AAUP President Condemns Political Firings of Texas Faculty, Calls for Reinstatements

AAUP President Todd Wolfson released the following statement today:

The sudden firings of faculty members this week at Texas A&M University and Texas State University are serious violations of well-established standards and principles of academic freedom and tenure endorsed by the AAUP, the American Association of Colleges and Universities, and more than 280 other professional and educational organizations that have endorsed the AAUP-AAC&U 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure.

These firings set a dangerous new precedent for partisan interference in Texas higher education. Governor Greg Abbott and Texas lawmakers' clamor for the dismissal of professors who say things they disagree with amounts to government thought policing. Partisan intrusion into the classroom is censorship and fundamentally antithetical to academic freedom and the mission of higher education. When it is allowed to stand, colleges and universities will no longer serve their mission of seeking truth, educating our students, and promoting the common good: They will seek only to please the politically powerful and teach ideas the government approves. The forces behind this are making colleges and universities into the caricatures they have been drawing for years, places where people are punished for voicing ideas that are unpopular or "politically incorrect."

To protect faculty members from these pressures, the AAUP has since its founding in 1915 insisted that a faculty member may only be fired from their current appointment after they've had a hearing before an elected committee of their peers where the administration bears the burden of demonstrating that they are professionally unfit for their positions. The AAUP therefore calls on Texas A&M University and Texas State University to reverse these summary dismissals. Further, we condemn the removal of the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and the chair of the English department at Texas A&M for supporting the academic freedom of an instructor as a draconian abuse of power.

The censorship of academic speech and entire fields of knowledge in service to an ideology poses an unprecedented danger to the future of higher education in the United States. The AAUP stands resolute in our core mission to advance and protect academic freedom and quality in education against these perverse and duplicitous political attacks.