BY VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY AAUP

The Vanderbilt University chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) registers its profound disagreement with the Vanderbilt Board of Trust’s “Declaration of First Principles” (July 29, 2026) as well as its opposition to the Department of Education’s “National Call to Action to University Presidents and Governing Boards” (August 3, 2026).  The Declaration and the Call show the Vanderbilt University upper administration acting in concert with a federal government that under the second Trump administration has systematically attacked, undermined, and extorted institutions of higher education as part of what the AAUP calls “a larger assault on democratic governance, civil society, and knowledge itself.”

As Vanderbilt faculty, we are extremely concerned to see our university act as a test case and model for the Trump administration’s new educational authoritarianism.  A model that twists academic freedom into an administrative compliance scheme, treats shared governance as a rhetorical flourish rather than the university’s longstanding order, uses “institutional neutrality” as a gag rule for academic leadership, and presents universities as little more than brute mechanisms for economic growth and military domination.  It is certainly unconscionable that the chancellor and BoT bypassed Vanderbilt’s “robust model of shared University governance” in producing the “Declaration” with no faculty participation.¹  However, what truly dismays us is to see Vanderbilt playing a key role in McMahon’s “reform” narrative, which leans on the Vanderbilt Report² released earlier this summer and urges all institutions to publish “statements of principle” addressing admissions, speech and protest, departmental politicization, affordability, grade inflation, foreign influence, and “American interests.”  Vanderbilt’s Declaration supplies a comprehensive framework for all of these targets. Vanderbilt’s chancellor was not reported to be among the four university “leaders” who consulted with McMahon on the Call, but the striking concordance between that Call and the VU Declaration means that whether or not Chancellor Daniel Diermeier was in the room, the Vanderbilt upper administration has offered an internal managerial toolkit with our university’s imprimatur to complement McMahon’s politicized demand for university compliance.  And while the Declaration claims to be above political ideology, it was clearly written to be responsive to a political demand.  We do not claim secret coordination (nor do we rule it out), but we find it impossible to treat these documents as unrelated.

The Declaration and the Call are a one-two punch aimed at academic freedom and shared university governance.  Cornerstones of the American higher educational system, academic freedom claims for faculty the right to research and teach guided by their expertise rather than as directed by administrators, politicians, donors, or other entities; shared governance requires cooperation between administrators and faculty in overseeing the university, especially in educational issues where only faculty have the requisite expertise to decide curriculum, methods of instruction, hiring and promotion, and so forth, in their fields of academic study.  While the Declaration takes aim at faculty and academic units and the Call at universities as a whole, they have one shared impulse: to deny scholarly and academic self-determination, usurping power from those qualified to hold it and asserting control from above.

We call upon Vanderbilt’s trustees and senior administrators to rescind the Declaration.  We believe that all universities should have strong statements of their values and purpose, but those principles must be developed and shaped free from external coercion and by the faculty whose research and teaching drives the university.  Shared governance must be reasserted and its procedures reviewed by appropriate faculty bodies and revised as needed to ensure meaningful faculty participation in governance.  Faculty should be primarily responsible for overseeing curriculum and ensuring scholarly standards.  Procedures for hiring, promotion, unit-level reorganizations, and other issues regarding academic units, should be assessed and revised by faculty to protect due process and the self-determination of faculty and academic units.

1. Not only were faculty not consulted, we were not even notified of the BoT’s actions.  The BoT published “The University and Its Purpose: A Declaration of First Principles” online on June 29, 2026.  Over the next few days, the statement was posted to Vanderbilt’s X account and described in a Forbes op-ed.  The first and only communication about the “Declaration” from university administrators to the Vanderbilt community was a two-line snippet in the “VU in the News” section that closes the monthly “MyVU News” email newsletter: “Forbes: The University and Its Purpose: A Declaration of First Principles.  Chancellor Daniel Diermeier authored its piece.”
2. The “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences,” now commonly referred to as the “Vanderbilt Report,” was commissioned by the chancellors of Vanderbilt University and Washington University and blamed falling public trust in higher education on academic scholarship in the humanities and humanistic social sciences (rather than on federal and state defunding and political attacks).  The report has been widely condemned and discredited for its obvious political motivations and shoddy scholarship.  The VU and WashU AAUP chapters released a joint statement against the Report.

This statement was published first on the Vanderbilt AAUP website on August 11.  A .pdf version may be downloaded here.