Academics have long tried to have it both ways in claiming to support diversity and robust debate while excluding views that challenge left-wing orthodoxy. Now an influential academic publication is abandoning all pretense.
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), a major union of academic professionals, states that it aims to “champion academic freedom, advance shared governance, [and] organize all faculty to promote education for the common good.”
And yet, AAUP’s magazine published an article titled “Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity” by Lisa Siraganian, a professor at Johns Hopkins University and the president of her university’s AAUP chapter. It became the subject of some heated criticism, and a Chronicle reporter wrote a Twitter/X thread that fairly described some flaws in the article, particularly by pointing out that the broader public accurately perceives academia as leaning left. In an attempt to defend the article, the AAUP account responded with the following: “Fascism generally doesn’t do great under peer review, but perhaps it’s the intellectual values of academia, which emphasizes critical inquiry & challenges traditional norms, that may be inherently less appealing to those with a more conservative worldview.”
It is difficult to identify what is most wrong in the AAUP’s post. By arguing that academia skews left because “fascism” doesn’t survive intellectual scrutiny, the AAUP suggests that anyone who isn’t sufficiently progressive is a Nazi who needs to be ejected from higher education. Could there be a more stark confirmation of the public’s perception of universities as ideological hubs unaware of their own internal hegemony? Still, the AAUP applauds itself, its affiliates, and university culture as practicing “critical inquiry.”
It isn’t clear what the “intellectual values of academia” mean anymore given the affirmative action policies that undermine meritocracy, and the proliferation of pseudo-disciplines like “gender studies.” And while the AAUP believes that “peer review” is a rigorous process, it now functions as a mechanism to enforce a left-wing consensus. After all, purportedly “academic” articles that have been published in peer-reviewed or refereed journals include “Unsettling SpongeBob and the Legacies of Violence on Bikini Bottom,” “Refusal to forgive: Indigenous women’s love and rage,” “Queering Queer Conversations,” and “A decolonized mental health framework for black women and birthing people.”
Supposedly serious “intellectual” institutions in the academic orbit are corrupted by progressive politics. For example, the American Psychological Association — which develops the APA style that is used in some universities, journals, and a range of scholarly works — issued an “apology to people of color” in 2021 for its “role in promoting, perpetuating, and failing to challenge racism, racial discrimination, and human hierarchy in U.S.” The APA encourages scholars to use “bias-free language” and follow its “inclusive language guide.” It also published an “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Toolkit for Journal Editors” this year that instructs editors to “promote citation justice” by “including citations from underrepresented scholars to address citation bias” for the sake of fostering “equity and diversity in scholarly discourse.”
Similarly, as an effort to counteract the Trump administration’s anti-DEI initiatives, Nature Reviews Psychology recently declared that “scientists can demonstrate their commitment to DEI through actions that are not mandated by institutions,” therefore it explicitly advised authors to begin “diversifying citation practices.” In other words, purported scholarship should pick sources based on an author’s identity traits as opposed to the quality of argument or evidence.
In sum, the AAUP’s self-regard was unjustified and its insult was a confession that confirmed what conservatives have long said: Academia lacks ideological diversity, in part because its left-leaning members gleefully define any right-leaning individuals as moral dangers and systematically purge them from the institutions — be it through the admissions process, the peer-review system, the employment search, or the tenure track. The AAUP was right about only one thing: academics do in fact “challenge traditional norms,” but only insofar as they are attempting to coerce everyone to subscribe to progressive beliefs.