PROFESSORS POOL PUBLIC DOLLARS TO ROOT OUT DOGE, TRUMP SYMPATHIZERS

The AAUP is organizing a search party for regents and other higher ed professionals caught “undermining” higher education.

A left-leaning group of activist professors — fueled in part by taxpayer dollars — is working to expose sympathizers of the Trump administration. They are taking aim at university trustees and regents who favor President Donald Trump’s policies and the Elon Musk-led DOGE effort, creating a veritable hit list of higher ed professionals to be harassed.

WHO, WHAT, WHEN?

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) is an activist membership organization of faculty and other academics, with chapters around the country. Last week, they sent an email to their members, initiating a McCarthy-like witch hunt for people who are aligned with Trump-Musk policies.

“Do you have Trump–Musk allies on your college or university board?” they asked their members. The prompt came in a message inviting them to attend a Zoom meeting later that week led by the Action Center on Race and the Economy. The College Fix described that outfit as “professional agitators.”

“We need to understand who is fueling this crisis on our campuses,” the AAUP email reads. “Join our research party to examine whether any of your institution’s regents, trustees, or governing board members are undermining higher education by supporting, advocating for, or profiting from Trump–Musk policies. Our goal is to map conflicts of interest among governing board members who are entrusted with the stewardship of our colleges and universities.”

The meeting was to organize an attack campaign against campus leadership, beginning with creating a Google spreadsheet to “identify university board members who are defunding higher education by supporting, advocating, and profiting from Trump-Musk policies.”

The participants were directed to perform internet searches on board members, adding other keywords: Trump, Vance, donor, Elon Musk, tax cuts and budget cuts, The College Fix reported.

They were asked to identify targets in time for the upcoming nationwide Day of Action on April 17, cosponsored by AAUP. On that day, the participating organizations are holding a series of online webinar events including:

• “Displacement From Palestine to Mexico”

• “Why Sanctuary Campuses Now?”

• “Universities Are Political Battlegrounds: A Call For Courage”

• “Immigrants Rights Defense Workshop”

• “Day of Action Palestine Webinar”

• “Militant Education In and Beyond the University”

Since 2020, AAUP has received at least $6 million from public universities, including Rutgers University, Kent State University, University of North Carolina at Wilmington, Eastern Michigan University and Portland State University, according to public records obtained by Open the Books.

The organization’s blacklisting of anyone who dares to go against the liberal elite mindset — under the guise of being good stewards of higher education — is not new.

AAUP currently sanctions over a dozen universities, including Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which is known for its scientific and technological advances. RPI is the oldest technological university in the Western Hemisphere, founded in Troy, NY in 1824.

They also sanction Canisius University in New York, Illinois Wesleyan University, New College of Florida and Vermont Law and Graduate School.

Ironically, one of their main goals is maintaining academic freedom in American colleges and universities. But viewpoint diversity, it seems, is to be rooted out.

A POWERFUL ALLY

AAUP is closely affiliated with one of the country’s most powerful left-leaning unions, American Federation of Teachers, and offers members of that union free and discounted access to programming and materials. The AAUP homepage prominently features a tab allowing users to navigate to the AFT homepage.

AFT President Randi Weingarten is one of the most visible progressive voices in national media and has led the charge to teach children age-inappropriate LGBTQ+ themes, championed critical race theory and supported injecting DEI into classrooms.

TAX EXEMPT AND SERVING CONTEMPT

This new project, aimed at exposing Trump-Musk supporters, comes as AAUP enjoys the tax benefits that come with being a nonprofit. It is a 501(c)(6), or a “business league,” with annual revenue of $10.6 million ($8.5 million coming from membership dues) according to their recent 990 tax filing.

It pays its executives well: seven people make between $170,000 and $244,000.

The group’s president until June 2024, Irene Mulvey, criticized Trump’s 2020 crackdown on teaching Critical Race Theory, decrying his attacks on the concepts of “white privilege” and “persistent institutional racism,” saying, “Critical race theory is a vibrant and rigorous discipline. Few reasonable scholars would deny its importance and timeliness.”

Last spring, when pro-Palestinian students at Columbia University erected a 50-tent “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” and demanded that the university divest from Israel, President Minouche Shafik allowed the NYPD to make arrests. Mulvey criticized Shafik’s action, and her testimony before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, as “trampl[ing] on students’ associational and free speech rights.”

More encampments were created, more arrests were made, antisemitic incidents occurred, and the university switched to hybrid online learning for the remainder of the semester. The May graduation ceremony was cancelled, and Shafik ultimately resigned in August.

Mulvey was succeeded by Todd Wolfson, an associate professor at Rutgers, who shares similar ideas and is candid in his contempt for the current administration. Wolfson has called Vice President JD Vance a “fascist,” has defended using DEI in hiring and evaluating faculty, and reversed AAUP’s longstanding opposition to academic boycotts — like those often called for against Israel. He’s a supporter of Faculty for Justice in Palestine–Rutgers chapter and has signed a protest statement from “Jewish members of Rutgers Faculty for Justice in Palestine.”

“These statements have drawn criticism that the AAUP is abandoning its historic commitment to defending academic freedom in favor of being too political, too leftist and too anti-Zionist,” according to Inside Higher Ed..

While Wolfson defended the organization’s actions, another previous AAUP president, Cary Nelson, contends the group has gone too far.

“We must no longer use AAUP policy as the gold standard for academic freedom,” Nelson, an Israel supporter, wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Nelson told Inside Higher Ed, having a Faculty for Justice in Palestine member lead the AAUP is “like having a KKK member run the AAUP.”

FINE PRINT: Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) is a national network of faculty and staff who support Students for Justice in Palestine and groups “who are organizing for Palestinian liberation.” Their Back to School statement in Fall 2024 said Israel was demonstrating “the depth of settler colonial depravity” and said opponents of campus upheaval were “weaponizing fragility.”

CASH FROM PUBLICLY-FUNDED UNIVERSITIES

The following payments have contributed to AAUP’s annual revenue figures since 2020:

CONCLUSION

AAUP is adorning this effort with the rhetoric of “defending academic freedom,” but the true goal here seems to be to root out opposing views. AAUP is fueled by public dollars in their effort to keep the spigot of public funds wide open. It’s a vicious circle of self-reinforcing interests, and taxpayers have inadvertently spent $6 million to keep it spinning.

EDITOR’S NOTE: A previous version of this story characterized $6 million in public funds sent to AAUP as “grants.” Recordkeeping from these universities lacks specificity as to the form and purpose of the money. The story now characterizes these public dollars as “payments” to AAUP.