07.05.26
Editorial Note
Last week, the New York Times (NYT) published an article about the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), an organization that has advocated for faculty members’ rights since 1915.
The article discusses how the AAUP has become one of Trump’s administration’s “main antagonists,” when, during his time in office, the AAUP has filed a dozen lawsuits, and seems to be “the first to jump into legal fights against the Trump administration’s attacks on university funding, speech rights and diversity initiatives.”
The AAUP plans to step up its fight by hiring a political director and shall endorse candidates it “deems supportive of its vision for higher education.”
However, the article notes that as the organization becomes more aggressive, it has also faced sharp criticism of its political stance, “proving the Trump administration’s point about the left-leaning tilt on campuses.”
In response to criticism, the AAUP’s leaders say it is filling a void. “The speed and the seeming arbitrariness of the new administration’s threats against universities left many schools shellshocked.”
The article claims that “Trump officials described professors as ‘the enemy’.”
The article argues that the Trump administration “tried to strip funding from research universities and pushed schools to sign a compact that would allow the government to exert more control over private institutions. Meanwhile, red state legislatures gutted faculty power and eroded tenure. In response, school leaders often concluded that their best bet was to stay quiet and avoid drawing attention to themselves.”
Todd Wolfson, the president of the AAUP, a Rutgers professor and former union leader there, told the NYT that the chaos in higher education has turned the AAUP into a “fighting organization.” He argued, “When people are feeling insecure, they need a home and a place that they think can defend them.”
The article noted, “professors were especially upset when the Trump administration began arresting international students involved in pro-Palestinian activism.”
In one of the AAUP successes, a federal judge has limited the government’s ability to arrest and deport noncitizens for their pro-Palestinian speech. The Trump administration is appealing the ruling. In another recent lawsuit to block the government from threatening to take billions away from Harvard University, a federal judge ruled against the Trump administration, saying its actions violated the First Amendment. The Trump administration said it would appeal against it.
The NYT noted that since 2006, the AAUP had discouraged academic boycotts, but then, in 2024, it adopted a new policy stating that individual faculty members and students are free to debate and embrace boycotts.
The NYT also noted that this “policy was released as Israel bombed Gaza and as pro-Palestinian activists urged cutting off ties with Israeli institutions.”
Not surprisingly, the NYT compares the current battle of the AAUP to “the 1950s, when Joseph McCarthy was calling the university ‘a mess’ and demanding the firing of professors suspected of being Communists… the fight was over whether ‘free institutions of learning’ or government agencies should determine who got to teach. These days… a new generation of professors has become energized by a similar fight.” The NYT stated.
The NYT reporter also added a comment at the bottom, saying that the AAUP “had receded into the background in recent decades. But with the Trump administration unleashing an aggressive attack on higher education, the group is seeing a resurgence. It’s largely shrugging off some of the critiques of the sector from the right,” and doubling down on being a “fighting organization.”
No doubt the second Trump administration prompted the AAUP to take a political stance. A September 2025 Chronicle of Higher Education article questions whether the AAUP is deemed “too partisan” by critics of its methods. It quoted Wolfson: “We’re taking it to the courts and the streets — and we need you,” and explained that this quote encapsulates the AAUP’s approach to the second Trump presidency. The quote comes from an email Wolfson sent to members about the AAUP’s strategy to confront the challenges posed by the second Trump administration. The strategy emphasizes a combination of legal action and organized activism/protest.
Some academics openly criticize the AAUP for its politics. For example, just days after the interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative-leaning think tank, responded in an article by Samuel J. Abrams, AEI Senior Fellow and a Professor at Sarah Lawrence College, titled “When the American Association of University Professors President Pretends There’s No Evidence, Academia Loses Credibility.” Abrams discussed a question raised by the Chronicle, “Why are there so few conservatives in the professoriate?” to Wolfson, to which Wolfson responded, “I would love to see the data on that. If there is actually data, I’d really love to see it.”
For Abrams, “the evidence Wolfson pretended not to know about has been gathered for decades, replicated across methodologies, and published in countless outlets. To act as though it may not exist is either willful ignorance or deliberate denial… The imbalance is not in dispute. Studies going back to the 1980s have shown that liberal faculty massively outnumber conservatives.”
