The American Association of University Professors is now mainly a leftist political outfit, just like the National Education Association. The latest piece of evidence is its endorsement of Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan, a DSA-adjacent zealot. The AAUP loves him because he’s for all the standard “progressive” stuff including nearly free college.
In today’s Martin Center article, Sherman Criner reflects on this development.
It signals to an entire generation of young people that to be college educated in America is, well, to be a democratic socialist. As is the case with these sorts of things, many conservatives have therefore characterized the AAUP’s endorsement of a Marxist politician as a clear, revolutionary break from our liberal traditions of institutional neutrality, academic freedom, and open inquiry. Other, more thoughtful conservatives lament how one of the nation’s historic academic institutions, prided for its evenhandedness and academic stature, has “transformed into little more than another advocacy organization.”
Criner recounts John Adams’s view that highly educated people become dangerous if they are not moored to virtue, which applies to the leadership of the AAUP and a great many college grads these days.
The AAUP’s endorsement of Abdul El-Sayed represents precisely that danger: an empowered class of extraordinary intellect, but one increasingly untethered from the character and prudence necessary to govern wisely. In this sense, America’s professoriate has fulfilled Adams’ warning of an aristocracy that mistakes the possession of superior talents for a corresponding superiority in natural judgment and, believing itself capable of perfecting mankind, seeks to “Set up Caesar.”