Academic Freedom, the American Anthropological Association, and the American Association of University Professors

This article first appeared in New English Review.

Times are tough these days for our educational establishment, especially higher education. The Trump administration, in particular the Department of Education, Office of Civil Rights, and now the Justice Department, which is taking over the duties of the former, has been coming down hard on universities that have allowed the pro-Palestinian goons to run amok. Millions of dollars in research funding are being cut off to major universities that have been the worst offenders. The outrages of organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), with their post-October 7, 2023 encampments and harassment of Jewish students, their faculty enablers (Faculty for Justice in Palestine-FJP et al), as well as the inaction of cowardly administrators, have brought sharp focus on the deterioration of our universities.

Recently, Washington University of St Louis and Vanderbilt University commissioned a study that concluded that within academia in general, the chief culprits have been in the humanities and social sciences (something that should have been obvious for years). The result, the study concluded, has been a decline in the quality of professional scholarship, which has given way to political advocacy. One of the fields of study that drew specific attention in the report was anthropology. The report is dated April 5, 2026.

Not surprisingly, that brought howls of indignation from the American Anthropological Association (AAA), even though they themselves voted overwhelmingly in 2023 to endorse an academic boycott of Israel, as pointed out by the Amcha Initiative, an organization founded by now-retired University of California professors to expose and combat campus anti-Semitism.  The AAA issued a letter dated June 11, 2026, contesting the conclusions, which is linked in the Amcha Initiative article. It might be noted that the AAA response gives a hint as to where its priorities lie.

"The authors argue that the humanities exist above all to prepare students for 'a life as a free citizen' – invoking the Latin liberalis, befitting a free person, then later condemn as politicized and distorted the scholarship associated with social justice, decolonization, and women’s liberation."

"The AAA was joined in its howls by the Washington University and Vanderbilt chapters of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). They also issued a joint letter to both universities, also dated June 11, 2026, not only contesting the report but also going a step further and calling on them to rescind it. Not surprisingly, they invoke their academic freedom, which is now, according to them, under threat, meaning their desire to engage in "scholarship in the name of social justice" (their words, not mine), which they feel is their right to use their classrooms as a soapbox to spout their personal political views and impose them on their students (our children). Something that they give away in their own letter:

"Weakening faculty governance does nothing to solve the real challenges facing our universities, and undermines our ability to effectively address society’s most profound problems and challenges, from the inequalities of wealth and white supremacy to the political consequences of climate change." 

Personally, speaking as someone who taught (part-time) at the university level for 20 years, I find it ironic that so-called academics, who preach about academic freedom, are now demanding that the two universities in question rescind the report they (the schools) commissioned because it offers a differing point of view from the AAUP- and because it criticizes what is happening today in our universities. Aren't universities, by their very definition, supposed to be places where contrasting viewpoints are discussed in an open and civil manner? How instructive it is that both the AAA and the AAUP, in their respective statements, betray their own hypocrisy? It is one thing for these organizations to respond and defend themselves against the criticisms in the report; it is quite another to try and have the report rescinded, as did AAUP.

Would it be a gross exaggeration to compare the "rescinding" of the above report to the March 1933 book burning by Nazis, which primarily occurred on German university campuses all over the country? Perhaps the learned professors of the AAA and AAUP would like to rescind (remove) books by people like Thomas Sowell, William F. Buckley, or Dennis Prager from all university libraries (if they even exist in those libraries). To rescind that report from the files of the above-mentioned universities would be to silence an opposing point of view. It would be against everything a university is supposed to stand for, something which, in fact, has been forgotten by far too many universities for years.

But that is the tactic of the academic left: If it doesn't conform to our point of view, it must be suppressed, whether it be a critical report, a speaking event by a conservative, a Republican, or by someone who is pro-Israel. They consider disruptions, harassment of Jewish students, encampments, and occupations to be "freedom of expression", but a written report analyzing problems and shortcomings in the university? That must be "rescinded".

The plain fact is that the report commissioned by Washington University of St Louis and Vanderbilt and the reactions of AAA and AAUP once again demonstrate that our universities are in major need of serious reform-for the sake of professional scholarship.