Abrams stated that “The costs of this lopsidedness are profound. Students are deprived of exposure to diverse viewpoints, stunting their intellectual growth. Conservative graduate students often fear that their beliefs will sink their chances of being hired or tenured… And when the public sees academia as hostile to half the country, trust collapses. Gallup and Pew have both recorded a historic drop in confidence in higher education: a decline fueled in part by the perception of ideological bias.”
In 2024, an article in the NYT titled “How Universities Cracked Down on Pro-Palestinian Activism” detailed how the Trump administration successfully halted campus disturbances by anti-Israel activists. Wolfson was cited as saying that the restrictions have made people afraid: “They feel like they’re being watched and surveilled… I think there’s a strong degree of self-censorship that’s taking place.”
In a similar vein, in an article by Inside Higher Education from October 30, 2024, titled “The AAUP’s New President Is Not Staying Neutral,” Wolfson was described as Jewish who has family in Israel. Wolfson said 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.” He explained he was unhappy with “the way Palestinians have been treated.”
Wolfson said he voted for the AAUP’s statement dropping its total opposition to academic boycotts, but it was in the works before he became president.
Back in 2021, Wolfson was among other Rutgers faculty who signed a petition in support of the Palestinian battle against Israel, as Israel Academia Monitor reported in “Rutgers University Battleground on BDS.”
Generally, professors are free to pursue truth in research and teaching without interference, but are expected to exercise restraint and professionalism, especially when dealing with political matters.
Israel Academia Monitor has periodically written about the process of radicalization in social sciences and humanities. The civil rights movement and the Vietnam War brought a new generation of activist professors who failed to make a clear distinction between the political and the academic. Most consequentially, they adopted the critical, neo-Marxist paradigm, which abandoned the empirical inquiry that the AAUP called for. Over time, as researchers argue, departments created an instructional dynamic known as “selection and reinforcement,” with hiring, peer review, and promotion processes, pushing for a leftist perspective. Money from oil-rich countries that supported the Middle East departments solidified the paradigm that Israel is a colonial entity created by Western imperialism that had no right to its ancestral homeland.
It is because of this trend that Wolfson has succeeded in turning the AAUP into a fully-fledged political organization fighting President Trump and promoting anti-Israel initiatives.
The evolution of AAUP from a guardian of academic freedom into a de facto advocacy body on issues such as Israel is dangerous. It contributes to public distrust of academic institutions and the polarization of Western society. Most consequentially, it inflames the current wave of antisemitism, which is already at a record high. Jews are victims of the majority of all hate crimes in the last year, with the number of violent assaults climaxing steadily.
Wolfson and the AAUP should take notice.
REFERENCES:
A Professor Union Grows Fast as It Ramps Up Its Fight Against Trump
The American Association of University Professors is drawing new members. The group’s critics say its political stances hurt its cause.
By
April 24, 2026
Two years ago, as universities were cracking down on campus activism, a handful of Harvard professors decided to push back.
Seven members joined a Zoom call. A few more trickled into meetings after that. Then Donald J. Trump became president again.
Membership in the group, Harvard’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, surged to more than 300, reviving a branch that had been dormant since the McCarthy era, when professors had organized to advocate the rights of faculty members. Across the country, other professors built up their own chapters of the association, too, as Republicans in the federal government and in state houses tried to push a more conservative agenda on higher education.
The national organization grew to more than 57,000 members from about 43,000 in the summer of 2024.
Now, as dues pour in, the group has turned into one of the Trump administration’s main antagonists.
The association has filed nearly a dozen lawsuits, often becoming the first to jump into legal fights against the Trump administration’s attacks on university funding, speech rights and diversity initiatives.
Soon, the A.A.U.P., which was established in 1915, plans to step up its fight. It is hiring a political director for the first time and even plans to endorse candidates it deems supportive of its vision for higher education. The group just unveiled a platform including a call for free public college.
As the organization has grown, and become more aggressive, it has also faced sharp criticism. Some professors say the A.A.U.P.’s political stances — including its support of diversity efforts and its skepticism of the Republican push for “viewpoint diversity” — are proving the Trump administration’s point about the left-leaning tilt on campuses.
The organization’s leaders say it is filling a void.
The speed and the seeming arbitrariness of the new administration’s threats against universities left many schools shellshocked. Trump officials described professors as “the enemy,” tried to strip funding from research universities and pushed schools to sign a compact that would allow the government to exert more control over private institutions. Meanwhile, red state legislatures gutted faculty power and eroded tenure.
In response, school leaders often concluded that their best bet was to stay quiet and avoid drawing attention to themselves.
