The Collapse of AAUP Credibility and Why It Matters

by Matthew W. Finkin

Should a university professor be free to select teaching materials and to explore her subject of instruction in the classroom according to her best professional judgment? To pursue and publish research on subjects of her choosing? To address issues of public moment outside her field of study? To speak to the policies and decisions of her own institution? If so, what standards constrain her? And how should these questions be addressed? By individual bargains struck by her and her institution when she applies for appointment? By an institution-wide policy? If the latter results in different policies, one institution to another, the result might be more or less faculty freedom depending on the institution. If so, what would the consequences be for the ability of faculty to move from one institution to another? How do the answers to these questions bear on the larger community’s interest in the intellectual vitality of higher education?

These questions vexed the emerging academic profession in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They were addressed in 1915 by the newly formed American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in the issuance of a declaration demanding academic freedom, in the creation by it of a standing committee—its first, Committee A—to consider necessary refinements of policy under charging circumstances, and in the initiation of a process of investigation by impartial ad hoc committees into serious institutional departures from AAUP standards. The latter resulted in detailed reports, vetted with the parties beforehand to assure accuracy, that named and shamed miscreant administrations.

On this foundation, a quarter of a century later, the larger academic community arrived at a consensus on these questions—in a pact, the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure,¹ made between the AAUP and the Association of American Colleges (AAC), the then-leading organization of liberal arts colleges. Further policy refinements, as circumstances required, and case investigations to secure compliance remained in the hands of the AAUP.

The parties could not have anticipated at the time how successful that endeavor would be. The 1940 Statement has been endorsed by well over two hundred disciplinary societies and educational organizations. It is incorporated by references or in text in innumerable college and university policy compendia. It has been relied on by those courts that understand that institutional and faculty obligations as a matter of contract law draw sustenance from the norms and expectations of the profession.² In sum, the 1940 Statement has become the national norm, the uniformity of which is assured by the repose of the authority to interpret it in a standing body historically composed primarily of scholars with disciplinary stature and a commitment to principle, whose judgments are enforced by the weight of opinion and occasionally reinforced by the courts. Soft law, to be sure; but surprisingly effective.

Absent a common understanding enforced by a consensus of respected opinion, and given the rising demands today to sanction faculty for speech objectionable to groups on and off campus—students, donors, alumni, and activist organizations—university faculty would be left to twist in the shifting winds of political and social excitements, with protections varying only according to local circumstances.

The glue that held this system of private ordering together is the credibility of the AAUP: a general acknowledgment that its pronouncements were those of principle, well considered and well wrought—Judge J. Skelly Wright, a well-respected federal judge, spoke of AAUP documents as being noted for “thoroughness and scrupulous care”³—uninfluenced by organizational ends or exogenous policies. The question has now been raised of whether that is still so.

Before addressing it, an autobiographical note might be helpful. I joined the staff of the AAUP fresh out of law school in 1967. Over the next five years, I dealt with over a thousand complaints of violations of AAUP policy involving hundreds of institutions. I later served as AAUP’s general counsel, arguing to the courts for the normative role of AAUP policy, some of whose successes have been noted above. I chaired Committee A for a decade and then served it in a variety of other roles for another decade. In all, after a half century of intimate involvement, I believe I have a pretty good sense not only of the organization’s strengths and weaknesses but also of the unique and irreplaceable role it came to play. That said, the AAUP is not now what it was even a decade ago. I believe the academic community would be ill served were it to allow the AAUP to sail under false colors.

Return to the two pressures the AAUP had long resisted. Of distortion worked by the influence of organizational ends: in the 1970s, the AAUP allowed its campus chapters to become collective bargaining representatives. Some AAUP leaders at the time thought this would compromise the AAUP’s credibility. For decades, however, that did not happen. The Association was able to wall off its local activism from the deliberations of Committee A. The wall has now been dismantled. The AAUP has merged into the American Federation of Teachers, a step it had resisted since its founding. The current president has been nothing if not clear about the course the refashioned AAUP will chart, that it

cannot exist primarily to write reports and statements and conduct research on higher ed. . . . These are important, but they must be used as tools toward the goal of aggressively organizing academic workers of all types across the country.⁴

The distortion of principle for organizational ends has not yet been evidenced, even as Committee A now labors under that cloud. Not so the role of exogenous ends. The AAUP has been attacked for actions that the critics claim have abandoned academic freedom for other social or political goals that the organization values more.⁵ That is the question presented here.

The AAUP statements that the critics have taken on should be considered in detail, not for the result alone but for the manner of reasoning—in fidelity to principle and in the cogency of reasoning. The most salient are three in which the AAUP has: (1) absolved criticism of Zionism and Israel of any taint of antisemitism; (2) abandoned its prior position that systematic participation in the boycott of Israeli universities could threaten academic freedom; and (3) declared that adherence to the dictates of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) as a condition of faculty retention is consistent with academic freedom.

These actions confirm the critics’ conclusions: they reveal a body now driven by considerations other than fidelity to principle or even thoughtful analysis. As a result, the deep well of communal respect has been drained dry; the AAUP’s credibility exists no longer. This leaves the academic community bereft of that still small voice of principle that calls it to account, and it denies the courts a respected resource.

Racism and Antisemitism

In 2023, Committee A published a statement, “Legislative Threats to Academic Freedom: Redefinitions of Antisemitism and Racism.”⁶ It took a Florida law on racism as illustrative of efforts by “partisans” on the “Far Right” to distort history, to “invert the very meaning of racism,” to scrub a “now innocent nation of responsibility for ongoing racist or settler-colonial violence” in the “guise of protecting students from harm.” It then disparaged Florida’s law on antisemitism for treating criticism of Israel and Zionism under that head. The statement did not deal with the statutory text on race, but it did the text on antisemitism.

Of race: The Florida law defines as wrongful, as race discrimination, “to subject any student . . . to instruction that espouses, promotes, advances, implicates, or compels such student . . . to believe” any one of eight listed precepts. That, for example,

1. Members of one race, color, national origin, or sex are morally superior to members of another race, color, national origin, or sex.

. . .

