The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) once stood as the guardian of higher education’s integrity. When it was founded in 1915, its mission was simple yet profound: protect academic freedom, defend tenure, and ensure that scholarship—not politics—guided the work of faculty. For generations, it provided a vital buffer against political intimidation, ensuring that the academy could function as a space for rigorous inquiry and civil disagreement. But today, the organization has abandoned stewardship in favor of ideology. It is no longer primarily a defender of free inquiry. It has become a political advocacy group, increasingly indistinguishable from the activist left.
Nothing illustrates this drift more clearly than the recent words of AAUP President Todd Wolfson, an associate professor of journalism and media studies who is on leave from Rutgers University. When asked in a recent interview with Inside Higher Ed whether he regretted any tactics employed by the organization in recent years, Wolfson replied:
Certainly, I have regrets. Everyone makes mistakes. I don’t know if this is a regret, [but] I think that our sector is not fully ready to respond to the real threats. Our sector needs to be able to take militant job actions and other sorts of actions as this issue continues to ramp up.
We won’t do that if we don’t have the ability to do it at a scale that makes it powerful and meaningful and effective. And so I think that’s the thing we are working on, and anything we do—and I want to underscore this—would be nonviolent and peaceful.
But, nonetheless, we need to be able to militantly show how concerned we are—not only over our own institutions and our own jobs and our students, but also around higher education and the future of our democracy.
Wolfson tried to soften the blow by sprinkling in words like “peaceful” and “nonviolent.” But language matters, and he openly called for militant action.
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The word militant is not a synonym for concern or resolve. It has a meaning that is well understood by those on the left, and that is “combative and aggressive in support of a political or social cause, and typically favoring extreme, violent, or confrontational methods.” Oxford defines this word as “using, or willing to use, force or strong pressure to achieve your aims, especially to achieve social or political change” and ScienceDirect, a source faculty rely on daily, defines militancy as “a form of active resistance that escalates from initial resentment toward a government response, ultimately leading to defiance and potentially armed insurgency.”
Wolfson was sharing his authentic views here, and invoking the term militant is not the language of professional stewardship. This is the language of confrontation, escalation, and even violence. And it is coming from the president of the nation’s leading faculty organization. Faculty leaders know this and internalize its sentiments. To use the word anyway is not simply careless: it was clearly deliberate.
Worse, this rhetoric is not abstract. Faculty across the country have already acted in ways that blur the line between peaceful activism and lawlessness. At Sarah Lawrence College (SLC) last fall, anti-Israel protesters barricaded themselves inside the main administrative building, covering windows with plywood and chanting “Disclose, divest.” Faculty were not simply bystanders; they directly supported those students who actively and violently took over the central campus building.
Many faculty have normalized and justified the takeover at SLC and at schools around the country, and this is the natural fruit of militant rhetoric. When academic leaders romanticize confrontation, students quickly learn that barricades, intimidation, and mob tactics are acceptable tools of campus politics.
The AAUP’s ideological capture and shift into activism make this more dangerous still. For well over a century, the AAUP claimed to stand above politics—an organization rooted in defining professional values that transcend left and right. But, as Andrew Gillen observes, its recent behavior betrays that heritage. The AAUP has long exhibited a leftward tilt, yet in 2025 it doubled down: for instance, the AAUP chapter at Rutgers formed a committee after the 2016 election to “prepare for the new wave of attacks … from a fascist, racist, xenophobic administration”—a move emblematic of its abandonment of impartiality. Back in its foundational 1915 Declaration, the AAUP warned that if the profession failed to purge itself of “inefficiency… superficiality, or… uncritical and intemperate partisanship,” others would step in to do so. Today’s resolutions read like activist manifestos, championing partisan causes, pushing radical unionization, and issuing statements that sound more like campus protest flyers than professional standards. These changes have squandered the very credibility that once allowed it to speak for the academy as a whole.
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And this betrayal could not come at a worse time. Public trust in higher education is extremely low, with less than half of Americans having a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education. Pew finds that skepticism spans the political spectrum: parents question whether college is worth the cost, employers doubt graduates’ preparedness, and Republicans increasingly see universities as radicalized havens for ideology, though Democratic and Independent support has declined as well. Because of this erosion of confidence, many Republicans have grown skeptical of reform efforts altogether, abandoning higher education as a lost cause. This has fueled the rise of voices on the right who see no value in liberal arts education and focus exclusively on education’s return on investment, reducing colleges to little more than job-training pipelines.
In this context, when the president of the AAUP calls for militancy, it confirms the worst fears of skeptics. It tells the public that professors are not dispassionate educators with an almost sacred duty of care and obligation to promote viewpoint diversity, but are, in reality, political operatives. It tells legislators that faculty governance is not a safeguard but a threat. And it tells students that the proper role of faculty is not to teach but to radicalize.
The historical irony is crushing. When the AAUP first gained credibility in the mid-twentieth century, it was precisely because it defended liberty and inquiry against political zealotry. It stood firm during the Red Scare and McCarthyism by appealing to shared American principles of fairness, democracy, and open debate. That credibility gave it moral authority. Today, it is burning that authority on the altar of leftist activism.
The consequences of the AAUP’s militancy are already severe, and more will follow. Legislators in dozens of states are reasserting control over higher education, citing faculty politicization as justification. Boards of trustees are hardening their stance, while parents and donors turn away. By betraying its founding mission to defend scholarship from politics, the AAUP has instead invited politics into the academy, eroding public trust, endangering students, and forfeiting the moral authority it once held. Its credibility is spent, and the damage to faculty, students, and the profession’s future will be lasting.
Image: “Anita Levy, AAUP Associate Secretary, presenting the Georgina M. Smith Award” by AAUP on Flickr; cropped for cover
