What Is Behind FIRE’s Attacks on AAUP?

The vice president of campus advocacy of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Alex Morey, has recently launched an unprecedented attack on the American Association of University Professors. She was quoted in Inside Higher Ed on Nov. 8 effectively offering an obituary for the organization in response to AAUP president Todd Wolfson’s expression of “disappointment” at the election of Donald Trump: “Faculty who’ve long relied on the AAUP for its principled academic freedom advice should look elsewhere,” Morey said.

On X, she has doubled down on these criticisms, suggesting by implication that FIRE could serve as a replacement for the 100-year-old association that is dedicated to the articulation and defense of academic freedom. Leaving aside the fact that these partisan attacks violate FIRE’s own insistence on neutrality, they misrepresent FIRE as promoting academic freedom, when that has never been part of its mandate. 

FIRE, from its founding in 1999, has been dedicated to the absolutist principle of individual free speech and not to academic freedom. An initial motivating force was the endorsement of the right of racist expression on the University of Pennsylvania campus. This is a telling choice of where their political affiliations lie.

FIRE’s mission statement does not refer to academic freedom, which is a freedom associated with educational institutions and is not the same as free speech. Their version of free speech is only about individual rights, while academic freedom is about the individual and collective rights of faculty as they pursue the mission of higher education in a democracy. That mission is best arrived at through procedures of shared governance, which allow the expression of dissent and disagreement in the process of articulating the university’s mission. 

The AAUP’s 1994 statement on the relationship of faculty governance to academic freedom is still our position: “A sound system of institutional governance is a necessary condition for the protection of faculty rights and thereby for the most productive exercise of essential faculty freedoms. Correspondingly, the protection of the academic freedom of faculty members in addressing issues of institutional governance is a prerequisite for the practice of governance unhampered by fear of retribution.”

These days, it is the undermining of shared governance by increasing numbers of university boards and administrators (the University of Kentucky’s abolition of its University Senate is a case in point) that most threatens faculty academic freedom, not the latest statements (misrepresented by Morey) of the AAUP and its president. Tellingly, the denial of faculty governance at Kentucky has been condemned by the AAUP, but FIRE has issued no criticism of this attack on academic freedom. 

Nor has FIRE recognized the AAUP’s recent statement on boycotts for what it is—a defense of the free speech so dear to their mission. Rather, they have consistently, deliberately and repeatedly misrepresented it. We did not “endorse academic boycotts of Israel,” as Morey has stated; we simply stated that, as with all extramural speech, those who do endorse such boycotts should not be penalized for their expressive activity.

Those reading Morey’s attacks ought to question FIRE’s commitment to higher education, when its sources of funding are foundations whose mandate is the undoing of the academy as a source of critical thinking and social, political and economic change. FIRE has received funding from conservative donors including groups linked to Charles Koch; its funders include Donors Trust, the Sarah Scaife Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.

FIRE has helped develop model legislation for state governments that would overturn the advances made in higher education through policies of antidiscrimination and affirmative action. As an AAUP report on “Campus Free-Speech Legislation” in 2018 noted, “The AAUP and the campus free-speech movement are false friends: superficial similarity masks a fundamental difference in aims.” The AAUP argues campus free speech legislation compromises the autonomy of the university and the academic freedom of its members.

The AAUP further believes that diversity and equality ought to be at the center of university policy—that is what education in and for democracy is about. FIRE calls these principles “ideological,” when it is in fact its opposition to them in the name of absolutist individualism that is ideological. It is no wonder that FIRE’s favorite groups to represent are on the political right: Young Americans for Freedom, Young Americans for Liberty and Turning Point USA. Of course, they cover themselves by litigating on behalf of the occasional liberal or even leftist, but make no mistake about where their true interest lies: with the programs of their right-wing funders.

It is arguably in line with their funders’ tacit, if not explicit support of the outcome of the election, that Alex Morey attacked Todd Wolfson’s comments in its aftermath. But Wolfson’s statements are not a departure from our principles. They simply echo Trinity Washington University’s Patricia McGuire and Wesleyan University’s Michael Roth, as well as those of us who have read Project 2025 and taken seriously JD Vance’s expressions that “universities are the enemy.” Leading up to the election, Roth wrote in Slate that even the 1967 University of Chicago Kalven report stated that there must be an exception to the principle of institutional neutrality when the very mission of the university was at stake.

He reminded us of the shameful compliance of Martin Heidegger, who joined the Nazi Party 10 days after being elected rector of the University of Freiburg. Roth believes, and we agree, that we are now in such a moment when the mission of the university is under threat and that we must speak out. Wolfson’s words were thus not a sign of a radical takeover of the AAUP, but a commitment—not apparently shared by the ideologues at FIRE—to the values that have made U.S. higher education the envy of the world. The AAUP continues to stand for those values and leaves FIRE, its associates and funders, to reckon with what will, hopefully, be the judgment of history.