3. A person’s moral character or status as either privileged or oppressed is necessarily determined by his or her race, color, national origin, or sex.⁷

At first blush it is not easy to see that declining to promote, advance, or espouse these odious precepts inverts the meaning of racism or “scrubs” a guilty (or by virtue of the law, a “now innocent”) nation of its historical responsibilities for “ongoing racist or settler-colonial violence”; nor is that lack of clarity dispelled by condemning the motives of those “partisans” who sought the law—and what law is not sought by its partisans?—who are accused of using the law as a “guise” for these nefarious purposes by cloaking them in what facially would certainly seem to be acceptable ends.

The significance of the personal attack on the law’s proponents, a jarring departure from Committee A’s historical practice, is more than a matter of style. Committee A has assigned personal blame for academic wrongdoing to academic administrators when the investigation in a particular case might require it, as that would be in the nature of the case; but it has not done so in the political realm. Committee A has functioned there as an arbiter of the principles implicated by political action, not as an adversary engaged in ad hominem polemics against the political actors. Even as the AAUP challenged the constitutionality of the loyalty oath, it never impugned the oath’s supporters.

In fact, the Florida law suffers from the same infirmity the AAUP saw in the loyalty oath and argued before the U. S. Supreme Court, with which the Court agreed. In Keyishian v. Board of Regents,⁸ the subject professors had to swear that they will not “willfully and deliberately advocate, advise, or teach the doctrine” of the desirability of the forceful overthrow of the government. The AAUP argued that these restrictions were an unconstitutionally vague infringement on the freedom to teach, which it claimed to be constitutionally protected. The Court agreed:

[D]oes the statute prohibit mere “advising” of the existence of the doctrine, or advising another to support the doctrine? Since “advocacy” of the doctrine of forceful overthrow is separately prohibited, need the person “teaching” or “advising” this doctrine himself “advocate” it? Does the teacher who informs his class about the precepts of Marxism or the Declaration of Independence violate this prohibition?⁹

Equally, does a teacher violate Florida’s law by exposing students to instruction that unlawfully “advances,” “implicates,” or “espouses” the precept in Prohibition 1 by assigning a speech by Louis Farrakhan in a course on contemporary social movements; or in Prohibition 2 by assigning an article from Der Stürmer in a course on modern German history? The First Amendment and academic freedom analyses and consequences are identical in both.

It should make no difference that the partisans for Florida’s law might claim to address the state’s racial divisions by shielding students from any racial affront in the classroom, any more than the partisans for the loyalty oath might claim to buttress academic freedom by assuring that students are taught by professors whose minds are free from the dictates of a foreign power. Whether driven by an expressed laudable aim or a surreptitiously reprehensible one, these laws are to be condemned on the ground that the AAUP argued and that the Keyishian Court accepted:

The Nation’s future depends up on leaders trained through wide exposure to that robust exchange of ideas which discovers truth “out of a multitude of tongues, [rather] than through any kind of authoritative selection.”¹⁰

It is well that this lesson be learned anew; but no more need be said. As the wrong is a matter of fact, not of motive, the statement does a disturbing disservice by an implicit message that motive might matter. This motif recurs in the committee’s later engagement with DEI.

Now, of antisemitism: The Florida law was oddly convoluted. It required that public institutions of higher education treat antisemitism the way they treat racial discrimination, by which logic an institution that ignores the latter can ignore the former. Further, as the expression of antisemitism is a matter of free speech, it is far from clear what Committee A’s address adds once the First Amendment is put in play. Nevertheless, the committee did choose to address the law, the bone of contention being its definition of antisemitism as including speech concerning the state of Israel. The statute defines “Examples of anti-Semitism related to Israel” as including:

1. Demonizing Israel by using the symbols and images associated with classic anti-Semitism to characterize Israel or Israelis, drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazi, or blaming Israel for all inter-religious or political tensions.

2. Applying a double standard to Israel by requiring behavior of Israel that is not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation, or focusing peace or human rights violations only on Israel.

3. Delegitimizing Israel by denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination and denying Israel the right to exist.¹¹

However, consistent with the law’s treatment of institutional responsibility as triggered only by discrimination, it goes on to provide that “criticism of Israel that is similar to criticism toward any other country may not be regarded as anti-Semitic.”

In terms of classroom instruction, the evil in this law is the same as the prohibition of subversive teaching in the 1960s: that a teacher of modern European history must be allowed to use the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as much as The Communist Manifesto, when germane to a course of instruction in, say, modern European history, such being the nature of the freedom to teach. The instructor should be equally free to post on her social media that she endorses the Damascus Protocol of the First Palestinian Congress of February 10, 1919. As it would have allowed only “Arabicized” Jews resident in Palestine to continue to reside there, her post would maintain that only their descendants should be allowed to remain. Such would be an exercise of her freedom of political speech as a citizen.

There the matter should have rested. Instead, Committee A dove into a controversy over the definition of antisemitism. It points to the text of a document, “The Jerusalem Declaration,” drafted by a “group of scholars” from several countries in counterpoint to a document of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, and praises the former for “seeking a clearer definition . . . [of antisemitism] that does not blur the distinction between antisemitic speech and political critique of Israel and Zionism” (emphasis added). In other words, it is Committee A’s position that there is a clear, unblurred distinction between antisemitic expression and political critiques of Israel and Zionism, which it would be wrong to conflate.

Professor Steven Lubet of the Northwestern University School of Law pointed out the threshold difficulty that Committee A “has no expertise in defining antisemitism.”¹² He is correct. Nothing in Committee A’s experience equips it to address the question; in its entire history no case, policy document, or report has ever dealt with antisemitism, save for the singular 1939 report on the dismissal of a Jewish professor of bacteriology by Saint Louis University for his support of the loyalist government of Spain—and then only glancingly.

Consequently, when Committee A decided to weigh in on what antisemitism “is,” the committee was out of its institutional depth. As a result, it maintains that there is an unblurred distinction in what is widely recognized to be inherently blurred. That reality is captured with clarity by Anthony Julius in his Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England (2010):

Israel is the only state in the world whose legitimacy is widely denied and whose destruction is publicly advocated and threatened; Israelis are the only citizens of a state whose indiscriminate murder is widely considered justifiable. Now, these sentiments are both sufficiently irrational and sufficiently serious in their practical implications, to merit urgent, considered reflection. And during the course of that process of reflection, the pondering of the relation between the history of anti-Semitism and the datum of Israel as the Jewish State is bound to arise. When reflecting upon the character of contemporary Israel-hatred, then, the question of anti-Semitism cannot be avoided.¹³

Consider the Florida law’s first example, the use of an anti-Jewish image to denote the State of Israel. There are troves of cartoons worldwide that do just that. One of the more innocuous, from a newspaper in Qatar (November 6, 2023), appears below. In it, a newspaper headline, “The World Implores Israel to Stop the Aggression in Gaza,” is read by a caricatured laughing Jew, with the Israeli flag on his hat.

