Nobody Asked Them | American Enterprise Institute

Last week, the American Association of University Professors made the first national political endorsement in its 111-year history, backing Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. 

Inside Higher Ed (IHE) reports that its Michigan chapters requested the endorsement, so the AAUP polled its Michigan members, and found that roughly 80 percent of those voting in the poll favored endorsing a candidate. 97 percent of those surveyed backed El-Sayed. The national council then approved the recommendation of those in Michigan and made the endorsement. IHE reported that more endorsements are likely forthcoming before the midterms and that the AAUP is creating both a political action committee and hiring a political director. 

I have taught American politics for nearly two decades and spent much of my career working with survey data. The 97 percent figure backing El-Sayed piqued my attention, for whenever I see a number like that, my first question is never, “Why did so many people vote yes?” Rather, it is, “Who never voted at all?” 

The fact of the matter is that contested elections almost never produce 97 percent agreement, and the Michigan race is absolutely contested. An Emerson College poll released last week found El-Sayed leading Haley Stevens among likely Democratic primary voters, but not by anything close to the AAUP margin. Organized labor is divided too. Stevens has collected more than 15 union endorsements, while El-Sayed has the backing of the UAW and AFT. Michigan Democrats clearly disagree about this race. 

Yet, the AAUP is telling us that Michigan professors are unified. We have no way of really knowing. The AAUP is not telling us how many people actually participated in their polling. Was it 97 percent of 400 professors? 40? 4,000? We are simply kept in the dark.  

I do not think 97 percent means everyone suddenly agreed. That is rarely how organizations work; more often, the people who disagree gradually stop showing up. 

Spend some time in almost any community or city council meeting. A committed group learns the rules, attends every meeting, and then keeps coming back and dominates the agenda. Others decide that the evening is not worth it because nothing is going to change; this disengagement is often a perfectly rational conclusion. 

I’ve seen the almost identical pattern emerge within academic departments and scholarly societies. The professor who disagrees often stops standing up to protest a decision and his attendance simply ends. The people who remain in the room begin to think that they speak for the department or discipline.

I know of so many moderate and conservative faculty – like myself – who have gradually disengaged from the AAUP and its chapters as it became clear that the AAUP was becoming a political organization on the left.

I valued and appreciated the AAUP because it was an apolitical, deeply principled, and proudly neutral organization. Because of that neutrality and its overt impartial position, the AAUP carried real authority and used to hold considerable stature in the press, within courts, and among the public in general. Its 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure and the AAUP Censure List carried reputation force because the group was neutral and its consensus could be built around principles as opposed to politics.

Sadly, I believe that the AAUP’s stature is gone. Today, the AAUP has transformed into little more than another advocacy organization – a “union and membership association of faculty…to help the higher education community organize to make our goals a reality” – and it has chosen to endorse candidates. In fact, this year’s AAUP Higher Ed Summit and Biennial Meeting made it clear that an organizational makeover was critical: “transforming the AAUP itself into a fighting labor organization capable of leading the sector and the broader struggle for democracy.”

Despite this shift – which I think profoundly damages the standing of academics and higher education more generally –  the AAUP’s decision as national organization to endorse a candidate in Michigan specifically is troubling because the AAUP at large is taking positions without knowing if they represent the voices of its entire constituency. Certainly, college and university faculty lean left in general and AAUP members lean even further to the left. A vote of the entire membership, therefore, may have produced the same result for the Michigan endorsement. But we don’t know for certain. The views and politics of faculty in Michigan are most likely very different from those in Iowa or Florida.

The endorsement itself is not what troubles me most; what bothers me is the assumption behind the political endorsement. The AAUP decided to speak in the name of professors as a national bloc without first determining if a majority of its members agreed with this decision. I know plenty of members who were never asked.