow orthodoxy — and that they were themselves a threat to academic freedom. Even if you accept that diversity statements are not, per se, in tension with academic freedom, none of these kinds of concerns made it into the AAUP statement. Critics of diversity statements were described as partisan — read Republican or right-wing. There was no mention of the robust critique from liberals, people like Harvard Law’s Randall Kennedy, who supports affirmative action but not diversity statements, or from people like UC-Riverside’s Steven Brint, the sociologist of education, who supports affirmative action but not diversity statements of this kind. The thought that I had when I read this statement was: I would want the AAUP to look at how they were actually being used, and decide whether they were threatening academic freedom.
Scott: That would be the case-by-case situation. The statement says, “This committee rejects the notion that the use of DEI criteria for faculty evaluation is categorically incompatible with academic freedom. To the contrary, when implemented appropriately in accordance with sound standards of faculty governance, DEI criteria, including DEI statements, can be a valuable component in the efforts to recruit, hire and retain a diverse faculty.” The qualifications in there — “when implemented appropriately” — are an attempt to acknowledge the abuses.
Jaleel: We discussed this quite a bit, because a lot of people on the committee, including myself, are suspicious and don’t always like the way diversity statements are written or implemented or understood. Critiques were across the board.
Meranze: Part of the problem with this discussion, as Rana was saying, is that there’s a context for these statements. Len, you — to my mind — very blithely said, “Oh, well, Trump won’t be around forever,” and so we can just push that aside for the moment. I don’t see it that way. The diversity-statements discussion took place in the context of many years of many state governments attempting to attack various forms of knowledge and to roll back various forms of admission and hiring, and there’s no evidence whatsoever that that’s going to go away in a few years.
Discussing these statements acontextually is a distraction from the real threat facing academic freedom. The media as a whole, including The Chronicle, has a responsibility for that. It tends to focus on issues that are, in fact, less crucial. We could literally see the sector destroyed in the next five years, at least on the level of research universities’ funding. Yet what do people want to do? They want to debate whether or not the AAUP’s DEI statement included three sentences about this other sort of critique.
I’m friends with David [Rabban]. I wrote a very long review of his book. I like it. Those are some anecdotes that he had. I remember the first time when I was involved at UC-San Diego. There was a fellowship that was created for underrepresented students after Prop 209 [banned affirmative action in 1996], and we got the applications. You know who got it? A white woman whose family had never had anybody in college, who had to deal with alcoholic parents. She was the candidate that was most deserving in that pool. Anecdotes are anecdotes.
Gutkin: Sure. But the fact remains that a large number of especially legal-minded liberals — including two former AAUP general counsels and Committee A chairs [Rabban and Matthew W. Finkin], including Harvard Law’s Randall Kennedy [who has called them “ideological pledges of allegiance”], including Brian Leiter — find the position hard to follow. They consider DEI statements a problem, and they find the AAUP’s posture on it confusing. I understand the case-by-case-basis thing, but the AAUP has made blanket statements. For instance, in 2014, it said that mandatory trigger warnings were a threat to academic freedom. Why didn’t the AAUP take a look around at the way that DEI statements were being used for years and issue some kind of equivalent warning? There’s no acknowledgment that DEI statements as hiring and promotion criteria could be in tension with academic freedom. It just doesn’t come up.
Meranze: “If used appropriately” means it can be used inappropriately. I don’t think that’s logically hard. The other thing I would say, Len, is I just raised what I consider a really important question about what should be the focus of this conversation. And you just went, Oh, well, let’s get back to statements.
Gutkin: Why issue the statements if they’re not worth talking about?
Jaleel: We’re talking about statements that were both issued a year ago. A lot has changed.
Gutkin: That’s not that long ago.
Meranze: We’ve twice expressed to you that it seems to us that the imbalance in time spent in this conversation indicates an imbalance in an acknowledgment of where the threats to academic freedom come from. You’ve twice blown it off.
Gutkin: I would counter by saying that if the AAUP can’t get its doctrinal ducks in a row —
Meranze: But they are in a row as far as I’m concerned.
Scott: The doctrinal ducks are evidenced so far in several successful lawsuits that have been filed against the worst of the Trump administration. Those are following from the principles or the commitments of the association to academic freedom.
I will say: For a long time, AAUP staff looked at the procedural issues involved in a complaint. Did I get due process? Did I get the right to appeal? Lately, it’s impossible to separate the procedural from the substantive. People are being accused of breaking the law — take the executive orders on Title VI or Title IX — and it’s impossible for us to say, or only to say, Well, the university forgot, didn’t look at, didn’t give them a hearing. I mean, we do still say that, but the connection to what we are defining as an illegal definition of Title VI has to be part of the argument as well.
The statements are statements, they’re not doctrinal policy. They’re an attempt to address an immediate set of issues.