The chaos in higher education has turned the A.A.U.P. into a “fighting organization,” said Todd Wolfson, the president of the group.
“When people are feeling insecure they need a home and a place that they think can defend them,” said Dr. Wolfson, a Rutgers professor and former union leader there. “The A.A.U.P. has stepped into that breach.”
Kirsten Weld, the Harvard chapter’s president, said professors were especially upset when the Trump administration began arresting international students involved in pro-Palestinian activism.
“We were looking around, and our universities were not saying a word,” she said.
The group, whose first president was the philosopher John Dewey, has filed 11 lawsuits against the Trump administration, including A.A.U.P. vs. Rubio, in which a federal judge limited the government’s ability to arrest and deport noncitizens for their pro-Palestinian speech. The Trump administration is appealing the ruling.
The group also filed a lawsuit last April to block the government from threatening to take billions away from the university. Days later, Harvard also sued, and the cases were consolidated. A federal judge ruled against the Trump administration, saying its actions
violated the First Amendment. The Trump administration said it would appeal.
The surge in membership to the A.A.U.P., which has both advocacy and collective-bargaining chapters affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers, reflects a larger wave of activism in higher education, said William A. Herbert, a collective-bargaining scholar at Hunter College.
“This is the greatest attack on higher education in American history,” Dr. Herbert said, adding, “You’re just seeing a massive growth in collective action on campuses by faculty and others.”
Critics, including those on the right and in the political center, have argued that the group has veered toward identity politics that helped animate the backlash against higher education, including by supporting diversity measures.
Since 2006, the organization had discouraged academic boycotts, which are the suspension of normal academic relations with a college or country in the service of a political goal. Then, in 2024, it adopted a new policy saying that individual faculty members and students should be free to debate and embrace such boycotts. The policy was released as Israel bombed Gaza and as pro-Palestinian activists urged cutting off ties with Israeli institutions.
The A.A.U.P. and its critics disagree on which policy is best for academic freedom.
Matthew W. Finkin, whose first job out of law school was as an A.A.U.P. attorney in 1967, said the group had grown more political and less deliberative in recent decades as it embraced union organizing at the expense of traditional concerns like academic freedom and tenure.
“You can no longer take its policy pronouncements as being above the fray, as being pure matters of principle,” Mr. Finkin said.
The political postures of the A.A.U.P. have led to many ruminations about the group’s “fall” and “unraveling.”
Dr. Wolfson has shrugged off, even reveled in, the criticisms, saying that now is the time to pick sides.
The proof his strategy is working, he said, is the recent membership boom. (The group’s peak was 90,000 in 1969, and its low point was 37,000 in 2012.) Tax records show the group had revenues, mostly from dues, of about $12 million in 2024. In an interview, Dr. Wolfson said 2025 revenues neared $17 million.
“Demand letters to universities, a compact which is nothing more than a loyalty oath, ideologically driven state houses that are ending tenure and collective-bargaining rights, ending academic freedom — and you’re going to tell me I should be neutral?” Dr. Wolfson said. “There’s no neutrality on a runaway train.”
Supporters like Dr. Weld say Dr. Wolfson’s fighting posture is right for this moment and one reason chapters are drawing new members.
In North Carolina, the group has gone to 800 members from about 200 in a year, said Belle Boggs, the state’s chapter president.
Last year, the group organized against a delay in awarding 33 professors tenure at the University of North Carolina’s flagship campus at Chapel Hill. It has opposed an effort to post the syllabuses of faculty members in a public-facing database. And it has created a legal hotline for professors, staffed by First Amendment lawyers.
Harvard’s chapter had been mostly dormant since the 1950s, when Joseph McCarthy was calling the university “a mess” and demanding the firing of professors suspected of being Communists. Professors and the A.A.U.P. praised Harvard’s president at the time, Nathan Pusey, for refusing to take action against the faculty members.
In 1954, at an A.A.U.P. event, Archibald MacLeish, a Harvard professor, said the fight was over whether “free institutions of learning” or government agencies should determine who got to teach.
These days, said Dr. Weld, a historian, a new generation of professors has become energized by a similar fight.
COMMENTS
- Vimal PatelReporterThe A.A.U.P., a storied faculty advocacy group and union, had receded into the background in recent decades. But with the Trump administration unleashing an aggressive attack on higher education, the group is seeing a resurgence. It’s largely shrugging off some of the critiques of the sector from the right and doubling down on becoming a “fighting organization,” as the group’s president told me.
