The fact that a professor’s dismissal more than a century ago contributed to the establishment of one of the most enduring institutions in American higher education is somewhat ironic. Arthur O. Lovejoy resigned from Stanford University in protest in 1900 after economist Edward Alsworth Ross was fired for opposing the use of Chinese labor on the Southern Pacific Railroad by Jane Stanford, the railroad tycoon’s widow. Lovejoy remembered. Fifteen years later, he and philosopher John Dewey formally founded the American Association of University Professors in a meeting room at the Chemists’ Club in New York City. Fundamentally, it was an act of collective memory.
The fact that the AAUP was founded in response to a particular injustice rather than as a bureaucratic body put together in a conference room still speaks volumes about the organization. This is significant because it influences the AAUP’s long-standing understanding of its mission, which is to hold institutions accountable rather than manage them.
The organization’s foundational document, the 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure, is the kind of document that is subtly cited for decades until circumstances make it seem urgent once more. On paper, its three main tenets are simple: academics should have autonomy in their research, in the classroom, and as citizens. It’s fairly easy. Those who find simplicity inconvenient have historically and currently caused friction.
The AAUP served as a sort of institutional conscience for the majority of the 20th century. It published reports on contingent faculty, censured universities that broke academic standards, promoted shared governance, and occasionally filed legal briefs. Its affiliation with the American Federation of Teachers in 2022 marked a change that went beyond symbolic solidarity. The AAUP was presenting itself as a union with the ability to organize, go on strike, and engage in negotiations in addition to being a professional association. In recent years, chapters at Oregon Tech, Wright State, and Rutgers have all put that muscle to the test.
It’s still unclear if institutional prestige and union power will be sufficient to address the current challenges facing the organization. The pressure created by the current political environment doesn’t neatly fit into preexisting frameworks. Without consulting the faculty, the Board of Governors in Florida, which is primarily composed of gubernatorial appointees, eliminated Introduction to Sociology from the general education curricula at all 12 public universities.
More than 200 courses in Texas were flagged or canceled as a result of the A&M system’s requirement for administrative pre-approval for courses that addressed race, gender, or sexual orientation. According to reports, a philosophy professor was instructed to take Plato off the syllabus. Midway through the semester, graduate ethics courses were discontinued.
Observing this from the outside gives the impression that something fundamentally different is taking place—coordinated efforts to decide which ideas are permitted inside a classroom rather than disagreements over budget allocation or tenure deadlines. In June 2026, the AAUP began a formal investigation into Texas, and its leadership has been outspoken in portraying these incidents as a pattern rather than as singular political disputes. The AAUP may have made its most significant strategic decision to date with that framing, as institutions tend to retreat from patterns rather than individual cases.
59 universities are currently on the organization’s list of universities that are censured for violating academic freedom and tenure standards. It’s a significant title, and most university administrators don’t like wearing it. However, criticism has its bounds. In a time when some governing boards don’t seem to care about reputation, it depends on reputational pressure. The AAUP is aware of this. The stakes were clearly stated in its joint policy platform with the AFT, which was introduced prior to the 2026 midterms.
The AAUP has never fully overcome the tension that led to its founding more than a century ago, when a powerful and wealthy woman decided that a professor’s ideas were inconvenient. Railroad barons become state legislators, dismissed professors become courses that are canceled, but the fundamental question remains the same: who gets to decide what is taught, and why? As it happens, that question is ageless.