The trope of the smiling Jew stands in a direct line of descent from the famous poster for the infamous Nazi film Jud Süß to Viktor Orbán’s poster of George Soros in the last Hungarian election. Without doubt, the cartoon makes a political statement about Israel. Without doubt, it uses an anti-Jewish slur to do it.

A year after the Committee A statement on antisemitism and racism, Stanford University created a body to study and report on antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias on its campus. It, too, noted that different definitions of antisemitism were in contention when speech critical of Zionism and Israel is involved—three definitions, in fact. But unlike Committee A, the Stanford committee took counsel from reality: “Regardless of which definition one prefers, the very fact that there are three definitions divided by how they regard the relationship between antisemitism and anti-Zionism illustrates the near impossibility of splitting one clearly from another.”¹⁴ No notice was taken of the AAUP.

There is more. Committee A’s statement on antisemitism and racism maintains that once criticism of Israel is taken out of the picture, nothing remains:

[W]hile the growth of antisemitism is a severe threat, it can and should be addressed under existing civil rights laws as religious or race discrimination.

As Professor Lubet has also pointed out, no law deals with antisemitism as such other than Florida’s badly crafted stab at it. Consequently, anti-Jewish action has to be brought under one or both of the only categories that extant law allows—namely, race and religion—though even these cannot capture all of what is involved, as David Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism: A History of a Way of Thinking (2023) so rigorously explores. Yet this state of affairs is taken by Committee A to obviate the need to think any further or deeper.

Let us step back to take the statement as a whole. It declares that antisemitism on campus, which it claims to be distinct from and not to be blurred with criticism of Israel or Zionism, is a growing and severe threat, but it declines to explore the nature of the threat, to examine its sources, or to consider why it is growing. It then concludes that inasmuch as existing law dealing with discrimination on grounds of race or religion is adequate to deal with a threat it neither defines nor examines, nothing more need be said or done. This from a body heretofore held in high regard for its “thoroughness and scrupulous care.”

The Boycott

Committee A’s engagement with the call to boycott Israeli universities proceeded in two phases: a declaration four-square in opposition, followed nineteen years later by an about-face. Before the latter is considered the former should be laid on the page.

1. Opposition

In 2005, the British Association of University Teachers (AUT) called on its members not to cooperate or collaborate with two Israeli universities. The resolutions drew international attention. In response, Committee A placed the matter on its agenda and the professional staff was asked to prepare a draft statement based on established policy for the committee’s consideration. The staff’s two-paragraph draft, which the committee adopted, condemned the AUT’s resolutions and called for their repeal:

Since its founding in 1915, the AAUP has been committed to preserving and advancing the free exchange of ideas among academics irrespective of governmental policies and however unpalatable those policies may be viewed. We reject proposals that curtail the freedom of teachers and researchers to engage in work with academic colleagues, and we reaffirm the paramount importance of the freest possible international movement of scholars and ideas.¹⁵

As the controversy continued, the committee responded by appointing a subcommittee to take a deeper dive. The subcommittee’s 2006 report, “On Academic Boycotts,”¹⁶ canvassed the issue in greater depth and in light of the texture of AAUP policy and experience. It set out a taxonomy of boycotts: “economic,” intended to injure the target financially; “symbolic and cultural,” intended to stigmatize the target, which might nevertheless have adverse consequences on third parties, for example, on the earning capacity of writers and artists; and “academic,” which “strike[s] directly at the free exchange of ideas.” Even as an academic boycott might call for non-cooperation only at the institutional level, leaving individuals to their own devices, it “inevitably involves a refusal to engage in academic discourse with the teachers and researchers” housed in the targeted institutions.

The report’s conclusion was categorical: “we oppose academic boycotts,” albeit by institutions, not by individuals. The nature of what was opposed was further refined, for even as individuals are free to decide not to cooperate with foreign scholars or their institutions, when these individuals act collectively and the refusal “takes the form of a systematic academic boycott, it threatens the principle of free expression and communication on which we collectively depend”; that is, in effect, such group action could come within the ambit of what Committee A opposed. However, the distinction between allowable individual and disallowed systematic group action was not further explained, nor was the line between them explored. It should have been. In the event, that obvious lacuna was not addressed in the committee’s later action, even as the position on it was explicitly reversed.

2. The Volte-Face

There matters stood until the summer of 2024, when the then Committee A approved a statement that expressly “supersedes” the position adopted nearly two decades before. The new “Statement on Academic Boycotts”¹⁷ explained its raison d’être: that the 2006 position “has been controversial, contested, and used to compromise academic freedom. We therefore believe that this position deserves reconsideration and clarification.”

The justification is disingenuous. Academic freedom has been “controversial” and “contested” ever since it was first demanded, yet that has never been taken to require reconsideration. As we have seen, the statement on racism and antisemitism has been soundly criticized, yet the committee has not reconsidered it.

This leaves the assertion that because the 2006 position has been “used to compromise academic freedom,” it should be reconsidered. That could provide a valid reason were it to mean that the 2006 report has been used to justify the threat or imposition of discipline. But the report makes no mention of there being any instance, in press accounts or complaints brought to the staff, of any faculty member having been disciplined or threatened with discipline simply for advocating for the boycott. On closer inspection, however, one sees that the assertion is not that the 2006 report has led to violations or abridgments of academic freedom, but rather that it has been used to “compromise” it. This must mean something other than a violation or an abridgment, but the 2024 statement breathes no hint of wherein that “use” resides.

As we cannot find a guide to the meaning of “used to compromise” in the 2024 statement, we are compelled to look elsewhere. The chair of Committee A, Professor Rana Jaleel, essayed the notion earlier, in an article entitled “Teaching Palestine,”¹⁸ which appeared in the AAUP’s journal in 2016. We cannot know whether her thinking played a role in what the committee meant by “used to compromise,” but her essay is the only document we have that could shed light on it.

