What Does the AAUP’s 1915 Declaration Really Say?

Heterodox Academy President John Tomasi recently wrote an essay titled, “The Vanderbilt-WashU Report Doesn’t Threaten Academic Freedom. It Defends It.” Tomasi imagines a “duty to intervene” that I strongly disagree with: “Academic freedom does not prevent university leaders from reforming wayward scholarship. Indeed, if professors abandon scholarly norms to pursue purely political projects, university leaders may have a duty to intervene.”

It’s disturbing that Tomasi has shifted his emphasis from advocating viewpoint diversity to declaring certain viewpoints (“political projects”) off limits and endorsing administrative intervention to prohibit them. The goal of viewpoint diversity should be to bring more perspectives into academia, not to banish those deemed to have the wrong political viewpoint.

But I want to focus on Tomasi’s argument that American Association of University Professors documents support his position: “Perhaps surprisingly, this duty of intervention is set out in the 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure—the classic defense of academic freedom, written by the founders of the AAUP.” That is surprising. Unfortunately, it’s surprising because it isn’t true, and the AAUP’s 1915 Declaration is directly opposed to Tomasi’s theory of an administrative “duty to intervene.”

Tomasi argues, “According to the 1915 Declaration, academic freedom is not a freestanding entitlement. It is a privilege grounded in specific professional responsibilities.” But the 1915 Declaration only mentions “privilege” once, to deny that private universities should have the power to suppress academic freedom. By contrast, the 1915 Declaration repeatedly discusses “the right of university teachers to express their opinions freely” and that trustees “have no moral right to bind the reason or the conscience of any professor.”

The 1915 Declaration does argue (incorrectly, I think), “There are no rights without corresponding duties.” But even this statement means that academic freedom is clearly not a privilege, it is a right. The AAUP in 1915 felt this right entails duties for the faculty. However, it doesn’t follow that if someone thinks the faculty have failed to fulfill their moral obligations, colleges have a duty to take away their rights. The 1915 Declaration explicitly opposes this approach.

Tomasi claims, “Scholars who retreat into an ideological monoculture—conducting research merely to serve political interests, assigning students one-sided readings, hiring only like-minded colleagues—abandon the duties that give academic freedom its life. This is where university leaders come back in.”

The 1915 Declaration clearly and absolutely rejects Tomasi’s theory that colleges can unilaterally intervene when faculty are deemed to have failed in following their moral duties. The 1915 Declaration states it is “inadmissible that the power of determining when departures from the requirements of the scientific spirit and method have occurred, should be vested in bodies not composed of members of the academic profession.” I cannot comprehend how actions that the 1915 Declaration calls “inadmissible” can ever be twisted into a “duty” of university leaders.

Tomasi argues, “The 1915 Report aims ‘to protect college executives and governing boards against unjust charges of infringement on academic freedom.’ Ultimately, this involves university leaders in judging whether professors are fulfilling their academic duties. If not, university leaders may intervene without violating academic freedom.”

No, this interpretation is completely wrong, and the AAUP is saying precisely the opposite. The line about avoiding “unjust charges” is part of the AAUP’s concluding argument for why colleges should adopt these principles giving faculty the power to judge whether professors are fulfilling their academic duties. If presidents and boards intervened to overrule professors, then they would not be protected against unjust charges of infringing academic freedom. So the 1915 Declaration’s line about preventing “unjust charges” only makes sense if it prohibits the kind of administrative intervention that Tomasi thinks is a “duty.”

Tomasi claims, “The 1915 Declaration does not simply raise the flag of academic freedom and tell university leaders to stand down. Instead, it pours the foundation for a system of shared governance.” In reality, the 1915 Declaration does raise the flag of academic freedom and tells university leaders to stand down. Shared governance does not mean that administrators get to “share” in faculty hiring by dictating the outcome according to their ideological desires. Shared governance means that some campus decisions are made by faculty (such as faculty hiring) and some decisions are made by the governing authorities of the university, and each group gets to advise and scrutinize and criticize those decisions.

Obviously, part of that argument included the AAUP’s belief that professors would self-regulate. But it doesn’t follow that if faculty fail to do the administration’s bidding, then university leaders should be free to intervene. If that were the case, then shared governance would be meaningless. Academic judgments would be deferred to only if leaders agreed with them.

When it comes to ideological viewpoints, the 1915 Declaration is explicit about why university leaders must not intervene: “In matters of opinion, and of the utterance of opinion, such boards cannot intervene without destroying, to the extent of their intervention, the essential nature of a university.” How can the 1915 Declaration be deemed to justify a “duty” to intervene when it says that “intervention” would be “destroying” the essence of a university?

The AAUP never dreamed of a utopia where faculty in a department made all the academic decisions. Administrators (with the approval of representative faculty committees) do get to overrule departmental faculty decisions in extraordinary individual cases where there is illegal discrimination or violations of academic standards.

What presidents are definitely never allowed to do is take their personal perception of a general political bias in an entire field to justify intervention where they impose their own ideological preferences in hiring. Whether that perception is about a pro-feminist bias in women’s studies, a pro-evolution bias in biology, a pro–social justice bias in sociology or a pro-capitalist bias in business, administrative intervention is not a permissible response under academic (and AAUP) standards, today or in 1915, and it is certainly not a “duty” of presidents.

Tomasi is fundamentally misreading the AAUP’s 1915 Declaration, and in doing so he is endorsing a repetition of the history of administrative abuses and violations of academic freedom that led to the creation of the AAUP and the formulation of the 1915 Declaration.