The AAUP Continues Its Policy of Antisemitism Denial

As an AAUP member, I recently received an email from President Irene Mulvey regarding the "Crisis on Campus." She commends various AAUP chapters for "standing up and speaking out to defend free speech and peaceful protests on our campuses and for condemning in the strongest possible terms the repressive and violent militarized responses ordered by college and university administrators." She does not mention the protests that have interfered with other students' access to university facilities, or the incidents of harassment directed at perceived "Zionist" and visibly Jewish students.

Regarding antisemitism, Mulvey says: 

The AAUP has been clear that antisemitism and hate have no place on our campuses or anywhere. On many campuses, criticism of a war and the policies of governments and institutions, including criticism by Jewish students, is being conflated with antisemitism.

She says nothing about the documented incidents of non-conflated antisemitism, such as the blood libel against Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky or the similar poster depicting Northwestern's President Michael Schill with horns. A recently opened civil rights investigation at UC Berkeley conflates islamophobia with a law professor's attempt to ensure civility in her own backyard. Will we see an objection from the AAUP?

The link in Mulvey's email goes to a single tweet, which reads:

Here’s a quick thread clarifying the AAUP’s stance on antisemitism.

The AAUP views the growth of antisemitism as a severe threat which can & should be addressed under existing civil rights laws as religious or race discrimination.

That's it. The AAUP's stance is that antisemitism should not be recognized as a unique phenomenon, with a unique history, even though, as I explained here, it has features that transcend, and cannot be adequately covered, by religious or race discrimination laws.

In other words, the AAUP is firmly opposed to antisemitism in the abstract, but takes no notice of it in the real world, where it is invariably said to be either nonexistent, weaponized, or impermissibly conflated. 

Nor has the AAUP made similarly dismissive statements about other forms of discrimination -- such as genetic information, parental status, domestic violence victim status, or use of worker's compensation -- that are often enshrined in universities' conduct codes.

Likewise, the AAUP called on university administrations to refrain from issuing statements about Hamas's Oct. 7 terror attack on Israeli Jews, in order to maintain neutrality, while saying exactly nothing about the scores of Palestine solidarity statements that university units -- including over 130 gender and feminist studies departments, among many others -- have issued for years.

It gets worse. Mulvey goes on to say,

Suppressing speech or silencing peaceful protest in the name of safety is antithetical to the mission of higher education to promote free and open expression, inquiry, and debate. 

We all know that the invocation of emotional "safety" has been overused and abused by students and DEI programs to shield students from all manner of merely uncomfortable speech. It would be good to eliminate it from the lexicon of student services. The AAUP, however, repudiates student "safety" only when it is invoked to protect Jewish students. The longstanding use by other minorities to suppress or discourage speech has not been challenged by the AAUP.

To be sure, antisemitism has lately been exploited as a wedge issue by opportunists in Congress. The now-pending Antisemitism Awareness Act goes much too far by requiring use of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition of antisemitism "for the enforcement of Federal antidiscrimination laws." The IHRA definition has much to commend it as an educational tool, but it was not intended to be enforced and should never be written into law.

The AAUP quite rightly calls itself the “most prominent guardian of academic freedom” for faculty and students in the U.S. Its cursory approach to antisemitism -- which is typically acknowledged in a single-sentence platitude, or less, followed by a much longer disclaimer -- is a deeply troubling reflection of contemporary politics on the left, which undermines the organization's reputation for objectivity. Even so, the AAUP otherwise plays an invaluable in irreplaceable role in academic life. I intend to maintain my membership and I encourage others to join.