Two Champions of Academic Freedom Go to War

When The Chronicle’s Emma Pettit posted a thread on X describing the “burst of debate” around the topic of viewpoint diversity, there was no reason to expect a social-media blowup. Her tweets were dry and informative, a roundup of relevant opinion coverage, in our pages and elsewhere, arguing for and against the notion that many academic disciplines would benefit from an infusion of non-left-wing faculty members.

But then the X account of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) responded: “Fascism generally doesn’t do great under peer review.” The post went on to speculate that the low number of conservatives in the academy could be a result of the fact that “the intellectual values of academia, which emphasizes critical inquiry & challenges traditional norms … may be inherently less appealing to those with a more conservative worldview.” (Who writes the AAUP’s X posts? I asked an AAUP spokesperson, who told me that a number of people have access to the account.)

The second part of the statement paraphrases a longstanding hypothesis about the dearth of conservatives in academe, although one under increasing pressure today. But the controversy that followed surely had more to do with the sloganeering about fascism, a streamlined restatement of something the AAUP’s president, Todd Wolfson, said in an interview with Pettit last month: “Fascist ideology does not do very well in a peer-reviewed process, right?”

The X post was quoted many times; responses were overwhelmingly hostile. To the AAUP’s critics, it looked like a compact articulation of the myopic self-righteousness of an organization that has lost its way. “Perfect, and perfectly revealing, in every detail,” is how the Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith put it. The University of Chicago’s Steven N. Durlauf called the post “disgraceful,” and saw in it evidence that “the AAUP does not intrinsically give a damn about academic freedom.” The Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle wrote that “it is mind-boggling to watch people simultaneously insisting that academia is super-open-minded and empirical and in no way a progressive bubble, and also that conservatives are all fascists.” “What was once a storied organization for defending the principles essential for truth-seeking & knowledge-production,” wrote the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s David Decosimo, “has become a tired embodiment of the bigoted, ignorant, partisan, self-deluded, anti-intellectual grift currently wrecking academia.” The University of Toronto’s Anna Su warned that “with friends like this academics don’t need enemies.” The University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Itai Sher suggested that “the AAUP needs new leadership” — or “at least someone else to run its social media account.” And so on, and on, and on.

And then there was the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a sometimes-ally of the AAUP who has tangled with it in the past over the question of academe’s left-wing political bias. FIRE’s chief executive, Greg Lukianoff, reignited those old squabbles by calling the AAUP’s post a “self-congratulating fantasy,” both “deeply anti-intellectual” and “childish.” In response, the AAUP posted a “yawn” emoji and implied that FIRE is a stalking horse for right-wing campus activists: “Oh Greg, there’s got to be right wing ideologue, Young Americans for Liberty, or Turning Point USA chapter out there that needs your urgent support … .” In a further exchange, the AAUP doubled down: “Sure, they [FIRE] throw the occasional liberal in,” but “based upon the actual casework” they should be considered allied with conservative campus activists.

The incontinent petulance of social-media style notwithstanding, these flare-ups reflect some real differences between the two organizations. The first has to do with the principled defense of academic freedom. Not for the first time, the AAUP — or at least its X account — has accused FIRE of mainly supporting right-wing causes, defending the token liberal here or there to keep up appearances. Lukianoff, by the same token, implied that the AAUP avoids defending conservatives. Is there any merit in either charge?

FIRE told me that they don’t track data about the political affiliations of the professors they defend. But even a cursory glance at their record confirms that they have very often stepped in on behalf of faculty members associated with the left, and not just since the second Trump administration. In 2017, they intervened at Drexel University in the case of George Ciccariello-Maher, a left-wing faculty member accused of anti-white racist speech. In 2022, they sued Florida over the Stop WOKE Act’s restrictions on teaching about race and sex. More recently, they have chastised colleges for punishing or threatening to punish faculty members accused of making tasteless comments about the assassination of Charlie Kirk; for banning teaching about “transgender topics”; for prohibiting a Black student group from hosting a “Black 2 Class Block Party”; for canceling drag performances, and so on. They filed an amicus brief in Mahdawi v. Trump, arguing that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents’ detention of a Columbia University student and pro-Palestinian protester was unlawful, and joined Stanford University’s student paper in a lawsuit against the secretary of state, Marco Rubio. The AAUP’s construal of FIRE as primarily devoted to right-wing causes is difficult to square with the evidence.

