‘ The prospect for higher education is grave,’ team says
Scholars if “loudly resist” and avoid conformity with the Trump presidency, the American Association of University Professors said in a new report.
Titled” Against Anticipatory Obedience”, the review, published this month, states the re-election of Donald Trump poses major threats to higher training, including possible assaults on career and intellectual liberty.
” As Donald Trump assumes the president for a second time, the prospect for higher learning is dire”, it states, adding:
The Trump administration and a number of Republican-led state institutions appear prepared to intensify strikes on academic freedom, shared leadership, and higher learning as a common good. They will criticize the faculty’s capacity to conduct “teaching, study, and support that respond to the needs of a different world public” on a number of fronts. The higher education sector has a duty to resist these problems and to resist doing so in advance. Rather, we must actively and loudly oppose them.
The document references the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report, which states that when world endangers the school’s primary goal and its commitment to free inquiry, the university has a duty to reject such actions.
” This is definitely for a moment”, the AAUP record states.
The union urges its” chapters and conferences, unions, and faculty senates across the nation” to” enhance and promote faculty rights in the areas of educational reform and course approval”, “reform policies to improve faculty oversight”, and” enhance local capacity to defend tenure and intellectual freedom”, among other things.
In response, Lee Jussim, a professor of social psychology at Rutgers University, called the report a “riot” in a post on X.
Five months after it started promoting academic boycotts as a way to address contentious political issues, he wrote, “AAUP supports the UChicago Kalven report, the clear call for institutional neutrality.”
The AAUP announced Aug. 9 it would support academic boycotts despite its previous position, held since 2005, The College Fix previously reported. In response, over 1, 000 scholars signed a petition opposing the faculty union’s new position.
The union also garnered attention last year after the union’s president, Todd Wolfson, referred to then-vice presidential candidate JD Vance as a “fascist”.
With Vance, American Far-Right authoritarians have succeeded in elevating a fascist who vows to “aggressively attack universities in this country” to within striking distance of their goal, Wolfson had stated.
MORE: DEI is’ compatible with academic freedom,’ AAUP says
IMAGE: Evan El-Amin/Shutterstock
Follow The College Fix on Twitter and Like us on Facebook.