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When the American Association of University Professors President Pretends There’s No Evidence, Academia Loses Credibility
by 
Nonresident Senior Fellow
September 24, 2025
The president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), Todd Wolfson, was recently asked a straightforward question by the Chronicle of Higher Education: Why are there so few conservatives in the professoriate? His response should trouble anyone who cares about the future of higher education. “It depends on the field,” Wolfson said, before adding, “I would love to see the data on that. If there is actually data, I’d really love to see it.”
This wasn’t curiosity. It was evasion. The evidence Wolfson pretended not to know about has been gathered for decades, replicated across methodologies, and published in countless outlets. To act as though it may not exist is either willful ignorance or deliberate denial. In either case, it’s unacceptable for the leader of an organization whose very historic mission has been to safeguard academic freedom and integrity.
Even without hard data, any serious observer of campus academic and social life can see that something is deeply off. Wolfson is an associate professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers and is an “anthropologist by training.” As a proclaimed ethnographer, he describes himself as a close observer of peoples and cultures with their customs and habits making it shocking for him to assert that he does not see the pronounced ideological monoculture on many campuses as evident in course offerings, faculty activism, hiring patterns, and the increasingly one-sided political climate that students and parents experience firsthand. You don’t need a survey to notice when virtually every professor at a given college leans one way politically; you only need to look around.
The imbalance is not in dispute. Studies going back to the 1980s have shown that liberal faculty massively outnumber conservatives. AEI’s overview of the research, “Are Colleges and Universities Too Liberal?” lays out how liberals dominate not only among faculty, but also among students and administrators. A landmark study by Mitchell Langbert, Daniel Klein, and Anthony Quain, “Homogenous: The Political Affiliations of Elite Liberal Arts College Faculty” found a staggering Democratic-to-Republican registration ratio of nearly 132 to one at top liberal arts schools. In many departments, there were literally no registered Republicans.
More recent work has confirmed this picture using new methods. A University of California report, “The Politics of the Professoriate” analyzed faculty social media activity and found that nearly 70 percent lean strongly liberal, while just over 13 percent lean conservative. The remaining faculty are moderates, a shrinking group in today’s polarized environment. While there is some variation across disciplines, the broad pattern holds everywhere: Higher education is overwhelmingly left-leaning.
Wolfson’s fallback—that the issue is “much more complicated than people being browbeaten”—is another dodge. Of course, there are complex factors shaping career paths and disciplinary cultures. But complexity does not negate the fact of the imbalance or the harm it causes. Saying the problem is complicated is not a solution; it is an excuse to do nothing.
The costs of this lopsidedness are profound. Students are deprived of exposure to diverse viewpoints, stunting their intellectual growth. Conservative graduate students often fear that their beliefs will sink their chances of being hired or tenured. Faculty self-censor, avoiding certain research questions or conclusions for fear of backlash. And when the public sees academia as hostile to half the country, trust collapses. Gallup and Pew have both recorded a historic drop in confidence in higher education: a decline fueled in part by the perception of ideological bias.
Imagine if the numbers were switched. If Republicans outnumbered Democrats by 132 to one and progressive students felt unwelcome. Would Wolfson really be asking whether there’s any data? Would he be musing about complexity? Of course not. The AAUP would treat it as an existential threat to academic freedom. That the reverse scenario provokes hand-waving instead of action exposes a glaring double standard.
As AAUP president, Wolfson has both the authority and obligation to lead on this issue. He could champion new, transparent data collection. He could push universities to reform hiring and promotion practices to ensure ideological diversity. He could speak openly about the problem and work to fix it. Instead, he chose denial and deflection. That choice sends a chilling message to conservative scholars and students: you don’t count here, and we don’t care if you feel excluded.
At this point, AAUP members and faculty across the country must ask whether Wolfson deserves their trust. A vote of no confidence would signal that protecting academic freedom means protecting everyone, not just those whose politics fit the dominant campus ideology. Wolfson’s performance shows he is unwilling to face reality. That is unacceptable in a moment when higher education is losing public support and credibility.
The data are real. The imbalance is real. The consequences are real. What’s missing is leadership with the courage to confront them.
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How Universities Cracked Down on Pro-Palestinian Activism
Stricter rules and punishments over campus protests seem to be working. Universities have seen just under 950 protest events this semester, compared with 3,000 in the spring.
