When I saw the Association of American Universities’ rejection of the White House’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” I knew that the institutions invited to join the agreement were likely to reject it, too. At a time when organizational communication seems to be the province of PR firms, it is still true that a missive from a group representing some of our country’s most prestigious research institutions carries substantial weight in U.S. higher education.
What I also saw in just 26 words—“We have significant concerns, however, about any compact or policy that could damage, compromise, or depart from our nation’s competitive, merit-based system of research grant funding”—was how different this august body’s response to efforts at censorship in academia today is compared to its actions during the Red Scares.
The joint statement between the American Association of University Professors and what is now the American Association of Colleges and Universities on academic freedom in the 1940s remains the touchstone of faculty and researchers’ rights in our institutions (even though the AAUP generally didn’t come to the aid of targeted professors during the Red Scares). What gets less attention is the role of the AAU in America’s history of academic censorship.
The AAU is an “elite organization that has served as a strong voice for … elite universities’ interests,” Timothy Cain, professor of higher education at the University of Georgia and expert on academic freedom, told me recently. “At times [the AAU has worked] in a productive way to facilitate issues for the entirety of higher ed.” At other times, though, it has prioritized the success and welfare of its member institutions, referred to on its website as “America’s leading research universities.”
Now, I don’t pay attention to powerful organizations because I think they are the “best.” For the same reason, I don’t pay attention to Harvard because I think it is filled with the “brightest” students or “smartest” faculty. I pay attention to these institutions because they are influential. They have been given the opportunity to accrue substantial wealth, property and connections. I abhor the tendency to discuss these places as if they are inherently better than other institutions. But I equally disagree with the notion that one should simply ignore them.
Powerful institutions can survive the consequences of sacrificing funding to defy pressure tactics. The financial fallout of such decisions could leave others destroyed. Their influence means they play an outsize role in setting the trajectory for all U.S. institutions. That’s why Marc Rowan, one of the billionaires rumored to be helping the federal government craft higher education censorship policies, implied last fall that one only needs to change five institutions to reshape the entire system of U.S. higher education. These dynamics are why the AAU’s role in the second Red Scare matters so much.
In 1953, the AAU weighed in on how the academic community should think about academic freedom in light of the second Red Scare. Its statement, “The Rights and Responsibilities of Universities and Their Faculties,” explicitly noted that “Since present membership in the Communist Party requires the acceptance of [certain] principles and methods, such membership extinguishes the right to a university position.”
It’s certainly true that in the middle of the 20th century people eagerly criticized Communism. It wasn’t just the AAU that condemned association with the party—the American Civil Liberties Union expelled a board member because she was a Communist. In its 1951–52 annual report, the Guggenheim Foundation warned that being a member of a group “which does their thinking for them or which indicates what their conclusions must be or ought to be” would get no help from the organization. “Without qualification, we know that this condition of un-freedom of mind includes all those who have membership in the Communist Party,” it said.
Organizations felt comfortable creating these types of edicts—and generally got away with it—given that large swaths of the U.S. public, and therefore also academics, held hostile views of Communism. The most vexing challenge for the AAU was how to address the issue of faculty potentially using the Fifth Amendment to avoid the severe punishments that came with disclosing their political beliefs.
At the same time, many people didn’t understand what rights were protected by this amendment. Fifteen different versions of Law & Order didn’t exist at this time to help educate the populace that “No person … shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” University administrators struggled to interpret this concept. Institutions, such as Rutgers University, even created special committees of faculty who spent substantial time educating themselves on what the Fifth Amendment was and how it worked, with the overall goal of understanding how the university should view employees who invoked it.
The AAU navigated this challenge by stating that “invocation of the Fifth Amendment places upon a professor a heavy burden of proof of his fitness to hold a teaching position and lays upon his university an obligation to reexamine his qualifications for membership in its society.” Basically, according to the AAU at the time, an academic was not honest if they pleaded the Fifth, and dishonest people could not be professors. Ipso facto, if you pleaded the Fifth, you were demonstrably not fit to be a professor and your employer was obligated to investigate whether you should continue to be employed. The AAU was, again, not alone in targeting people who used their Fifth Amendment rights. A striking example is The New York Times firing anyone on the news team who took the Fifth.
Archives of documents from the time show that college leadership was enamored with the AAU statement. It gave them guidance for how to navigate employees who invoked their Fifth Amendment right during official hearings.
The faculty responses were more varied. Minutes from the October 1953 AAU meeting note that “faculties were inclined to place undue emphasis upon the paragraphs dealing with the Fifth Amendment.” (I wonder why …) A substantial contingent of the faculty was concerned by what it would mean to be considered “dishonest” and “unworthy to be a professor” based solely on asserting one’s Fifth Amendment rights.
Marc Rowan wasn’t wrong in his observation that only a handful of universities can determine the direction of American higher education. We have ample historical examples to show this isn’t a modern phenomenon. Joy Williamson’s Jim Crow Campus details the ways that white Southern universities from the 1950s to the 1970s shifted their policies surrounding academic freedom and the treatment of Black people in order to be considered “world-class institutions.” It’s not surprising, then, that during the second Red Scare a large portion of the sector used the AAU statement as cover for investigating alleged Communists on their campuses.
The AAU has not promoted Red Scare–like political repression in our current moment of rising academic censorship. The organization’s default response to the attacks on its members has instead been to generally take cover under an implicit commitment to neutrality (its response to the compact not withstanding). While not as direct of an attack on academic freedom as its actions in the ’50s, the AAU’s conspicuous silence could allow institutions and governments to ramp up censorship with little pushback.
For example, Texas A&M University remains a member in good standing of the AAU, even though it recently fired a faculty member in a manner that the university’s Academic Freedom Council determined violated the person’s academic freedom and, as I noted in my last column, censored several courses. While Texas A&M is perhaps the most extreme example, it is not the only AAU member to have taken overt steps to restrict the freedom of speech and expression. As university leadership signals a willingness to purge and sanction political dissidents, the question remains what powerful organizations like the AAU will do. As the historian Howard Zinn opined, you can’t be neutral on a moving train.
In Jim Crow Campus, Williamson notes that it took sanctions from a series of organizations and accreditors, among other actions, to force white Southern universities to racially integrate. It’s unlikely that simply retreating into the illusion of safety through silence and “institutional neutrality” will overcome the authoritarian forces threatening academic freedom today. The AAUP, learning from its mistakes during the Red Scares, has been a leader in the current fight for the freedom of inquiry. The AAU once used its power to strengthen academic censorship. Now is the time for it to wield its power to dismantle it—and protect the ability to freely teach and conduct research.
The AAU claims to be comprised of America’s leading research universities. And indeed, its institutions have been the leaders among a major segment of the country’s higher education system for more than a century. But if the member presidents choose the guise of institutional neutrality as a way to gain political cover, they may now be leading higher ed toward greater authoritarianism.