Professor Jaleel pointed to legislation that disallows the state and its universities from doing business with businesses that observe the anti-Israel boycott or that require entities under legislative control, such as university pension funds, to divest from such businesses—in effect, laws that boycott the boycotters. She called on the AAUP to “push back” against these and all other laws that, she says, “cast any critique or less than favorable academic assessment of the Israeli state as discriminatory.” She demands this pushback “in the name of academic freedom.”

The sense seems be that legislative directives of this sort, even if at a remove from campus life, have the capacity to create an on-campus atmosphere so inimical to those who favor the boycott as to chill or, to use the 2024 statement’s phrase, “compromise” advocacy for it. In other words, what the AAUP said in 2006 has to be reconsidered because advocates for the boycott have been put at a forensic disadvantage.

The argument concerning legislative chill is logically flawed and empirically unsupported. By its logic, were the state to accede to the demands of the BDS movement and divest university investments in companies that do business in Israel, those faculty members who oppose the boycott and wish to say so would have had their academic freedom “compromised.” The only way that would not be the case would be to maintain that advocacy for BDS is protected by academic freedom while advocacy against it is not.

Nor is there any factual basis for the claim that such legislation has actually “been used to compromise” academic freedom in that chilling sense. Illinois law, for example, directs its state university retirement system to decline to invest in companies that observe the anti-Israel boycott and to divest from those that do.¹⁹ Yet at the University of Illinois, the BDS movement shows no sign of abatement.

Nevertheless, on these sinking sands the 2024 statement proceeds to ground a syllogism. The major premise: that violations of fundamental human rights abound across the globe, denying the right to life, liberty, religion, and much else. The minor premise: when faculty deploy the academic boycott against institutions of higher education in these countries in order to end or ameliorate these abusive conditions, academic freedom is not infringed. The conclusion: individual faculty members should be free to “make their own choices regarding their participation.”

The conclusion would seem to be in keeping with the 2006 report’s recognition, in contrast to a boycott by a university, of “the right of individual faculty or groups of academics not to cooperate with other individual faculty members or academic institutions with whom or with which they disagree.” The difference lies in the fact that the drafters in 2006 took up the necessary next question: if individuals or groups have a privilege to decline to cooperate with foreign institutions, may they do so “systematically,” as, say, an entire departmental faculty, even as they declare it to be a personal, not a departmental, action? If the institutional/individual distinction is to be maintained, that question cannot be avoided, and the 2006 report did not. It addressed that question in the sentence that follows the allowance of individual action: “[W]hen such noncooperation takes the form of a systematic academic boycott, it threatens the principles of free expression and communication on which we collectively depend.”

The 2006 report did not comment on what it took for the effort to be wrongly systematic, where the line will have been crossed. Even as more was needed, the sense of it seems to be this: a department may not adopt a statement that as a department it condemns Israel as a “racist, colonial, apartheid state” and declares non-cooperation by the department with any Israeli university, institute, or academic program, even as members of the department may announce non-cooperation individually. But if nearly the whole of the department’s faculty join as a group in a common pronouncement of non-cooperation, the 2006 report would seem to see it as a systematic boycott, one in which the whole is larger than the sum of its individual participants—it being of no moment that the collective statement is accompanied by a statement that its signatories are not speaking or acting for the department. Absent more in the 2006 report, this would seem to be the sort of systematic boycott the report disallowed: that the department was not identified as the actor is a distinction without a difference. The impact on students—undergraduate and graduate, present or prospective—who wish to pursue academic work in Israel, or on incumbent or potential faculty members who wish to engage in collaborative projects there, would seem to be as much as if the department had acted in its name. The group pronouncement would bear much the same chilling effect that Professor Jaleel claimed rendered anti-boycott legislation wrongful, save that here the impact drenches the entire department from within, whereas legislation stands at a considerable remove outside of it.

The 2024 statement declines to address the 2006 treatment of the systematic boycott directly, but it does so by indirection, and emphatically:

Committee A therefore holds that individual faculty members and students should be free to weigh, assess, and debate the specific circumstances giving rise to calls for systematic academic boycotts and to make their own choices regarding their participation in them. [emphasis added]

This choice is asserted to be a matter of academic freedom.

More on the grounding in academic freedom in a moment, but it pays to stress that the “therefore” is preceded by no engagement with the 2006 report’s reservation, nor accordingly is any attempt made to reconcile the 2024 statement’s explanatory grounding for the need for change—to dispel the “compromising” (or chilling) effect the opposition to the boycott allegedly has had—with the 2006 report’s opposition to the systematic group boycott apparently predicated on that very ground.

The 2024 statement then extends academic freedom to participation in a specific kind of boycott. Unlike the taxonomy of boycotts given in 2006, the 2024 statement would seem to distinguish a primary boycott, an infliction of economic or reputational cost imposed on an actor to sanction the actor’s wrongful action, from a secondary boycott, where a party that has done no wrong is made a target of financial or reputational harm because it has a relationship to the wrongfully behaving actor in order to pressure the non-actor to pressure the wrongdoer.

The 2024 statement first embraces the secondary boycott full-throatedly and then retreats from it without a word acknowledging that it is doing so or explaining why. It starts out by reciting a litany of fundamental human rights violations in global terms and states that faculty can support a boycott to “advance the . . . fundamental rights [from ‘arbitrary arrest or detention,’ etc.] of colleagues and students who are living . . . under circumstances that violate . . . one or more of those rights”; that is, faculty can engage in secondary boycotts of institutions housed in countries whose governments violate rights against arbitrary arrest, detention, etc., for no reason other than that they are housed there and that these violations affect faculty and students. But in its concluding sentence, the 2024 statement would restrict academic freedom to participation in the primary boycott:

Academic boycotts should target only institutions of higher education that themselves violate academic freedom or the fundamental rights upon which academic freedom depends. [emphasis added]

The statement makes no effort to connect the two assertions: It says that individuals should be free to boycott on their own account per se, which fairly implies they may support a primary or a secondary boycott, but especially the latter in light of the litany of human rights abuses it recites that cannot be attributed to the targeted universities—arbitrary arrest and detention, for example. But it then says that academic freedom extends only to participation in a primary boycott. The way it reads, a professor has the academic freedom to engage in a systematic primary boycott, but not a systematic secondary one, without a word to explain why as a matter of academic freedom that would be so.

