PRESS RELEASE: New DFI Report Traces How the AAUP Has Sacrificed Academic Freedom and Intellectual Diversity for Union Power and Radical Ideology

WASHINGTON — A new report released today by the Defense of Freedom Institute for Policy Studies (DFI) exposes how the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), once known for defending academic freedom, has abandoned its founding principles. Historically an independent voice for the pursuit of truth and free inquiry on campus, the AAUP has devolved into the junior partner of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), which has leveraged the AAUP for faculty unionization efforts to increase the AFT’s dues-paying membership rolls and to promote far left policies.

Indoctrination Stations: How the AAUP and the AFT Undermine Free Inquiry and Academic Freedom in Higher Education traces the AAUP’s transformation from a professional association dedicated to the pursuit of truth into an arm of the AFT that pressures colleges and universities to impose diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates and gender ideology on faculty and staff while advancing anti-Israel activism and other radical political causes. The report argues that the AAUP’s 2022 affiliation with the 1.8-million-member AFT gave the AAUP access to the AFT’s considerable resources while deepening the influence of the AFT over the organization.

“The AAUP was founded to protect universities as places where scholars could pursue truth without fear, favor, or political interference. Today, it is helping to impose the very ideological conformity it once existed to prevent,” said Paul Zimmerman, DFI Senior Policy and Regulatory Counsel and author of the report. “By embedding DEI mandates, race-based policies, and political objectives into collective-bargaining agreements, the AAUP and its affiliates are turning colleges and  universities from ‘intellectual experiment stations’ into indoctrination stations.”

DFI’s analysis found collective-bargaining agreements negotiated by AAUP affiliates with at least 23 colleges and universities to contain DEI or anti-racist provisions, ranging from affirmative-action commitments to the use of DEI criteria in evaluating faculty teaching and research. The report also documents the AAUP’s reversal of its opposition to academic boycotts targeting Israeli institutions and its increasing involvement in partisan politics, including its first national electoral endorsement of left-wing candidate Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s 2026 Democratic U.S. Senate primary.

The report includes an extensive appendix demonstrating that the radicalism of the AAUP is not confined to its national office’s activities, endorsements, and partnerships; it is also prominent in the political positions taken by its campus affiliates. DFI reviewed 287 AAUP chapter websites and social-media pages linked from the organization’s website and found:

• 45 chapters published statements supporting DEI, racial justice, or anti-racism;
• 22 chapters published statements opposing immigration enforcement;
• 21 chapters published statements opposing campus enforcement actions against anti-Israel protesters;
• 16 chapters published statements identifying Israel as genocidal or otherwise culpable for a war against Palestinians, including statements calling for boycotts or divestment;
• 9 chapters published statements supporting the primacy of gender identity over sex or continued access to sex-rejecting procedures for minors.

To restore academic freedom and protect civil rights, DFI’s report contains several recommendations:

• In its forthcoming regulations reforming college and university accreditation, the U.S. Department of Education should require accreditors to ensure that colleges do not include provisions in faculty union contracts that result in unlawful race-based treatment, evaluate professors based on their incorporation of DEI or similar standards, or impose curricula on faculty and students.
• Congress should investigate the AAUP and other unions that encourage institutions to abandon free inquiry and determine appropriate legislative measures to blunt their influence, including by prohibiting federal-funding recipients from negotiating requirements that require discriminatory conduct by the institution, impose DEI criteria, or mandate curricular requirements into their faculty collective-bargaining contracts.
• State legislatures should prohibit collective bargaining in their public colleges and universities or at least make clear that DEI and other race-based criteria are not appropriate subjects for collective bargaining with these institutions.

To read Indoctrination Stations: How the AAUP and the AFT Undermine Free Inquiry and Academic Freedom in Higher Education, click here.