Does academic freedom have a greater enemy than the American Association of University Professors?

With millions of dollars in backing from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the AAUP recently set up a Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom (CDAF) that’s about as accurately named as the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Instead of defending academic freedom, the director of the AAUP’s center wants to stamp out some of the last vestiges of viewpoint diversity on today’s campuses.

In the face of overwhelming hostility from hiring committees—and often outright, illegal discrimination—conservative academics and even old-fashioned liberals have been forced to find positions outside of regular departments in new “civics centers” on campuses across the country, places like the University of Florida’s Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education.

Even a tenured Harvard professor at the top of his field, like the Renaissance historian James Hankins, has found the progressive-dominated academic mainstream of today so intolerant he’s moved to the Hamilton School, where his students will be judged on their merit as scholars, not the color of their skin or their politics.

Yet instead of championing fairness and intellectual diversity, the director of the AAUP’s center is looking for ways to attack institutions like the Hamilton School.

“(L)ike, naming and shaming and discrediting and undermining the legitimacy,” said CDAF director Issac Kamola in a recording obtained by the Manhattan Institute’s John Sailer.
“I would love 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,” Kamola continued.

There’s big money behind the decades-long push to drive America’s colleges and universities to the political left—the Mellon Foundation, which provided the seed money for Kamola’s organization, has an endowment of nearly $8 billion.

Indeed, according to Tyler Austin Harper, writing in The Atlantic, “the foundation’s virtual monopoly on humanities funding means that it has the power to remake entire fields according to its desires. And in recent years, under the leadership of Elizabeth Alexander, who became the organization’s president in 2018, Mellon has embraced an understanding of the humanities that is much more utilitarian, and far more political …”

Sailer believes AAUP’s targeting of civics centers is part of a broader campaign. In his bombshell report for City Journal revealing Kamola’s remarks and AAUP’s mischief, Sailer notes, “CDAF appears to be part of a larger but covert ‘rapid response’ project funded by Mellon,” and he quotes Kamola burbling about “a budget that looks like it may be something like $10 million to create a new organization that would do rapid response.”

The academic establishment is fighting back against all attempts by states and the federal government to restore sanity and fairness—including equality under law—to our campuses.

The AAUP sees itself as an aristocracy: untouchable, unaccountable, and entitled to living off other people’s labor.

Yet that’s not enough—the mere existence of alternative academic institutions like the Hamilton Center is intolerable. Academic freedom for these AAUP apparatchiks means the freedom to impose absolute conformity. And thanks to the Mellon Foundation, they think they have money to do it.

The state of higher education today shows just what Mellon’s millions are worth: While academic standards slide to the point where students can’t even read complete books, recitations of ideology crowd out serious discussions of ideas, and the very institutions that ought to champion academic freedom instead turn it inside out. The AAUP should be ashamed, but Americans can’t wait for an organization like that to reform itself.

Our institutions of higher education receive billions of taxpayer dollars, whether in the form of federal grants or through state governments. They should have academic freedom, but not freedom from accountability to the law and to the mission of education itself.

Civics centers have been an attempt to restore something of the original character of our colleges and universities, but it turns out these centers won’t be left alone by the progressive bureaucracies that surround them or the activist academics who want to destroy them.

If the director of AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom is bent upon “increasing the political costs and decreasing the legitimacy of these centers,” it’s time for stronger remedies than building gated communities of traditional scholarship within what is in effect a one-party state.

The only way to protect civic centers, viewpoint diversity and academic freedom is to continue the efforts the Trump administration has begun to hold higher ed to account.
Just as freedom on the street doesn’t mean criminals’ freedom to mug and murder, academic freedom doesn’t mean the freedom to end everyone else’s freedom to teach and learn.

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