A premier institution dedicated to advancing academic freedom is reportedly working to limit free speech on college campuses.
In February 2024, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which sets professional standards in higher education, launched the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom (CDAF). The center, according to its mission statement, is “committed to preserving and expanding conditions that make it possible to work, teach, learn, create, and share knowledge in ways that promote the common good.”
But new revelations from City Journal indicate that the CDAF is not living up to its name; instead, its membership has taken a rather narrow view of what knowledge and which methods “promote the common good”—especially at civics centers designed to promote viewpoint diversity on campus.
“If we’re thinking about a five-year research agenda,” CDAF director and Trinity College professor Isaac Kamola said in a March 2025 meeting unveiled through City Journal‘s public records request, “I think unmasking, naming and shaming, and just increasing the political costs and decreasing the legitimacy of these centers is going to be really important.”
What could lead a group, nominally dedicated to defending academic freedom, to attack centers of classical and Enlightenment thought? Power and politics, of course.
In that March meeting, Barrett Taylor, a CDAF fellow and professor of higher education at the University of North Texas, said that the establishment of civics centers “undercuts our ability to make” process arguments. If the centers began to assert their own institutional autonomy, Taylor said, then some critic might wonder, “Why do you want your faculty to be in charge of the curriculum but not theirs?”
With no principled answer to give, the CDAF appears ready to torpedo the reputation of these centers—in the name of academic freedom.
Still, the legitimacy of civics centers—which are often created or backed by right–leaning state legislatures or conservative donors—may deserve questioning. When partisan politicians engage in the direct management of public institutions of higher education, bias and censorship are often the result.
But it doesn’t look like the CDAF is conducting an honest audit of the centers’ efficacy. Instead, it has recognized them as a threat to higher education’s progressive status quo, whose protection seems to be the CDAF’s true priority.
In the same meeting, Eli Meyerhoff, a CDAF fellow and a visiting scholar at Duke University, outlined his vision for the AAUP over the next five years. He saw the organization “becoming more like a union,” where “the holder of academic freedom is more like a worker and less like a professional.” Under this system, limits on academic freedom would be determined by “strong, democratically run unions” consisting of students, faculty, and staff at individual universities.
The AAUP did not respond to Reason‘s request for comment on whether the CDAF members’ statements were representative of its present or future approach to safeguarding academic freedom. But, given higher education’s lack of political diversity, decisions made by “strong, democratically run unions” could only ever be expected to punish conservative academics.
Indeed, in an October 2024 meeting, CDAF fellow John Warner (a writer on faculty at the College of Charleston) called the suspension of controversial University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax “an example of the process of academic freedom.” Free speech groups, including the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, criticized the university for “ignor[ing] the difference between protected expression and punishable misconduct,” and said that Wax’s case “is academic freedom’s canary in the coal mine.”
The warning seems to have been well-founded. The CDAF—backed by such an influential organization as the AAUP—has devoted itself to defending a liberal orthodoxy which, in the name of community-sanctioned “process,” has expelled dissidents and disciplined infidels with abandon. True academic freedom is in need of more principled defenders.
