From Kelly Benjamin, AAUP Media and Communications

Fight for Future of Higher Ed Intensifies in 2024

Fight for Future of Higher Ed Intensifies in 2024The new year has begun with an intensified political assault on academic freedom and shared governance in higher education. Despite the bombastic rhetoric coming from politicians and propagandists, this attack has never been about antisemitism or plagiarism. It is part of a highly orchestrated, well-funded campaign to denigrate higher education in an attempt to justify censorship and sabotage higher education’s role in our democracy. The AAUP has been busy pushing back against this assault. The press clips below offer a glimpse into our efforts to defend American higher education.

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AAUP Top Clips:

• “There is a right-wing political attack on higher education right now, which feels like an existential threat to the academic freedom that has made American higher education the envy of the world” – AAUP president Irene Mulvey quoted in the Associated Press on the campaign to take down Harvard president Claudine Gay.
• “The issue was never plagiarism, it was always her personhood.” – AAUP Council member Davarian Baldwin quoted in Salon on Claudine Gay’s resignation.
• “The attack on higher ed is a backlash from people with money and power and influence who are not happy that the academy has expanded to include students and faculty from underrepresented groups. They would like to revive the prejudices of the past.” – Irene Mulvey in an interview with the Chicago Reader.
• “Without a stronger defense of our higher education institutions, along with a re-commitment by universities and their boards to work to adhere to the (AAUP) Declaration of 1915, we risk compromising the role our great American universities play as flag bearers for freedom of thought and expression.” – Nicholas Dirks, president of the New York Academy of Sciences in an essay for Time.
• “I know weaponized Congressional hearings and the politicization of academic standards to advance a partisan political agenda when I see it. That’s what I see now.” – Irene Mulvey quoted in the New York Times.
• “Without academic freedom, there can be no meaningful democracy.” – Jeffrey C. Issac in an op ed in The Nation on the suspension of a tenured professor at IU Bloomington over a campus event featuring an Israeli peace activist. The suspension and IU Bloomington’s AAUP statement on the issue have been covered by NPR and Inside Higher Education.
• “I’ve been on university campuses for over 20 years, and I’ve never been on one where the morale is as low as it is right now at UT-Austin. A lot of professors are on the job market right now.” – UT Austin AAUP member Karma Chavez quoted in the Austin American-Statesman on the Texas ban on DEI offices and programs in the state’s public university system.
• “It was a lot of work, it was a lot of organizing, but at a time when higher education faces a number of threats and problems across the country, the best thing that faculty can do to protect public education.” – Keith Pluymers, assistant professor of history at Illinois State on the certification of the school’s new AAUP/AFT faculty union.
• “How much destruction must occur, and how many lives upended, before the thrill of humiliating higher education wears off for the public at large?” – Jennifer Ruth of Portland State University’s AAUP chapter asks in a column for Inside Higher Education.
• “Given how quickly the focus of the people claiming to be concerned about antisemitism on our campuses shifted to plagiarism, it certainly appears that the focus was never really about antisemitism and protecting students, it’s part of a long-running, well-funded effort to create a false narrative that higher education is broken.” – Irene Mulvey quoted in Salon.

In Solidarity,
Kelly Benjamin
AAUP Media and Communications