Report > Teacher Unions, Postsecondary Education, Title VI and Equal Protection
Indoctrination Stations: How the AAUP and the AFT Undermine Free Inquiry and Academic Freedom in Higher Education
By Paul Zimmerman | September 29, 2026
Key findings
- The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) was founded in 1915 to advance the principles of academic freedom and professionalize the practice of teaching in higher education. The AAUP sought to preserve universities as “inviolable refuges” for apolitical research and teaching motivated solely by the quest for knowledge and truth. During its first fifty years, the AAUP became a resource, adviser, and watchdog within higher education known for defending the free inquiry of faculty and their rights to due process and shared institutional governance.
- This commitment fundamentally changed in the early 1970s, when the AAUP went into the business of collective bargaining. With that decision, the AAUP, once a haven for academic freedom and free inquiry, mutated into the organization that is today—a heavily politicized, ferociously anti-Israel union fixated on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and gender ideology. With a national headquarters beholden to the partisan American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and chapters that have etched DEI and race-based decisions into their collective-bargaining agreements, the AAUP has turned its back on first principles to attract younger, more-militant workers in academia.
- This report makes policy recommendations to the U.S. Department of Education (the Department), Congress, and state legislatures. In rulemaking, the Department should consider modifying its criteria for recognizing accrediting agencies to require that agencies maintain policies prohibiting colleges and universities from entering into collective-bargaining contracts that result in institutional violations of civil rights and academic freedom. Similarly, Congress should consider legislation that withholds federal funding from institutions of higher education on similar grounds. State legislatures that do not outright bar collective bargaining should at least clarify that race-based and DEI criteria, free inquiry, and curricula are not legitimate subjects for agreement through faculty contracts.
Executive summary
Once an organization dedicated to academic freedom in colleges and universities, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) now coordinates with its affiliate, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), on an agenda that undermines free inquiry in higher education. The organization openly pushes institutions to evaluate professors based on their fulfillment of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) criteria. It calls on colleges to spend money on disciplines that examine identity and inequality through an ideological lens. It unreasonably stretches the term “academic freedom” to apply it to encampments and occupiers who intimidate, harass, and commit violence, pretending that such actions are the same as the objective search for the truth.
The AAUP’s slide into radicalism was not inevitable. For half a century, the association investigated alleged violations of academic freedom on campuses, advised institutions regarding their responsibilities to uphold free inquiry, and articulated the meaning of academic freedom and the responsibilities that professors owed in exercising that freedom. But the AAUP’s decision to unionize in 1973 altered its focus and put it on the path to betraying the principles of its early years. Today’s AAUP, under the influence of the AFT, organizes new chapters and maximizes union dues by attracting younger academics who see America as irredeemably racist, Israel as genocidal, and the West’s greatest teachers and thinkers as white supremacists.
This report describes how the AAUP lost its way and joined with the AFT to stress activism over inquiry, such as by leveraging collective-bargaining contracts to require race-based criteria and evaluations in faculty hiring. To address this untenable situation:
- In forthcoming regulations on accreditation in higher education, the U.S. Department of Education should consider modifying its criteria for recognizing accrediting agencies to require that agencies maintain policies prohibiting colleges and universities from entering into collective-bargaining contracts that result in institutional violations of civil rights and academic freedom. Congress should consider withholding federal funding, including federal student aid, from institutions that enter into collective-bargaining agreements that compel institutions of higher education to violate civil-rights laws or undermine academic freedom.
- State legislatures should prohibit state-supported colleges and universities from engaging in collective bargaining with faculty and other employees. At the very least, they should affirm in law that DEI, race-based policies, and curricula are not the proper subjects of such contracts. Schools of civic thought would also serve to restore academic freedom and viewpoint diversity in public institutions of higher education.
