The AAUP’s New President Is Not Staying Neutral

On April 10, 2023, Rutgers University faculty went on strike for the first time in the institution’s 257-year history. But they were far from alone. Joining them were the postdocs and counselors in their union, plus academic workers from two other unions—an uncommon alliance of multiple types of higher education workers in a single, huge walkout. Altogether, the labor organizations called thousands of people off the job simultaneously across all three Rutgers campuses.

Todd Wolfson, a Rutgers associate professor and president of the union representing faculty, grad workers and postdoctoral associates, and counselors, was a leader in uniting the three unions for the strike and preparing the ground for it. Ironically, though, he’d have to leave the Rutgers campuses just as it was beginning. On the eve of the strike, Governor Phil Murphy had called representatives of the workers and university leadership to the statehouse in Trenton to negotiate an end.

But before Wolfson left the flagship Rutgers–New Brunswick campus that first day of the strike, he took up the mike in front of hundreds of ralliers. Wolfson, a critic of the “bureaucrats” and “business people” who he says have taken over higher education, referenced Rutgers’ central administration building in his speech to the crowd, according to a video of the demonstration. “Let’s make sure that the folks in Winants Hall in their little fancy spot over there can hear us, OK?” he said. The crowd cheered, and he started a call-and-response chant.

“No contract?” he yelled. “No peace!” the picketers cried back, jutting their signs into the air with each word.

The governor’s office asked the unions to bring five people to the statehouse, Wolfson told Inside Higher Ed. “We couldn’t do that—we were three unions, and we brought a team of 20,” he said. Six days of nearly 24-7 negotiations in the statehouse ensued—“a pressure cooker,” he said. “We felt very, very far away from the people who we were negotiating for,” he said.

That week of striking and negotiating led to a framework deal. In the end, the university—with the aid of an extra $25 million that Murphy and the State Legislature threw its way—provided many grad workers with nearly $10,000 raises. Rutgers also hiked the minimum pay for postdoctoral associates and fellows by nearly 28 percent, significantly increased per-course pay for lecturers, and more. Wolfson has tenure, but he told Inside Higher Ed that, in the strike, “we really wanted to center the needs of the more vulnerable parts of our unit”—the adjunct faculty and grad workers.

It was a significant victory. And Wolfson was simultaneously bringing that “No contract? No peace!” energy to a national level. While serving as president of Rutgers’ combined American Association of University Professors–American Federation of Teachers union chapter, he led the development of Higher Education Labor United (HELU), a national effort to unite all higher education workers, faculty or not.

Then, earlier this year, he ran for national president of the AAUP and beat the incumbent in a landslide, putting him in charge of the more than a century old faculty association that long ago wrote the rules—adopted by colleges and universities across the country—defining what academic freedom, tenure and shared governance mean.

The elevation of this union leader to the top of the AAUP comes amid a surge in higher education union formations and strikes. And it comes in the midst of an escalation in the already existing conservative criticism of postsecondary education. In this environment, Wolfson isn’t responding by running the AAUP as a staid scholarly organization, if it ever was just that.

He’s called the Republican vice presidential candidate a “fascist.” During just the first four months of his presidency, the association has released statements defending the use of diversity, equity and inclusion criteria in hiring and evaluating faculty and abandoning the group’s categorical opposition to academic boycotts—such as those often called for against Israel. These statements have drawn criticism that the AAUP is abandoning its historic commitment to defending academic freedom in favor of being too political, too leftist and too anti-Zionist.

Wolfson calls that bunk. “This is not new for AAUP—AAUP has always stood for fighting over the best aspects of the sector,” he said.

Fighting Words?

In an early sign that Wolfson might punch harder than past presidents, on Aug. 8, he called JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, a “fascist.” The remark wasn’t an answer in an interview—it was included in a statement posted to the AAUP’s website. Vance, whom Trump had recently chosen, had previously called professors “the enemy” and just praised how Viktor Orbán, the authoritarian Hungarian prime minister, handled universities in his country.

“With Vance, American far-right authoritarians have succeeded in elevating a fascist who vows to ‘aggressively attack universities in this country’ to within striking distance of their goal: the annihilation of American higher education as we know it,” Wolfson wrote. “All those who care about higher education, academic freedom and the future of democracy should prepare for the fight ahead by organizing their campus communities.”