For its part, the AAUP seems to have declined involvement in any number of high-profile speech furors over the last several years in which the targets of censorship were on the right or were accused of racism. In 2022, the Georgetown University law professor Ilya Shapiro was investigated for several months by his employer for a tweet deemed racist. In another case, the University of Michigan music professor Bright Sheng was penalized by his employer for showing a 1965 film version of Othello featuring Laurence Olivier in blackface. These were open-and-shut violations of academic freedom. FIRE intervened in both cases; the AAUP in neither. In fact, the AAUP’s Academe blog published an open letter condemning Sheng.

The second major bone of contention has to do with the subject of Pettit’s original thread: intellectual, or viewpoint, diversity. The AAUP has no formal position on viewpoint diversity. FIRE, conversely, has been consistently aligned with the viewpoint-diversity movement. FIRE told me that while it “does not advocate for viewpoint-diversity mandates,” it believes that “intellectual diversity is essential to the marketplace of ideas, and that marketplace lies at the foundation of higher education.” That belief was evidenced most recently by an essay written by Lukianoff and two co-authors critiquing the AAUP for its supposed resistance to higher-ed reforms, including the introduction of greater viewpoint diversity in the academy. “The latest entry in AAUP’s recent history of dodging reform,” Lukianoff et al. wrote, is “the lead essay in its flagship magazine, Academe … titled “Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity.”

But that essay, by the Johns Hopkins University literary scholar Lisa Siraganian, does not represent the AAUP’s official position on the matter, and in fact the Academe blog posted a rebuttal of Siraganian. Indeed, when Siraganian published a version of her arguments in our pages, she appended a disclaimer noting that her arguments are hers alone. They do not reflect an official position of the Johns Hopkins AAUP chapter, of which she is president — much less of the national organization.

Nevertheless, the AAUP’s repeated response to questions about political bias in academe — “fascist ideology does not do very well in a peer-reviewed process,” in Todd Wolfson’s words, or “fascism generally doesn’t do great under peer review,” in the words of the AAUP’s X account — certainly give the impression that something like an official AAUP position is emerging. That position has two planks. First, it refuses to grant any legitimacy to the notion that some disciplines might be afflicted by a disabling degree of political homogeneity; after all, those complaining about being kept out are “fascists,” who by definition have no place. Second, it insists that if conservative ideas are underrepresented, that is only the result of good epistemic hygiene, as enforced by peer review. Ideas are not rejected for being conservative, but for being wrong.

This is a convenient theory for defenders of the status quo, but it’s almost certainly incorrect. In fact, there is good evidence that political homogeneity and a commitment to activist politics has impaired the truth-seeking mission of some fields. The question of how ideological diversity, or its lack, affects knowledge production in fields like political science, social psychology, and sociology is a live and important one; Wolfson and the AAUP X account’s dismissiveness is unwarranted.

That said, the more incendiary part of the AAUP’s rhetoric — the accusation of fascism — in fact names a sticky problem for the viewpoint-diversity movement. As Nicolas Langlitz explains in our pages, since “the quest for diversity was inherently limitless,” it “would eventually have to include even the most extreme positions.” He quotes a group of German social psychologists: “We do not know how much diversity would be necessary to reduce these [liberal] biases. Would it be enough to include liberals and conservatives? Or should communists, fascists, and even terrorists also be included?”

Perhaps in the future, FIRE and the AAUP might get together to discuss this complex and fascinating topic. They should do it somewhere other than on X.