“I would really love to see kind of a robust research project on these right-wing centers and individuals—like, naming and shaming,” announced Isaac Kamola, a Trinity College political science professor who heads the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom (CDAF) at the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). In an audio recording obtained by Manhattan Institute senior fellow John Sailer, who also obtained supporting public documents, Kamola lets us know that he wants “to strategically map who these f—ers are, and figure out what the weaknesses are, and design a research agenda that just goes through them and tries to knock them out.”

So much for competing in the marketplace of ideas.

Created in 2024, according to Sailer’s analysis for City Journal, CDAF receives $1.5 million in funds from the Mellon Foundation, the nation’s largest donor to the arts and humanities. In 2020, Mellon decided to embark on a “major strategic evolution for its organization, prioritizing social justice in all of its grantmaking.” In recent years, the study centers and associated people Kamola hopes to “knock out” have stood in the institutional vanguard of the higher education reform movement, emphasizing non-ideological approaches to such traditional subjects as civics, great books, American government, military and diplomatic history, free enterprise, and other areas that the legacy professoriate prefers to ignore or deride. Many are proven academic successes. The same day Kamola’s recording leaked, the University of Florida’s Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education announced that three of its affiliates had just received Fulbright fellowships.

Founded in 1915 “to advance academic freedom,” one might expect that the AAUP—and its center specifically named for academic freedom—would at least pretend to defend that concept. Not so fast. According to CDAF’s website, the organization only touts the sort of “freedom” that supports its narrow assessment of policies consistent with the notion that “teaching, learning, and the pursuit of knowledge are essential to creating and sustaining multi-racial and plurinational societies.”

If that doesn’t sound like a rousing commitment to defend free speech and inquiry, your assessment is correct. An “action report” written by Kamola in October 2024 advocated responding to Turning Point USA, which he claimed, “promotes many far-right political positions,” by shaming institutions into firing administrators who invited its late leader Charlie Kirk to campus.

That same month, the AAUP’s Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee released a statement  defending the use of DEI criteria in hiring, promotion, and tenure, arguing that “diversity goals are closely connected to academic freedom” and suggesting that opposition to DEI is part of a “partisan political playbook to turn back the clock.”

In the documents Sailer uncovered, CDAF fellow John Warner suggested that the University of Pennsylvania’s sanctioning of law professor Amy Wax for alleged disfavored speech was itself “an example of the process of academic freedom.”

While Kamola’s pugilistic words and illiberal program activities have only succeeded in naming and shaming himself, they also call attention to the AAUP’s recent turn to the radical left. In August 2024, the organization reversed its long-standing opposition to academic boycotts based on “political or religious viewpoint”—virtually all of which exclusively target Israel—arguing that they “can be considered legitimate tactical responses” to anything that might displease an academic professional. Indeed, the AAUP’s reversal on the matter concluded that opposing such boycotts itself “contravenes academic freedom.” That was too much even for the AAUP’s own former president Cary Nelson, who lamented in a Chronicle of Higher Education op-ed that the organization had “set aside its hundred-year defense of academic freedom.” Nelson concluded that “we must no longer use AAUP policy as the gold standard” for its own existential concept.

Conservative academics would likely agree. Addressing the question of why there are so few conservatives in the academy, in October 2025 the AAUP sarcastically posted on its official X account that “fascism generally doesn’t do great under peer review.” The widely received implication of that now-deleted post was that conservative viewpoints are both professionally subpar and should disqualify scholars from AAUP-endorsed academic freedom protections. That same month, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) released a survey showing that only 7 percent of conservative faculty members reported receiving union support for consequences of protected speech, compared to 29 percent of liberal faculty.

In February 2026, the AAUP publicly supported a student campaign calling on colleges to terminate contracts with companies that do business with ICE. In April, AAUP president Todd Wolfson, a former “community and labor organizer” who also serves as vice president of the American Federation of Teachers, derided a Wall Street Journal op-ed proposing a one-course college economics requirement with posts claiming that capitalism “doesn’t work for most of us” and that students “see all too well how capitalism works, as it steals the lifeblood of their loved ones!”

Wolfson called the Journal op-ed’s author—a politics professor whose professional interests are nominally represented by AAUP—and those who hold his position “clowns.” But for educators of all political views who rely on the AAUP to protect true academic freedom and their other professional rights, Wolfson may be the one leading the circus.