Wolfson’s pugilistic statement came as the conservative critique that faculty are overwhelmingly leftist has only grown since Oct. 7, 2023, when the Hamas attack was followed by ongoing Israeli retaliation and continuing pro-Palestine protests on U.S. campuses. But Wolfson hasn’t moderated his language in response to that.

Wolfson, who is Jewish and has family in Israel, said, “I’ve never been an activist, I’ve never organized” on the Israel-Palestine conflict. But he supports the Faculty for Justice in Palestine–Rutgers chapter and has signed a protest statement from “Jewish members of Rutgers Faculty for Justice in Palestine.” Before becoming national AAUP president, Wolfson said, he joined a human ring to protect a student protest encampment at Rutgers from police.

“I’ve felt like the beautiful history that I know of Judaism isn’t reflected in the way Palestinians have been treated,” he said. But, he said, “I did not run to be president of AAUP because of my feelings about Israel and Palestine.”

Wolfson said the AAUP’s Aug. 12 statement dropping its total opposition to academic boycotts was in the works before he became president, but he voted for it when it came before the group’s national council. The reversal launched a flurry of criticism from other academic freedom organizations, free speech groups and Israel supporters. “We must no longer use AAUP policy as the gold standard for academic freedom,” wrote Cary Nelson, an Israel supporter and former AAUP president, in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

In an interview with Inside Higher Ed, Nelson said having a Faculty for Justice in Palestine member lead the AAUP is “like having a KKK member run the AAUP.” He said they’re both extreme and politically offensive identifications that should disqualify someone from being president of an organization that should be neutral.

Joshua T. Katz, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a member of the Academic Freedom Alliance, wrote an op-ed in the conservative City Journal subtitled “The American Association of University Professors, long relied on to champion academic freedom, can no longer be trusted to do so.” But Katz wrote that the reversal on boycotts “by the once-august and respected organization is not surprising,” citing Wolfson’s statement calling Vance a fascist.

Other free speech and academic freedom advocacy groups criticized the AAUP this month over a statement on diversity, equity and inclusion that Wolfson didn’t write himself, but that was instead approved by the organization’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. “This committee rejects the notion that the use of DEI criteria for faculty evaluation is categorically incompatible with academic freedom,” that statement says. Amid universities and state legislatures eliminating DEI policies, the statement said DEI criteria can be valuable “when implemented appropriately in accordance with sound standards of faculty governance.”

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression responded with a column on its own website titled “The AAUP continues to back away from academic freedom.” The columnist said, “The AAUP’s transformation into just another political organization is highly discouraging.”

Wolfson said Committee A’s work has been “walled off from the political leadership of the organization.” But he defends both the statement on DEI and the one dropping the complete opposition to boycotts.

There was never a statement from the AAUP opposing academic boycotts “before Cary Nelson was president and wanted AAUP to serve his interests," Wolfson said. "We are being attacked by Cary Nelson and a well-organized set of forces on those positions and, from my vantage, it’s them, and particularly Cary Nelson, who has politicized academic freedom for his own personal ends and then led a campaign.” (Clarification: The AAUP released an initial, two-paragraph statement opposing academic boycotts in 2005, before Nelson became president in 2006. In 2006, the AAUP released a longer statement opposing boycotts.)

He said “The political side of the organization, which in many ways I’m leading … I do not think needs to be neutral.” The political side is focused on “standing up to the bullies that want to undermine our sector," according to Wolfson. “There are massive political intrusions coming on, coming at us around academic freedom. There’s no way to be a neutral arbiter. We must stand for things in this environment.”

Wolfson says he’s fighting two crises: divestment from public higher education that began in the 1970s, plus the “attempt from the right wing to take control of our institutions and control what we think and say and research and what our students learn and say.”

“I decided to run for president of AAUP because I felt like we need to be able to respond to this,” Wolfson said. “We need to be able to fight back. There may have been a time when it was OK for us to pretend like we were in the ivory tower and the outside world didn’t matter. This is not that time; 2024 is not that time.”

The Making of a Scholar-Activist

In his position leading the AAUP, Wolfson, 52, is continuing to advocate for faculty beyond just those who are tenured or on the tenure track or who hold the title “professor.” Even further, he said, “I believe we should be making common cause with all workers in higher education.”