A secondary boycott, if allowable, could rest on findings of human rights violations by the Israeli government adequately documented by well-respected neutral bodies. The targeted universities need not be shown to have engaged in any wrongdoing. Not so the primary boycott. If Israeli universities are to be boycotted for their discrimination against Arab students and faculty—a matter of much controversy²⁰—the nature and extent of that wrongdoing should be found sufficient to justify the action. Unlike the process of AAUP investigation, wherein wrongdoing would be the subject of inquiry, the launching of a systematic primary boycott need not be founded on any process to assure the accuracy of the allegations, nor does it provide any opportunity for the targeted institution to defend itself. The issues of accuracy and fairness inherent in the primary boycott pass without Committee A’s notice.

Nor did the 2024 statement attempt to explain how academic freedom applies. The 2006 report saw the boycott as “threatening” the freedom of “free communication,” i.e., the liberty of academic collaboration that the AAUP’s core document—the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure—assured. That rationale could not apply to the reverse, to participation in a boycott. If academic freedom applies to participation, it would have to be grounded in the 1940 Statement’s protection for political speech; but that liberty draws no distinction between a primary or secondary target inasmuch as both are matters of political expression and action.

Suffice it to say, the freedom of political expression, no less than of disciplinary and intramural expression, is subject to ethical norms: professors do not “discriminate or harass colleagues,” says the AAUP’s Statement on Professional Ethics,²¹ and they “respect and defend the free inquiry of associates,” no less in political speech than in addressing intramural issues. The 2006 report objected to the systematic group boycott apparently on the ground that, akin to a boycott by the university, a systematic group boycott threatens (or “compromises”) the capacity of colleagues freely to decide what academic collaborations were best suited to their research and teaching. The 2024 statement emphatically rejects that reasoning, without a word of explanation.

Let us step back to take the statement as a whole. In 2024, Committee A chose to reconsider a matter it had previously addressed in categorical terms anchored in the 1940 Statement’s guarantee of the freedom to research and teach. The reasons given for reconsideration are threadbare, at best. The result is a tangle of inconsistencies and begged questions, with no reference to—let alone inquiry into—the role played by freedom of research and teaching, on which the committee’s position rested a generation before.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

A number of universities have adopted policies governing faculty appointment, retention, and promotion geared to a sociopolitical end, i.e., to achieve “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI). These policies would seem to rest, expressly or tacitly, on the fact that the student population served by the institution includes members of numerous minority groups, some long ignored, slighted, or discriminated against societally and, possibly, by the institution itself, and that it should be part of the university’s mission to address what it conceives to be these groups’ needs and aspirations. That end is to be achieved by requiring every faculty member, as a condition of employment, retention, or promotion, to further that aspect of the institution’s mission in their teaching, research, and service. Toward that end, every candidate for reappointment, tenure, and promotion is to submit a statement explaining—and, for incumbent faculty, detailing—how, as one such policy puts it, the individual has “facilitated a diverse and equitable community in your teaching, mentoring, outreach, research, and/or service.”

On January 21, 2025, well after Committee A addressed the compatibility of DEI with academic freedom, President Trump issued an executive order, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” directing federal agencies to dismantle DEI policies. The executive order did not define what DEI meant, but it required institutions of higher education that receive federal funds and that participate in federal student loan assitance to comply with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (2023). It is not clear at present what more these institutions are expected to do beyond complying with the law. The interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Ed Martin, has gone much further. He has demanded that Georgetown University’s law school discontinue instruction involving DEI.²² It should be the case as a matter of constitutional law that the federal government cannot coerce universities to coerce their faculties in teaching when their teaching is germane to a subject of instruction and adheres to professional standards of care and ethics. That, however, need not be pursued here. Committee A did not address the legal aspects of DEI policies. It took up the policy’s compatibility with academic freedom. So shall we.

To its advocates, DEI is well within the prerogative of a university, especially when acting congruently with the sentiments of its faculty, to emphasize that aspect of its mission and to implement it in that way. To its critics, a DEI statement is parlously close to a loyalty oath and in execution is inimical to academic freedom. As Ralph Fuchs, a former AAUP president, put it while the loyalty oath controversy raged, even giving due allowance for the institution’s prerogative to chart its mission—“the essentiality of autonomy for academic institutions”—the “core of the matter” remains the “freedom of individual faculty against control of thought or utterance from either within or without” the institution.²³

Had Committee A taken up DEI in keeping with its customary process of policy consideration in such a weighty matter, it would have: assembled the data on what these policies actually provided, how widespread they were, and how they were being administered; engaged with the arguments on the relationship of DEI to academic freedom in the literature and in the deliberations of faculties, including those that refused to go down that road; and provided a clear, dispassionate analysis of how DEI stacked up against the 1940 Statement’s commitment to freedom of research, teaching, and political engagement. It did nothing of the kind. Instead, it launched an aggressive defense of DEI, accompanied by a strident attack on its critics, in all of six paragraphs and three conclusory recommendations. Each bears brief synopsis before the substance of the statement is addressed.²⁴

1. The DEI Statement in Summary

The first paragraph recites the AAUP’s support for affirmative action, which includes the promotion of diversity not only in the composition of the faculty but also in the production of knowledge, of opening “entirely new vistas of inquiry that were not possible without it” (emphasis added).

The second paragraph folds DEI criteria into this “broader vision,” thereby allowing “DEI criteria in faculty evaluation,” including the use of statements that “require faculty members to address their skills, competence, and achievements regarding DEI in teaching, research, and service” (emphasis added). It notes an AAUP survey in 2022 indicating that 21.5% of four-year institutions have included DEI criteria in their tenure policies and that another 39% were considering it.

The third paragraph notes the objection to DEI on academic freedom grounds. The response then reads in its entirety: “This committee rejects the notion that the use of DEI criteria for faculty evaluation is categorically incompatible with academic freedom” when “implemented appropriately” in accordance with “standards of faculty governance.”

The fourth paragraph goes on at length to explore the role of the faculty in setting and applying standards for faculty performance and evaluation. It argues that DEI is in keeping with that traditional role when the policy is faculty-approved.

