If I were dismissed from my college faculty for writing for The Weekly Standard, the American Association of University Professors, founded in 1915, would be on my side. It wouldn’t matter that, as seems likely, many of its 45,000 members loathe TWS and all that it stands for. After all, the AAUP supported Mike Adams, a professor denied promotion at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, allegedly because of columns he had written for the conservative website Townhall. Presumably, few in the membership approved of columns such as “Liberal Lawyers and Litigious Lesbians,” but the AAUP has been good at distinguishing its commitment to academic freedom from the generally liberal political commitments of its members.
It may, therefore, seem churlish to complain that AAUP has my back for the wrong reasons. Yet Hans-Joerg Tiede’s meticulously researched and absorbing history of the founding and early years of the organization reveals, without intending to, a weakness in our understanding of academic freedom that continues even now to undercut its defenders. Tiede chairs the AAUP’s Committee on the History of the Association.
It is “something of a founding myth” that the AAUP was begun primarily to defend academic freedom. Tiede embeds the early AAUP in the politics of progressivism, a politics favored by a number of its founders, including its first president, John Dewey. Just as progressives like Herbert Croly, and Dewey himself, considered the ideas of the Founders unsuitable for modern industrial conditions, the founders of the AAUP thought that “the traditional mode of governance, in which a lay governing board appointed and empowered a president, was no longer adequate for the modern university.” To establish the claim that the American conception of academic freedom emerges out of this progressive context, Tiede draws on the writings of the Johns Hopkins philosopher Arthur O. Lovejoy, arguably the most influential figure in the early history of the association. But he also does us a service by drawing our attention to James McKeen Cattell, then a renowned experimental psychologist, now neglected even in the history of academic freedom, although he was evidently the first to call for the establishment of the AAUP.
Cattell decried the university “president under the existing system” as “not a leader, but a boss” responsible to a board of trustees that is responsible to no one. He and Lovejoy, whom Cattell “directly influenced,” advocated “sweeping changes to the governance of colleges and universities,” the end of which was to establish (as Lovejoy put it) a “self-governing republic of scholars,” a “virtually autonomous body . . . with approximately complete control over all the activities of the institution.” Or as Cattell said, “the university should be a democracy of scholars serving the larger democracy of which it is part.”
This reference to the “larger democracy” is important because Cattell, at least, tied university reform to political and social reform. Tiede begins his book with a quotation in which Cattell drew a parallel between his hope for university reform and his notion that “the industrial trusts will in the end be directed by the world’s greatest democracy.” Cattell did not conceal his expectation that academic experts would, and should, come to constitute a “scientific or advisory department of the government [that would] rank co-ordinate with its executive, legislative, and judicial departments.” Although the AAUP was formed in large part to increase the influence of professors over higher education in a period of rapid expansion and new demands for national education standards, its disposition toward academic freedom was also shaped by the view that academic freedom is good because it enables academics to have political influence.
That was not merely an idea of Cattell, whose attitude toward the “role of experts in a democracy” was standard progressivism. The AAUP’s distinctive emphasis on “extramural speech,” or “speaking on matters of public concern, whether or not as an expert in these matters,” had much to do with the ambitions of a “professional class of faculty that included members who used their expertise to advocate the reform movements of the Progressive era.” In this advocacy, they found themselves “in conflict with powerful interests.” Cattell named these powerful interests, the “political machine” and the “business corporation” and their “materialistic aims and autocratic usurpations.” It was part of “educational and scientific work” to oppose these forces “with all our power.” Tiede shows that Cattell’s anticorporate bent, although it was certainly not shared by every member of the AAUP, was influential. The AAUP’s archrival in its early years was the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which “appealed to business interests” and encouraged universities to “adopt business practices.”
Of course, the AAUP also championed—and still champions—the idea of the scholar as above the political fray. The “liberty of the scholar,” declares the 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure, depends on his conclusions being “gained by a scholar’s method and held in a scholar’s spirit.” But that conception of scholarship sat uneasily with the AAUP as representative of a distinctive political movement. This tension could be resolved in the minds of people like Dewey because they thought that their politics were a product of the scientific spirit—that is, like many partisans, they were quite sure that their partisan views were true. But it is not hard to see how the public might balk at conferring a special status on academics—a status that gives their speech even more protection than the First Amendment already confers—when they offer themselves not as gadflies but as advocates and potential rulers.
The AAUP’s interest in furthering the political influence of scholars may have had something to do with one of the more shameful episodes in the organization’s history, its nearly complete silence about the dismissal of professors by overzealous, or sometimes just cynical, boards during World War I. Dewey, at least, thought that the “social mobilization of science” for war would help to initiate a “new type of democracy” characterized by (among other things) deference to progressive elites. Such a goal might be worth the sacrifice of a Socrates or two. We need not imagine that advocates of academic freedom cynically traded principles for power—indeed, many were ardent and genuine proponents of America’s role in World War I—to suspect that the marriage of their concept of academic freedom to particular political aims clouded their judgment.
As I was writing this, I received an email from Rudy Fichtenbaum, president of the AAUP, urging me to sign the AAUP’s Centennial Declaration. That declaration denounces “corporatization” and the influence of “business interests” as very nearly the sole enemy of the common good for which we scholars are said to stand. Whatever one might think of the claim that institutions of higher learning emulate (and seek to please) the private sector to the detriment of their missions, the AAUP’s focus on this issue alone in a declaration meant to sum up its principles advances the organization’s most partisan, and least attractive, legacy.
It helps to explain why, in spite of the organization’s record of defending academic freedom, even for conservatives, it is sometimes hard to believe that the American Association of University Professors is serious about academic freedom.
Jonathan Marks is professor of politics at Ursinus College.
