AAUP President Todd Wolfson
Mike Ferguson/AAUP
Donors, state politicians and Trump administration officials are extorting universities to get them to give up their autonomy, the American Association of University Professors says.
“The federal government has used the threat of withholding billions of dollars in research funding, not to enforce civil rights law, but to demand sweeping changes to institutional governance, hiring, curriculum and campus policies,” AAUP President Todd Wolfson said Wednesday at a news conference.
The AAUP—the 111-year-old professional organization that wrote seminal definitions of academic freedom and tenure, and a left-leaning faculty union—released a new report Wednesday titled “Extorted Compliance: A Threat to Institutional Autonomy, Academic Freedom, and Shared Governance.” It recounts what it calls an attack on higher ed and faculty accelerating over the past decade as part of “a far-reaching effort spearheaded by forces on the political right to remake not only higher education but the entire political landscape, to some extent as part of a broader international antidemocratic movement.”