Nov. 25, 2024
Colleges and universities have tightened rules around protests, locked campus gates and handed down stricter punishments after the disruptions of pro-Palestinian demonstrations and encampments last spring.
The efforts seem to be working.
Universities have seen just under 950 protest events this semester so far, compared to 3,000 last semester, according to a log at the Nonviolent Action Lab at Harvard University’s Ash Center. About 50 people have been arrested so far this school year at protests on higher education campuses, according to numbers gathered by The New York Times, compared to over 3,000 last semester.
When students have protested this fall, administrators have often enforced — to the letter — new rules created in response to last spring’s unrest. The moves have created scenes that would have been hard to imagine previously, particularly at universities that once celebrated their history of student activism.
Harvard temporarily banned dozens of students and faculty members from libraries after they participated in silent “study-ins” — where protesters sit at library tables with signs opposing the war in Gaza — though a similar protest did not lead to discipline in December 2023. At Indiana University Bloomington, some students and faculty members who attended candlelight vigils were referred for discipline under a new prohibition on expressive activity after 11 p.m. University of Pennsylvania administrators and campus police officers holding zip ties told vigil attendees to move because they had not reserved the space in compliance with new rules.
And at Montclair State University in New Jersey, police officers often outnumber participants in a weekly demonstration where protesters hold placards with photos of children killed in Gaza and the words “We mourn.”
“They say it’s to keep us safe, but I think it’s more to keep us under control,” said Tasneem Abdulazeez, a student in the teaching program.
The changes follow federal civil rights complaints, lawsuits and withering congressional scrutiny accusing universities of tolerating antisemitism, after some protesters praised Hamas and called for violence against Israelis.
Some students and faculty have welcomed calmer campuses. Others see the relative quiet as the bitter fruit of a crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech. They worry President-elect Donald J. Trump, who as a candidate called for universities to “vanquish the radicals,” could ratchet up the pressure.
In many cases, universities are enforcing rules they adopted before the school year began. While the specifics vary, they generally impose limits on where and when protests can occur and what form they can take.
Todd Wolfson, the president of the American Association of University Professors and an associate professor of media studies at Rutgers, said the restrictions have made people afraid.
“They feel like they’re being watched and surveilled,” he said. “I think there’s a strong degree of self-censorship that’s taking place.”
But Jewish students who felt targeted by protesters have praised the rules — and the speed at which universities are enforcing them — for helping to restore order and safety. Naomi Lamb, the director of Hillel at the Ohio State University, said the school’s new protest policies seem to be working well.
“I appreciate the response of administrators to ensure that there is as little antisemitic action and rhetoric as possible,” she said.
Some of the tactics protesters used last semester have been met with stringent responses this school year. At the University of Minnesota, 11 people were arrested after they occupied a campus building. Last school year, some universities let protesters occupy buildings overnight and even for days at a time.
At Pomona College, the president invoked “extraordinary authority” to bypass the standard disciplinary process and immediately suspend or ban some pro-Palestinian protesters who took over a building on Oct. 7 of this year. A college spokeswoman said the unusual move was justified because the occupation had destroyed property, threatened safety and disrupted classes, and noted that students were given opportunities to respond to the allegations against them.
At some campuses, protesters have taken up new tactics to challenge the new restrictions.
Study-ins like those at Harvard have also taken place at Ohio State, Tulane University and the University of Texas at Austin. Students typically wear kaffiyehs and tape signs to their laptops with messages like “Our tuition funds genocide.”
“It’s kind of designed to put the administration in this bind of either you ignore it, or you enforce rules but you look like kind of a jerk,” said Jay Ulfelder, research project manager at Harvard’s Nonviolent Action Lab.
A Harvard spokesman said that a January 2024 statement from university leadership made clear that demonstrations are not permitted in libraries or other campus areas used for academic activities.
During Sukkot, the Jewish holiday that celebrates the harvest, members of the anti-Zionist organization Jewish Voice for Peace set up “solidarity sukkahs” at about 20 schools including Northwestern and the University of California, Los Angeles. The sukkahs, or huts, commemorate the structures the Israelites lived in while wandering in the desert for 40 years and are often decorated with gourds, fruit and lights. JVP members added signs saying “Stop Arming Israel.”
The sukkahs were removed at nine universities, according to JVP, with administrators citing new rules prohibiting unauthorized structures.