The fifth paragraph attacks critics of DEI who use “sweeping or abstract criticism” of it to misrepresent, “often deliberately,” what it really does, which, to repeat, is to ensure “teaching, research, and service that responds to the needs of a diverse global public” (emphasis added). Faculty members are free to voice dissent, but “when an appropriate larger group”—a faculty committee, one would assume—adopts an “educational policy” by which an individual’s performance is measured toward these ends, the policy must be adhered to.

The sixth paragraph pursues the critics of DEI with greater vehemence. These are treated in the same fashion as the “partisans” criticized in the 2023 statement on racism and antisemitism: that attacks on DEI have gone “hand in hand with partisan efforts to restrict or ban” the teaching of some subjects and that

attacks on DEI have played an integral part in the partisan political playbook to turn back the clock on advances that have been made toward the goal of diversity in the faculty, student body, and areas of study.

The statement concludes with three recommendations: that DEI can be declared to be part of the institution’s mission; that faculty should be involved at all stages in developing the policy; and, critically, that “[m]eaningful DEI faculty work should be evaluated as part of the core faculty duties of teaching, research, and professional service.”

Before addressing the statement’s rejection of DEI’s incompatibility with academic freedom when “appropriately implemented,” the manner in which the statement sets the stage should be noted: it stresses widespread acceptance; it denigrates those who are of a contrary mind; and it places dispositive weight on faculty approval. Let us look to each.

The statement starts out by noting the extent to which DEI policies have been adopted or considered for adoption; but it declines to note that the same staff report also found that over 39% of the institutions surveyed had decided not to consider such policies, nor that several months before Committee A issued its statement, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard rescinded its DEI policy, as did MIT. The reasons for Harvard’s and MIT’s actions were never inquired into, let alone addressed.

The attack then impugns the motives of those critical of DEI. They are not named, but some might be noted. In August 2022, the Academic Freedom Alliance, scarcely a partisan for the repression of teaching, issued a statement in opposition to DEI.²⁵ Committee A declined to acknowledge it. Brian Leiter, a distinguished professor of law and philosophy at the University of Chicago, also scarcely a partisan for the repression of teaching, found fatal fault with DEI on constitutional grounds, which Committee A declined to note.²⁶ The author, who would like to believe he is not a partisan for the repression of teaching, unpacked the University of Illinois’s DEI policy on academic freedom grounds the year before Committee A spoke; but this, too, was ignored.²⁷ Shortly before Committee A acted but with ample time for it to take into account what was said, David Rabban of the University of Texas Law School, a former chair of Committee A and AAUP general counsel, published a comprehensive work on academic freedom and the First Amendment—Academic Freedom: From Professional Norm to First Amendment Right (2024)—that provided just the sort of dispassionate assessment one would have expected of Committee A; he concluded that, on balance, the opponents had the better of it.²⁸ Rabban is not a partisan for repression of teaching. Committee A took no note of his work.

The statement then makes faculty approval of the policy key to its endorsement of DEI. For academic freedom purposes, faculty approval is and should be irrelevant; the heavy reliance placed on it is fraught with mischief. As a matter of sound institutional governance, faculty are accorded a primary role in the development and adoption of educational policies bearing on instruction, research, and faculty status; a faculty is accordingly expected to understand and respect academic freedom. But faculties can and have failed in that regard.²⁹ When one does, Committee A’s role is to correct the error, and it has.³⁰

It is worth noting that a number of faculty members subject to the loyalty oath supported it, and a larger number were indifferent.³¹ The AAUP did not consider the depth of faculty support for the loyalty oath vel non to have any bearing on the academic freedom consequences of it. The reason is that the abridgment of academic freedom is a matter of fact irrespective of the status or motive of those effecting or acquiescing in it. The way Committee A has cast it, a DEI policy identical in every word would or would not abridge academic freedom depending only on the ideological or political proclivities of a majority of a bare quorum of “an appropriate larger group.” Faculty liberties cannot be made to hang by so precarious a thread. It should be enough to say of the right to exercise academic freedom what the Supreme Court said of the right to exercise freedom of thought and speech: it depends on no majority, it hinges on the outcome of no vote.³²

2. DEI and Academic Freedom

The most arresting feature of the DEI statement is that although it cabins the acceptability of a DEI policy to its “appropriate” implementation, it says nothing, not a word, to inform the reader of what that “appropriate” implementation is or would be. What does appear from the text of these policies is that DEI functions in a two-step process. First, those groups qualifying for DEI treatment must be identified: some, but not other races (Black, but not white?); some, but not other religious affiliations (poor rural evangelicals, but not wealthy urban high church Episcopalians?); some, but not other ethnic origins (Mexico, but not Poland?); some genders, but not others (heterosexual females, but not heterosexual males?); and so on. Teaching, research, or service involving groups not meriting DEI designation will not be accorded DEI credit. As the Stanford report on antisemitism observed, this binary formulation reduces “complex social and political phenomena to slogans in utter contradiction to the university’s mission of critical inquiry.”³³

Second, while it might be enough to teach and research regarding a designated group, when it comes to service activity, engagement on a designated group basis would be a necessary but not a sufficient condition for DEI credit. The specific engagement must further interests that those who administer the policy find concordant with the goals they set—not of diversity alone, but of equity and inclusion as well. Most often one would coincide with the other, but not invariably.

Before pursuing that, what academic freedom means in relation to these obligations should be briefly addressed. The 1940 Statement assures the instructor freedom of teaching and research. The freedom to teach, Edward Shils observed,

means the freedom to teach in ways which the teacher regards as effective as long as respect is shown for the rules of reasonable discourse, for the dignity of the student, and for general rules of propriety.³⁴

The critical point is that the pedagogical choices to which the freedom attaches—selection of the materials to assign, of illustrations and examples to emphasize, of questions to explore—are for the instructor to make in exercise of her professional judgment.

