The AAU is an “elite organization that has served as a strong voice for … elite universities’ interests,” Timothy Cain, professor of higher education at the University of Georgia and expert on academic freedom, told me recently. “At times [the AAU has worked] in a productive way to facilitate issues for the entirety of higher ed.” At other times, though, it has prioritized the success and welfare of its member institutions, referred to on its website as “America’s leading research universities.”
Now, I don’t pay attention to powerful organizations because I think they are the “best.” For the same reason, I don’t pay attention to Harvard because I think it is filled with the “brightest” students or “smartest” faculty. I pay attention to these institutions because they are influential. They have been given the opportunity to accrue substantial wealth, property and connections. I abhor the tendency to discuss these places as if they are inherently better than other institutions. But I equally disagree with the notion that one should simply ignore them.
Powerful institutions can survive the consequences of sacrificing funding to defy pressure tactics. The financial fallout of such decisions could leave others destroyed. Their influence means they play an outsize role in setting the trajectory for all U.S. institutions. That’s why Marc Rowan, one of the billionaires rumored to be helping the federal government craft higher education censorship policies, implied last fall that one only needs to change five institutions to reshape the entire system of U.S. higher education. These dynamics are why the AAU’s role in the second Red Scare matters so much.
In 1953, the AAU weighed in on how the academic community should think about academic freedom in light of the second Red Scare. Its statement, “The Rights and Responsibilities of Universities and Their Faculties," explicitly noted that “Since present membership in the Communist Party requires the acceptance of [certain] principles and methods, such membership extinguishes the right to a university position.”
It’s certainly true that in the middle of the 20th century people eagerly criticized Communism. It wasn’t just the AAU that condemned association with the party—the American Civil Liberties Union expelled a board member because she was a Communist. In its 1951–52 annual report, the Guggenheim Foundation warned that being a member of a group “which does their thinking for them or which indicates what their conclusions must be or ought to be” would get no help from the organization. “Without qualification, we know that this condition of un-freedom of mind includes all those who have membership in the Communist Party,” it said.