When facilities workers arrived with power tools to tear down the sukkah at Northwestern, JVP members told them it was wrong to do so before the end of the weeklong holiday, said Paz Baum, a senior.
“They do not care about our ability or right to practice our religion,” Ms. Baum said. “They only care about limiting Palestinian speech.”
The new restrictions may not be the only factor behind diminished protest activity this semester. Some protest groups have embraced more violent rhetoric — praising Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, for example — alienating some students who had sympathized with their cause.
Some things have not changed, however: There is still little consensus about what it means for a campus to be safe and when speech critical of Israel crosses the line into antisemitism.
At Montclair State, where pro-Palestinian demonstrators have criticized the number of police officers and administrators at their events, President Jonathan Koppell said he was trying to strike a balance between “competing priorities.”
In an interview, Dr. Koppell said the officers stationed at protests are necessary to protect everyone on campus, including the protesters. He noted that demonstrations on campus have been peaceful and people have “engaged responsibly.”
He added that some community members want him to prohibit the pro-Palestinian gatherings altogether, something he has resisted.
“You have a desire for some people to be able to say whatever they what, wherever they want, whenever they want,” Dr. Koppell said. “And you have some people who would like to see an environment where there’s an absolute limitation on people’s ability to protest.”
“Anybody who wants an absolute in either direction is going to be unhappy,” he added.
Even as universities crack down, administrators and faculty say the federal government under Mr. Trump could try to force further changes at institutions.
Still, much remains unclear about what could happen. His pick to lead the Department of Education, Linda McMahon, has less education experience than is typical of education secretaries in the past and has publicly said little about campus protests.
Abed A. Ayoub, the executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, said he did not think Mr. Trump could make campuses more hostile to pro-Palestinian protests than they already are.
“Are they going to continue with their crackdown on anti-Israel speech? I think they will,” he said, referring to universities. “That’s not because Trump is in office. They started this. It’s been happening.”
Isabelle Taft is a reporter covering national news and a member of the 2024-25 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their career.
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October 30, 2024
The AAUP’s New President Is Not Staying Neutral
Todd Wolfson is pushing the century-old American Association of University Professors to fight higher ed’s detractors and “organize every campus.” But critics say the venerable organization is straying from its roots.
By Ryan Quinn
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.”
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May 29, 2021We stand in Solidarity with the Palestinian People
Rutgers University faculty condemn Israel’s military assault against the Palestinian people across all Palestinian geographies. We join and welcome the endorsement of all colleagues committed to combatting racism, colonialism, and settler colonialism.
A ceasefire does not end the colonial conditions of structural violence and inequality that Palestinians live under. The fifteen year siege of and systemic war on Gaza are part of a long-standing effort to isolate, dehumanize, and punish Palestinians for resisting decades of occupation and what UN ESCWA, Human Rights Watch and the Israeli human rights organization B’tselem, have called an Israeli Apartheid regime.
The forced displacement of Palestinian families from occupied East Jerusalem, including Sheikh Jarrah, takes legal, bureaucratic, and military forms. Zionist settler colonial expansion marks Palestinian homes and neighborhoods for removal, destruction, and replacement while military and settler infrastructure limits Palestinian mobility and segregates them into Bantustans. Critical resources such as water and land are expropriated by the Israeli state. These tactics are part of a broader effort to deny the possibility of Palestinian self-determination in Palestine.
While we mourn the loss of civilian life in Israel, we also refuse to engage narratives that demand an ‘equal sides’ approach to a fundamentally unequal reality.
The Palestinian rights to freedom, security in their homes, to return, self-determination, and to be free of violent occupation are well established under international law. The language of both-sidedness, of timeless or religious ‘conflict’ with moments of ‘escalation’ erases the military, economic, media, and diplomatic power that Israel, as an occupying force has over Palestine. While we mourn the loss of civilian life in Israel, we also refuse to engage narratives that demand an ‘equal sides’ approach to a fundamentally unequal reality.
The demand to center Israel’s right to ‘self-defense’ erases the colonial context and delegitimizes the Palestinian right to resistance and to self-defense, both principles enshrined in international law. It also neglects non-violent tactics and campaigns, such as BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions), and civil disobedience that Palestinians have used for decades to dismantle the system around them. We stand in solidarity with a growing chorus of voices in the US media, in universities, activists and social movements, and with progressive political leaders in the US government. With them, we demand an end to US’ long-standing military, economic, and diplomatic support for unchecked Israeli anti-Palestinian violence.