So, too, of the freedom to research. In his 1972 annual report as president of Yale, Kingman Brewster characterized the guarantee of this liberty as a reflection of the “inner direction” of scholarship, asserting that scholars should be

guided by their own intellectual curiosity, insight, and conscience. In the development of their ideas they should not be looking over their shoulders either in hope of favor or in fear of disfavor from anyone other than the judgment of an informed and critical posterity.³⁵

What Theodore Caplow and Reece McGee said in the midst of the last century retains its vitality today:

The ideal of academic freedom includes the assumption that men [and now women] working on the fringes of established knowledge will often dissent from the truths of the majority, will appear unreasonable, eccentric, or disloyal, or will be unable to explain to others their motives for pursuing a particular line of effort.³⁶

It is, as Abraham Flexner put it in 1939, the right to pursue “useless knowledge” geared to no external measure.³⁷

The DEI obligation has to be mapped onto these core liberties. In some disciplines it is conceivable, even likely, that the instructor’s free choice of teaching matter and research subject will coincide or overlap with a group given DEI designation—e.g., in urban sociology, criminology, health policy, etc. As such an instructor would secure DEI credit for doing what she otherwise would, there would be no compromise of her academic freedom. Some disciplines have no DEI connection—particle physics, theoretical mathematics, geochemistry. Instructors in these fields are compelled accordingly to satisfy DEI requirement by service activities if they wish to be retained; more on that below. There remain disciplines in which researchers and teachers could add a DEI component, though doing so would be contrary to their professional judgment. Consider an instructor in musicology fascinated with Ralph Vaughan Williams’s idea that a composer might “have a special message for his own people,” as he had put it, and who chooses to pursue what Williams meant by a deep engagement with his work. She has no interest in William Grant Still—or Bedřich Smetana, for that matter. Not that Still (or Smetana) would be unworthy of study, but he is not the composer of her intense and singular interest. Unless she alters her research design or course material to satisfy her DEI obligation by paying “enough” attention to him or a like minority composer, in keeping with the institution’s roster of accepted DEI designations—possibly including Smetana if being Czech qualifies for diversity designation—she would be required to compile a satisfactory compensatory dossier of extracurricular DEI service in order to secure tenure.

It pays to stress that the pressure she and all others in similar situations face is a political one. Nothing in musicology tells her that unless she includes a composer from a designated racial or ethnic group, she would be derelict in teaching or research, and even less that she might suffer the loss of her position for the failure to do so. It is the “new vista” that DEI adds, not “possible otherwise” precisely because it is not founded in any disciplinary dictate or tenet: it is made “otherwise possible” by an institutional mandate.

Those unable or unwilling to adjust their research and teaching to secure DEI credit have no alternative but to engage in approved DEI-related service activities, intramurally or in larger civil society. Here, too, what is credited vel non reveals the political nature of the policy and the infringement on freedom it causes.

Most institutions include “service” as a component of faculty evaluation. Inasmuch as universities rely on faculty to perform many administrative functions, commonly in committee, an incumbent’s willingness to perform these tasks is taken to be part of the obligations of office. Service can be counted as well by the incumbent’s activities in extra-institutional disciplinary bodies and the like that add stature to the individual and luster to the institution. The idea of service for DEI purposes is far more encompassing: it includes participation in outreach efforts on campus or in the larger community, all manner of civic engagement geared specifically to advance the goals of DEI. This abridges the freedom of political and civic association, or non-association, irrespective of any further parsing of the obligation.

Nevertheless, such a parsing is instructive. Assume our geochemist, unable to compile a record of DEI activity in research and teaching and so needful of a DEI record in civic outreach, concludes that the goals of Marcus Garvey’s long-neglected Universal Negro Improvement Association would have solved the American Dilemma had it been pursued, and thus seeks to establish a campus chapter. As that effort would address an approved racial group, it would seem to be worthy of DEI credit; but as the movement’s goal is to repatriate African Americans, albeit voluntarily, this civic engagement would be unlikely to receive DEI credit due to its failure to meet the “inclusion” requirement.

Assume, our musicologist, unable to complete a satisfactory DEI dossier in research and teaching, takes an interest in a poor, rural, evangelical sect and seeks better to integrate its adherents into mainstream society by persuading the sect’s young women to pursue a higher education. The instructor learns that a tenet of their belief is the total rejection of abortion, which the instructor must accept and advocate if she is to gain the group’s trust. Even though her civic engagement is in support of the female members of a marginalized religious group, she would be denied DEI credit because the end she sought, by denying women reproductive choice, would be inconsistent with the “equality” component of DEI.

If the DEI policy means what it says, that every faculty member subject to it must satisfy the DEI obligation as a condition of retention, the university must lose what all in the field agree are promising scholars destined for remarkable achievements, not for want of excellence in research in any way, nor for want of excellence in teaching in any way, but for failure to satisfy the institution’s political agenda.

Let us step back to take the DEI statement as a whole. Committee A has endorsed a policy that allows professors to be put to a Hobson’s choice: either compromise their judgment in teaching or research, or engage in officially approved political or ideological expression and association. In public universities it is difficult to conceive that this could possibly withstand constitutional muster, nor can it be reconciled with the 1940 Statement’s assurance of professional and personal liberty. Committee A flatly “rejects” that conclusion, but it does so without any engagement with the 1940 Statement, the source of its authority; in fact, the 1940 Statement makes no appearance in this document. Instead, the committee attributes its support to the “needs of a diverse global public” without a moment’s reflection on the fact that if academic freedom can be sacrificed on that altar, the door is opened to any authority vested with legal control of the institution to declare what those needs are and to condition faculty retention on fulfilling them.

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It seems inevitable that sometime, somewhere, one or more instructors will be not be reappointed for no other reason than the failure to satisfy a DEI requirement. It seems equally inevitable that at least one housed in a public university will contest the decision on constitutional grounds and, in that event, that the AAUP will appear before the court as amicus curiae. In that case, it would be expected that the AAUP will address the court much along this line:

We appear before this court as the repository of a century’s thoughtful engagement with the meaning and significance of academic freedom, to bring our considered judgment, expressed in the statement on “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Criteria for Faculty Evaluation,” to the court’s attention and to argue in support of it.

To which the only frank response a court could make is: “You are the successor in title; but no longer in principle, spirit, or scrupulous care.”

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Matthew W. Finkin is the Swanlund Chair and Center for Advanced Study Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He holds the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Prize, honorary doctorates from three European universities, and the rank of Chevalier in the Ordre des Palmes Académique conferred by the government of France for his work in comparative labor law. He is the co-author, with Robert Post, of For the Common Good: Principles of American Academic Freedom (Yale Univ. Press, 2009).

