BY JOHN K. WILSON

I fully agree with the first line of Tom Ginsburg’s attack in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the AAUP: “Colleges are entering what is likely to be their greatest crisis since the McCarthy period.” Although I don’t work for or speak for the AAUP, I strongly disagree with the rest of his essay and his belief that the AAUP must now bow down to the Trump administration and forswear any views deemed unpopular in this conservative climate. 

Ginsburg often criticizes the AAUP based not on the merits of its positions but because the AAUP is choosing to “double down on some of the very policies that have attracted so much hostility to higher education.” Defending Communists in the 1950s was deeply unpopular, but the AAUP should have done it nonetheless (and today the AAUP’s failure to aggressively resist McCarthyism is seen as one of its worst mistakes). Throughout its history, the AAUP has often doubled down on defending the academic freedom of unpopular professors who attract hostility to higher education, and we should praise the AAUP’s principled willingness to be unpopular even if we might disagree with some of their positions. 

Ginsburg attacks three recent statements of the AAUP on academic boycotts, diversity statements, and institutional neutrality.

On academic boycotts, Ginsburg argues that the AAUP “endorsed a practice that interferes on the ground with the academic freedom of individual scholars.” But in reality, the old AAUP positions could be misused to justify violating the academic freedom of individual scholars, and the new AAUP statement was a measured defense of the right to engage in individual boycotts while rejecting institutional boycotts.

In its report on diversity statements, the AAUP takes the reasonable and moderate position that faculty rather than administrators should decide hiring criteria, and that colleges should not adopt separate diversity statements. Instead, “meaningful DEI faculty work should be evaluated as part of the core faculty duties of teaching, research, and professional service.” Ginsburg quotes only the last part out of context and writes, “It is hard to imagine that any college receiving federal funds will be able to sustain this posture over the next month.” We should be horrified at the thought that the federal government might ban any faculty work deemed DEI from being considered in hiring and promotions.

Ginsburg bizarrely claims that diversity statements “do not concern research or teaching.” He cites no evidence for this strange position. In fact, most diversity statements directly address a candidate’s ability to teach students from diverse backgrounds.

Ginsburg also claims about diversity statements that there is “significant concern about their legality.” Although I am (like the AAUP) opposed to separate diversity statements, I don’t see any grounds for claiming they are all inherently illegal. More importantly, all of us (including the AAUP) should never leash our judgments about what is right and wrong to what some judge or politician decrees to be legal.

On institutional neutrality, Ginsburg argues that the AAUP has “a grave misunderstanding of academic freedom itself” because “rather than focusing on the academic freedom of the individual scholar, Committee A emphasizes collective academic freedom.” I agree with Ginsburg’s critique of those who think that academic freedom is a collective faculty right rather than an individual right. (Here is the clearest proof: Is it a violation of academic freedom for a college to ban Communists? If your answer is, “It depends on whether the faculty approved it,” then you have a collective, and incorrect, vision of academic freedom.) But Ginsburg makes the mistake of thinking that because rights such as academic freedom belong to individuals, therefore all collective expression can be banned and “departments are not bearers of academic-freedom rights.” Ginsburg, like the Kalven Report, freely admits that collective positions are sometimes essential (indeed, the Kalven Report is itself a collective statement). But then the question becomes not an issue of individual rights but institutional power: Does a department have the right to take a collective position or does an administration have the right to ban it?

Ginsburg’s approach to academic freedom is analogous to saying that because religious freedom is an individual right, therefore no churches have the right to exist (after all, churches are not mentioned in the First Amendment). In reality, while rights are based in the individual, individuals must have the right to associate and join together to exercise those rights. Therefore, when collective associations (such as churches or universities or unions or departments) are silenced, this censorship also infringes upon the rights of the individuals who form them, even though some of those individuals might somehow feel silenced by the statements of the association.

While I agree with Ginsburg that people sometimes ought to be careful in how they exercise their right to speak and understand how this can have an intimidating impact on those who disagree (whether it’s political statements by university presidents, faculty senates, departments, unions, or individual professors in their classrooms), colleges and governments must not ban speech. And that prohibition of censorship extends to collective groups such as departments. 

Ginsburg denounces “shared governance” for “authorizing practices that are in fact highly contestable” and being “routinely in significant tension with academic freedom.” As the AAUP correctly argues, shared governance is an essential protection for academic freedom, not a threat to it. It’s true that when universities act, some of their practices are “highly contestable” and some of them can even endanger academic freedom. But that’s a problem of centralized power that shared governance helps to protect against by giving academic experts greater authority to make academic decisions.

Faculty collectively make mistakes at times. But shared governance is based on the accurate belief that the faculty collectively are a better (albeit not perfect) judge of academic standards and protector of academic freedom than the administration or the politicians. At a time when political and administrative repression of free speech on campus is a dire threat, it’s alarming that Ginsburg treats faculty power and shared governance as an enemy of academic freedom rather than its most essential defenders.

Ginsburg’s response to the censorship of the Trump administration is not to criticize the government threats to academic freedom but to condemn the AAUP for expressing unpopular views. The AAUP’s statements in defense of academic freedom may be controversial, divisive, and upsetting to some of its members. But that’s exactly what should happen in a free society, where ideas are individually and collectively expressed and debated rather than censored. The government’s repression, not the AAUP’s moderate and thoughtful opinions, poses the real threat to academic freedom.

John K. Wilson is the author of eight books, including Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies, Trump Unveiled: Exposing the Bigoted Billionaire, and the forthcoming book The Attack on Academia.