Gutkin: Let me say why I think doctrine matters. Because I agree with you, as I’ve said, that the most significant threats right now are from the federal government. But I’ll risk a prediction. The sector is going to emerge from this intact but battered. Individual faculty members are going to have less autonomy vis a vis both legislators and academic administrators who want to tell them what they can and can’t say. And in that situation, it seems to me, the AAUP should have a strong set of philosophically and legally coherent doctrine about things like DEI statements, including what I’m going to ask you about next, what I call right-wing DEI.
Take these civic centers which are all the rage right now, especially in red states. I call them right-wing DEI because they justify educational activity in terms of certain kinds of political virtue, like making good citizens, training patriots, whatever — there are more- and less-benign ways of describing it. If I were teaching in a place that had one of these big civic centers, could an “appropriate larger body,” to quote AAUP’s DEI statement, require me to write a civic statement for hiring and promotion purposes in which I describe how I’ve inculcated, say, love of the free market?
In other words, what are the limits of what an appropriate larger body can dictate to individual faculty members? I think that’s what we’re going to see — individual faculty members more buffeted than ever by all kinds of forces from the left and the right, telling them what to say, how to say it, and what not to say. Strong doctrine seems like the place to start, to my mind. That’s why I’m so interested in these statements.
Meranze: The mere fact that some members of what you’re calling the left-liberal academy don’t like the statement doesn’t prove that it’s doctrinally unsound, right? Every statement in the history of the world, including every legal statement, has had plenty of people who disagree.
About the civic centers. The AAUP statement makes it very clear that an appropriate DEI statement cannot or does not include a demand that you say you support diversity as a goal. This is why the loyalty-oath business is so mistaken, right? It asks what you’ve done in your classroom faced with this situation, just like they ask what you do in your classroom faced with the fact that reading is different now. It doesn’t ask you to support the idea that diversity should be a university goal, at least not if it’s appropriately done. The examples you provided would, in fact, be loyalty statements, because they ask how you inculcated specific values, not how you addressed a particular social problem.
Gutkin: The definition of the social problem is an evaluative one. I don’t think anybody really accepts the notion that required DEI statements don’t index a certain set of values.
Meranze: If I go in front of a classroom and I’m facing a diverse set of students, and the university wants to know how I’ve responded to that, they can ask me that.
Gutkin: The move you’ve made is to make diversity statements a purely pedagogical question. But in the AAUP’s own statement, “research” is listed among the things that can be appropriately considered in terms of a diversity statement.
Meranze: But nobody’s required to research diversity. It’s just to say, if you do that, you can include it in your statement.
Gutkin: Why do you think people like Randall Kennedy, or Christopher Eisgruber, the president of Princeton, have turned against them? [Eisgruber called them “politically loaded practices” that should be abandoned.] Why are they so skeptical of these statements, if they are as anodyne as you make them sound?
Jaleel: It depends on how they’re written. There’s a diversity of criteria, of ways that people have approached this. Some we’d agree with. Some we wouldn’t. It’s not that hard an issue. It’s being complicated in really strange ways.
Meranze: Obviously there are bad versions. What we tried to do in that statement was to lay out the problem and provide people with ways to think about it, such that you would not, in fact, use them to threaten academic freedom. If somebody is having it used to threaten their academic freedom, then they should write to the AAUP’s department of faculty governance.
Gutkin: So in your view, the problem is that not enough people came to the AAUP to complain about them, but they were complaining about trigger warnings.
Scott: Nobody came to the AAUP and said, I’ve been denied a job because I wouldn’t fill out the DEI statement. I think if we had had evidence of that, or if people had come with those complaints, we might have followed through on them. We certainly did have trigger-warning complaints.
Gutkin: You’ve given me a lot of your time. And I know that you feel there are more important things to talk about. So I want to close by asking: What are the most important things the AAUP has done recently and what are you looking forward to it doing in the coming year?
Scott: Lawsuits. The California one where the federal District Court just ruled that the MAGA attack on UCLA was not warranted was enormously important — as are the lawsuits with the Middle East Studies Association and Harvard. The organizing of faculty in collective-bargaining units. Advocacy chapters of AAUP are tremendously important, because it means that on the ground there’s activity happening which is resistant to university administrators.
The best statements about Columbia or Brown or Harvard have come from faculty groups, often AAUP chapters, who say: You can’t do this. You are destroying the integrity of the institution that we belong to.
Meranze: If you look over the last year or two, there have been many statements — the ones that don’t tend to get nitpicked — which are, in fact, much more important. The very early “against anticipatory obedience” statement; the recent Title VI report that Rana mentioned, which is not only about Title VI, but about an effort to effectively overturn civil-rights gains that have been accomplished since the 1960s.
Jaleel: We are very much tied in with our members. We hear what they want, we hear the criticisms, we hear the praise. What they want right now is support against these kinds of incursions, like the ones we’re seeing in the Texas A&M system, like the ones we’re seeing in California. That is where the energy is going to come from. It’s going to come from the ground up.