“I’ve always been concerned with injustice and inequality in multiple different sites—sometimes in my own work site, sometimes in the communities where I work and live.” He said, “Democracy in the workplace is, I think, critical to building a democratic society.”

Wolfson earned his undergraduate degree in cultural anthropology from Duke University in 1994, then spent three formative years in Africa. He started off teaching in Namibia through a Harvard University program and then researched social projects such as fighting HIV and AIDS before getting a grant for an oral history project in which he interviewed people who were children during the over-20-year-long Namibian war for independence from apartheid South Africa.

He returned to the U.S. and pursued a Ph.D. in anthropology and education at the University of Pennsylvania. He ended up researching social movements, and at Penn he got his first taste of labor organizing—he and other grad workers at Penn started a unionizing campaign around 2001.

Penn grad workers voted on a union, but the George W. Bush–era National Labor Relations Board decided grad workers didn’t have the right to unionize and impounded the ballots before counting, Wolfson said. Despite this, he said the university made concessions.

“Even though we ended up not unionizing, we won a fair bit of important things for the lives of the grad workers, and doctoral students in particular,” Wolfson said. (Twenty years later, the group he helped found, Graduate Employees Together at the University of Pennsylvania, or GET-UP, won unionization under the current NLRB.)

Wolfson also began community organizing off campus. Though he hasn’t worked as a reporter himself, he was part of a group that started the Media Mobilizing Project around 2006. “The goal was to bring together all sorts of organizations fighting for social change in Philadelphia and use media to lift up their struggles and to connect them,” he said.

He wrote his dissertation and first book, Digital Rebellion: The Birth of the Cyber Left, on the social movements of the 1990s and early 2000s. That included the Indymedia wave of citizen journalism that sprouted up amid protests of the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle.

After getting his doctorate, he was hired at Rutgers–New Brunswick in the fall of 2009. He’s now an associate professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies.

He co-directs the Media, Inequality and Change Center, a collaboration between Rutgers and his old campus, Penn. The National Communication Association’s Critical and Cultural Studies Division gave him its inaugural Scholar Activist Award.

At Rutgers, Wolfson said he joined the Rutgers AAUP-AFT union leadership in 2016. Shortly after helping lead the 2018 contract campaign, he was elected the chapter’s president in July 2019.

Then came the pandemic. The Rutgers administration signaled it was going to do mass layoffs, Wolfson said, but his union and others joined together and persuaded the university to agree to what was basically a voluntary furlough program to save jobs. Wolfson said that showed him the power of building a broad coalition of faculty, staff and students.

“That experience really resonated with me and in many ways shapes how I’ve been thinking about and approaching the future of this sector,” he said. Amid the pandemic, Ian Gavigan—a grad worker who said he met Wolfson while he was pushing against underfunding and privatization of public education in Philadelphia—came to Wolfson with the idea for what would eventually become Higher Ed Labor United.

HELU seeks to unite all faculty and higher ed staff across the country, no matter what union they’re in or whether they even have collective bargaining rights. Joe Berry, a labor historian involved in HELU, said Wolfson’s leadership of HELU “was of a style of a good parent: He runs a good meeting, he was serious, honest, did not say he would do things and not do things. When he failed to do something that he said he was going to do, he was, as they say, a mensch about it. He owned up to it right away.” (Wolfson would become interim chair of the organization; he later handed off the reins at the founding convention, at Rutgers, to focus on leading the AAUP.)

Back at Rutgers, Wolfson united all the unions representing academic workers for the next union contract campaign—which would ultimately include the 2023 strike.

Earlier this year, Wolfson threw his hat in the ring for the AAUP presidency himself as part of a slate called United Faculty for the Common Good. “Higher education is in crisis—business as usual won’t save it,” the slate’s website says. Alongside stressing the need for unity across different types of workers, it calls for “expanding political power through coalitions with allied student, climate and social justice organizations at the local and national levels.”

The platform was not politically neutral. Higher education, the slate’s website says, must challenge “forms of systemic oppression based on race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, age, (dis)ability, immigration status or colonialism.” It calls for strengthening and expanding shared governance “beyond the ranks of faculty.” And it appears to take a swipe at the efficacy of AAUP’s practice of writing policies and issuing reports on violations of academic freedom and other matters: “Issuing declarations and reports will not save higher education,” the website says.