We are in awe of the Palestinian struggle to resist violent occupation, removal, erasure, and the expansion of Israeli settler colonialism. As faculty at an institution committed to the principles of social justice and academic excellence, particularly those of us who study and teach about the Middle East or Racism, we endorse the Palestine and Praxis call to action. We affirm our own commitments to speaking out in defense of the rights and dignity of the Palestinian people as well as foundational principles of scholarly integrity and academic freedom. We recognize our role and responsibility as scholars to theorize, read, teach and write about the very issues unfolding in Palestine. Not doing so means we fail to provide our undergraduate and graduate students, including Palestinian and Israeli students, with the critical tools and information they need to understand and engage the subjects of Palestine and Israel, colonialism, US empire, and anti-racism. Those who do not study these issues can be involved in study groups, teach-ins, and other such educational activities as faculty and students were during other moments of international protest and solidarity, like protests against the Vietnam War and Apartheid South Africa.
Therefore, we stand in solidarity with Palestinians and their Jewish as well as non-Jewish allies around the world, understanding that their struggle is inseparable from other movements for equality, justice and liberation both within the United States and globally. We join together in rededicating ourselves to working against all forms of racism, imperialism, colonialism, settler colonialism and injustice at Rutgers, in the classroom, on campus, and beyond.
Signatories
Asher Ghertner, Geography Laura Schneider, Geography Mary Rizzo, History Asli Zengin, Women’s and Gender Studies Popy Begum, School of Criminal Justice Jawid Mojaddedi, Religion Yesenia Barragan, History Mark Bray, History Marisa J. Fuentes, History and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Judith Surkis, History Elaine LaFay, History James Livingston, History Jackson Lears, History Belinda Davis, History Xun Liu, History Sean T. Mitchell, Sociology and Anthropology Arthur B. Powell, Urban Education Camilla Townsend, History Barbara Foley, English Donna Murch, History Tamara Sears, Art History Salam Al Kuntar, Classics Aldo Lauria Santiago, History, Latino and Caribbean Studies Kenneth Sebastián León, Latino and Caribbean Studies Kevon Rhiney, Geography Hanan Kashou, African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures Samah Selim, African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures Atiya Aftab, Middle Eastern Studies Karishma Desai, Education Carlos Ulises Decena, Latino and Caribbean Studies Jon Cowans, History Jamie Pietruska, History Charles Payne, African and African American Studies Radhika Balakrishnan, Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Latino and Caribbean Studies, and Program in Comparative Literature Zakia Salime, WGSS & Sociology Ousseina D. Alidou, African, Middle Eastern, South Asian Languages and Literatures Akissi Britton, Africana Studies Zeynep Gürsel, Anthropology Amir Moosavi, English Becky Schulthies, Anthropology Ethel Brooks, Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Alamin Mazrui, African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures Kyla Schuller, Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Tim Raphael, Arts, Culture and Media Nate Gabriel, Geography Jasbir Puar, Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Michael Adas, History Carter Mathes, English John Keene, English/AAAS Evie Shockley, English Sarada Balagopalan, Childhood Studies Kate Cairns, Childhood Studies Erica R. Edwards, English Stéphane Robolin, Literatures in English Anjali Nerlekar, African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures (AMESALL) Lauren Silver, Childhood Studies Andrea Marston, Geography Preetha Mani, African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures Charles I. Auffant, Law Jamal Ali, AMESALL Shaheen Parveen, AMESALL Belinda Edmondson, English/AAAS Beth Rubin, Education Edwin Bryant, Religion David D. Troutt, Law Todd Wolfson, Journalism and Media Studies Zaire Dinzey-Flores, Latino & Caribbean Studies David Lopez, Law Trinidad Rico, Art History Krista White, Rutgers Libraries Diane Fruchtman, Religion Dennis C. Prieto, Law Mark Krasovic, History Debra Scoggins Ballentine, Religion Itzel Corona Aguilar, Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Kayo Denda, Rutgers U. Libraries – NB Meredeth Turshen, Bloustein School Sara Perryman, Writing Program, English Chrystin Ondersma, Law Mich Ling, WGSS Adnan Zulfiqar, Law Jillian Salazar, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Brittney Cooper, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies/Africana Studies Chenjerai Kumanyika, Rutgers Department of Journalism and Media Studies Hamid Abdeljaber, CMES Carolyn A. