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The new president of the American Association of University Professors called Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance a “fascist” in a written statement Thursday.
The AAUP elected Todd Wolfson, an associate professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, as its president in June. His new statement—titled “Professors Are Not the Enemy. Fascists Are.”—focuses on Vance’s past condemnations of American higher education, including his calling professors “the enemy.”
“The ascension of JD Vance to the Republican presidential ticket has brought the decades-long battle to define the future of American higher education to the tipping point,” Wolfson wrote. “With Vance, American far-right authoritarians have succeeded in elevating a fascist who vows to ‘aggressively attack universities in this country’ to within striking distance of their goal: the annihilation of American higher education as we know it. All those who care about higher education, academic freedom and the future of democracy should prepare for the fight ahead by organizing their campus communities.”
Wolfson also wrote that “while attacks on American higher education are nothing new, the scope of the Project 2025 blueprint for a Trump-Vance presidency offers a frightening glimpse into an authoritarian future that would transform American colleges and universities into thought-control factories by stifling ideas, silencing debate and destroying autonomy.”
Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, which didn’t respond to a request for comment Thursday, has sought to distance Trump from Project 2025, a blueprint for his potential second term spearhead by the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank. Vance’s Washington, D.C., office also didn’t return a request for comment Thursday.
The AAUP is both a scholarly association that sets widely adopted standards on academic freedom and a union affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers. Wolfson told Inside Higher Ed Thursday that even among the AAUP’s Republican members, he doesn’t think there are many “who align with the statement that the professoriate is the enemy.”
“We do not intend to make this a Republican-Democrat issue,” Wolfson said. “We are pointing directly at the extreme positions of the current Republican candidates for the executive branch that are coming after us directly.”