Topics: Reflections & Dialogues • Israel Initiative

1. AAUP, 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure; hereinafter, the “1940 Statement.”

2. Some of the leading cases are AAUP v. Bloomfield College, 322 A.2d 846 (N.J. Ch. Div. 1974) aff’d as mod. 346 A.2d 846 (N.J. App. Div. 1975); Browzin v. Catholic University, 527 F.3d 843 (D.C. Cir. 1975); Drans v. Providence College, 383 A.2d 1053 (R.I. 1978) judgment vacated and remanded, 410 A.2d 972 (R.I. 1980); Krotkoff v. Goucher College, 585 F.2d 675 (4th Cir. 1978); Saxe v. Bd. of Trustees of Metro St. College, 179 P.3d 67 (Colo. App. 2007) on remand 29 IER Cases 1996 (Colo. Dist. Ct. 2009); McAdams v. Marquette University, 914 N.W.2d 708 (Wis. 2018); Crenshaw v. Erskine College, 850 S.E.2d 1 (S.C. 2020); Wortis v. Trustees of Tufts College, 228 N.E.3d 1163 (Mass. 2024).

3. Browzin v. Catholic University, 527 F.2d 843, n. 8 at 898 (D.C. Cir. 1975). I represented the AAUP as amicus curiae in the case and, with leave of the court, argued before it.

4. Remarks of Todd Wolfson in Rotua Lumbantobing, Gabriel Winant, and Todd Wolfson, “Do Much More to Meet This Moment: An Interview with United Faculty for the Common Good,” n+1, June 11, 2024. See also Ryan Quinn, “The AAUP’s New President Is Not Staying Neutral,” Inside Higher Ed, October 30, 2024.

5. Tom Ginsburg, “Can Academic Freedom Survive the AAUP?,” Chronicle of Higher Education, February 18, 2025; and Garrett Shanley, “A Firestorm Against the AAUP: What’s the Best Way to Defend Academic Freedom?,” Chronicle of Higher Education, December 6, 2024.

6. AAUP, “Legislative Threats to Academic Freedom: Redefinitions of Antisemitism and Racism,” 2023.

7. CS/HB7 (2022) adding Fla. Stat. § 760.10(8)(a).

8. 385 U.S. 589 (1967).

9. Keyishian v. Board of Regents, id. at 600.

10. Keyishian v. Board of Regents, id. at 603.

11. CS/HB 741 (2019) adding Fla. Stat. § 1000.05(7)(b).

12. Steven Lubet, “University Professors’ Organization Misunderstands the Nature of Antisemitism,” The Hill, August 24, 2022.

13. Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2010), p. 583 (references omitted).

14. “It’s in the Air”: Antisemitism and Anti-Israel Bias at Stanford, and How to Address It, report from the Subcommittee on Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias of the Jewish Advisory Committee, Stanford University, May 31, 2024. It appears that Harvard has followed suit; see Vimal Patel, “Harvard Adopts a Definition of Antisemitism for Discipline Cases,” New York Times, January 23, 2025.

15. “The AAUP Opposes Academic Boycotts,” Academe 91, no. 4 (2005): 57.

16. Joan Wallach Scott et al., “On Academic Boycotts,” Academe 92, no. 5 (2006): 39–43.

17. AAUP, “Statement on Academic Boycotts,” 2024.

18. Rana Jaleel, “Teaching Palestine,” Academe 102, no. 6 (2016): 22–25.

19. 40 ILCS 5/1-110.16.

20. A statement issued by Tel Aviv University in May 2024 noted that the Arab population of the student body was 16%—a significant figure, but less than the Arab population as a whole—and pointed to several programs it had launched for the recruitment and support of Arab students. Tel Aviv University, “Setting the Record Straight: The Truth about Tel Aviv University,” May 9, 2024.

21. AAUP, Statement on Professional Ethics, 1966.

22. David French, “The MAGA Culture War Comes for Georgetown Law,” New York Times, March 9, 2025.

23. Ralph Fuchs, “Academic Freedom—Its Basic Philosophy, Function, and History,” in Academic Freedom: The Scholar’s Place in Modern Society, ed. Hans Baade and Robinson Everett (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana Publications, 1964), p. 3 (emphasis added).

24. AAUP, “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Criteria for Faculty Evaluation,” 2024.

25. Academic Freedom Alliance, statement in opposition to DEI, August 22, 2022. The Academic Freedom Alliance was created primarily by a group of faculty at Princeton. See the Academic Freedom Alliance website, https://academicfreedom.org/.

26. Brian Leiter, “The Legal Problems with Diversity Statements,” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 30, 2020; Leiter, “Diversity Statements Are Still in Legal Peril,” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 1, 2022.

27. Matthew W. Finkin, “Diversity! Mandating Adherence to a Secular Creed,” Journal of Free Speech Law 2, no. 2 (2023): 451–82.

28. David Rabban, Academic Freedom: From Professional Norm to First Amendment Right (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2024).

29. See, e.g., Felkner v. Rhode Island College, 203 A.3d 433 (R.I. 2019) (that faculty placed an impermissible political test on student’s academic work stated an issue for trial); McAdams v. Marquette University, 914 N.W.3d 708 (Wisc. 2018) (holding that a faculty hearing committee’s finding of misconduct was contrary to the 1940 Statement).

30. E.g., “Academic Freedom and Tenure: The University of Arizona,” AAUP Bulletin 49, no. 4 (1963): 336–43.

31. Jane Sanders, Cold War on the Campus: Academic Freedom at the University of Washington, 1946–64 (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1979), p. 166.

32. West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 638 (1943).

33. Stanford Subcommittee on Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias, “It’s in the Air,” p. 82.

34. Edward Shils, “Do We Still Need Academic Freedom?,” American Scholar 62, no. 2 (1993): 190 (emphasis added).

35. Kingman Brewster, Jr., “On Tenure,” AAUP Bulletin 58, no. 4 (1972): 382 (reprinting the 1971–72 report as president of Yale, the quotation borrowing the phrase from David Riesman).

36. Theodore Caplow and Reece J. McGee, The Academic Marketplace (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1965), p. 190.

37. Abraham Flexner, The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2017 [1939]).