An organization of activist professors is working to expose college administrators who sympathize with President Donald Trump’s agenda, according to a new watchdog report.
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), an association composed of faculty members on more than 500 campuses, sent an email to their network last week asking members to identify “university board members who are defunding higher education by supporting, advocating, and profiting from Trump-[Elon] Musk policies.”
“We need to understand who is fueling this crisis on our campuses,” the email read. “Join our research party to examine whether any of your institution’s regents, trustees, or governing board members are undermining higher education by supporting, advocating for, or profiting from Trump–Musk policies. Our goal is to map conflicts of interest among governing board members who are entrusted with the stewardship of our colleges and universities.”
AAUP plans to “map conflicts of interest” by creating a Google spreadsheet of board members who align with Trump. From there, the group plans to target board members with Trump sympathies.
“When we have a regent that has a conflict of interest, they are probably the same people deciding the economic agenda, profiting at the expense of us and other members of our communities,” one professor said Thursday during a Zoom meeting AAUP hosted on the subject, the College Fix reported. “They are probably avoiding taxes, buying our politicians, and leveraging their economic power. That’s what we’re here to interrupt.”
AAUP has received more than $6 million in dues from faculty members at publicly funded universities since 2020, Open the Books found, including most recently, $904,257 from Portland State University faculty in 2023, $578,637 from Kent State University faculty in 2023, and $449,012 from Eastern Michigan University faculty in 2021. Faculty at other publicly funded universities that have given to AAUP include Rutgers University, University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and Waubonsee Community College.
The organization’s broader plan to “interrupt” the alleged political agenda of individual trustees coincides with the National Day of Action for Higher Education on April 17, which AAUP co-sponsors. The national event is “a one-day action on and around our campuses to renew this vision of higher education as an autonomous public good, and university workers as its most important resource,” according to its website.
During the Zoom meeting last week, one organizer told AAUP members and professors that “we cannot allow board members and trustees to be supporting the Trump-Musk agenda while also pretending to represent the interests of your institutions of higher learning. We need to identify their ties. We want actionable research to support the action you will be leading later this month and in May,” the Fix reported.
Editor’s Note: A previous version of this article stated that AAUP had received $6 million in grants from publicly funded universities. That claim, which was based on Open The Books’ reporting, was incorrect. In fact the $6 million came from voluntary dues contributed by faculty members at those universities.