AAUP Denounces Politician, Donor “Extortion” of Universities

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.”

The report especially focuses on the second Trump administration’s actions, including how it pressured Columbia University to make concessions through cutting its research funding and its proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” But Wolfson said that “if any administration, Republican or Democratic, can use financial leverage to compel universities to surrender their independence,” then institutional autonomy, academic freedom and shared governance become conditional.

Rana Jaleel, chair of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, said, “In aggregate, these are not good-faith attempts to improve how universities function,” but instead efforts to “coerce higher education into functioning as an ideological arm of the state.”

“What to research, what to teach [and] how to ensure that all—and not just some—of the public is served by higher education would no longer, in their vision, be determined by people who have spent their lives learning and training to address these issues,” Jaleel said. “Instead, those people are being pushed aside so that politicians can tell us what to do.”

The White House didn’t respond to requests for comment.