Wolfson easily won his race against Irene Mulvey, who had led AAUP for the previous four years and ran its nonunionized Fairfield University chapter, garnering 20,811 votes to her 7,682. Mulvey said, “There was so much that the two campaigns agreed on, I think the real difference was the focus on wall-to-wall organizing,” a phrase she said Wolfson’s slate used. Wall-to-wall organizing usually means trying to organize across all types of jobs, rather than just focusing on faculty. While she was “disappointed in the results of the election,” she believes the AAUP’s core principles will guide the organization into the future no matter who’s in leadership.

American Association of Unionized Professors?

For at least the last decade, said Berry, the labor historian, most AAUP members have been union members. He said Wolfson now represents the larger unification between the AAUP and the AFT. “I would say that there’s a good chance that this is a pivotal point and that he will be seen as one of the pivotal figures,” Berry said. But Berry also said it seems Wolfson is “not a personal power seeker, he’s a movement guy.”

Wolfson’s union background and emphasis aren’t completely without precedent for AAUP. In fact, in 2012, Rudy Fichtenbaum, chief negotiator for the AAUP union chapter at Wright State University, also beat Mulvey during an earlier attempt of hers for the presidency. He served from 2012 to 2020.

Upon his election, Fichtenbaum asked, “What is the best way to achieve academic freedom, shared governance and protect economic interests of faculty members? I think the answer is being an organization of activists, where the core values of the AAUP remain a centerpiece.” Back then, there was criticism in the AAUP of Fichtenbaum’s emphasis on unionizing.

In an interview last week with Inside Higher Ed, Fichtenbaum, now a professor emeritus, echoed many of the statements Wolfson has made. “The emphasis on organizing is necessary because of the way the profession has changed,” Fichtenbaum said. He noted the majority of faculty are no longer on the tenure track. “Without collective action there really just is no faculty voice,” he said. He said, “As times change, if you want to survive, you have to change with ’em.”

During Fichtenbaum’s presidency, a publication sponsored by the conservative National Association of Scholars ran a column criticizing his rhetoric. The column was titled, “The AAUP Takes a Sharp Left Turn.”

Joan Scott, who recently rejoined the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure after serving on it from 1993 to 2006, pushed back on the leftist characterization. But she also said, “AAUP has always been a quote-unquote progressive organization.” For instance, she noted that the AAUP’s first president was philosopher John Dewey, who led what was called the “progressive education” movement.

“That kind of organization is always going to be fighting against the powers that be or those that would seek to undermine and destroy the institutions,” Scott said. Now, “when the mission of higher education is at stake, then the people who are trying to destroy it are the ones you have to stand up against.”

Cary Nelson served as AAUP president before Fichtenbaum and also butted heads with him. Of Wolfson and the current AAUP leaders, he said, “I think they’re going to kill off the AAUP.” Nelson accused Wolfson of wanting to focus the organization on anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian activism.

“His actions and statements as AAUP president confirm that really that’s at the core of what he means by the AAUP being an activist organization,” Nelson said. “That’s not the only thing he means by it, but anti-Zionism is part of it and that’s a huge difference from 100 years of neutrality.”

Nelson argued that “you can’t defend neutral principles and academic freedom at the same time that you take contested political positions.”

But Wolfson “is not the kind of leader that imposes his vision,” said Rebecca Givan, general vice president of Rutgers AAUP-AFT. She said Wolfson “believes in making sure that union spaces are inclusive spaces where there’s opportunity for dissent and to hear from all perspectives.” And she asserted that the AAUP’s century-long fight for academic freedom and tenure is itself “an advocacy position.”

For many years, Givan said, the AAUP’s primary tool was putting universities on a censure list if they violated the group’s academic freedom principles. But she said universities “no longer care, so if the old tools are not working, it’s time to think seriously about where the power lies and how we can protect higher education.”

Mia McIver, the chair of HELU and a continuing lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles, said faculty have “been losing, and both academic freedom and shared governance have been so deeply eroded in the last few decades that I think we need to learn from that past.”

“The decisions and the statements of AAUP have always been political,” McIver said, “and what’s different now, I think, is that there is a conscious awareness that we need politically engaged leaders and politically engaged organizations to fight for higher ed.”