On the blog of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), its longtime president Anne Neal writes about the election of Rudy Fichtenbaum as the new president of the AAUP. Her alarmist rhetoric not only distorts what the AAUP does today, but fundamentally rewrites the history of the AAUP in a completely misleading way.
Neal writes, “one cannot help but view with alarm the results of the AAUP elections, which in large measure suggest that the AAUP has now positioned itself as a faculty labor union advocating for faculty rights rather than enforcing faculty ethical obligations.” Of course, the AAUP has been a faculty labor union advocating for faculty rights for more than 40 years now. The phrase “enforcing faculty ethical obligations” is the evasive code language that ACTA uses for its goal of purging left-wing faculty who express political views. The AAUP has never done this, and never will. The AAUP for a century has advocated for faculty rights and never enforced the “ethical obligations” of individual faculty.
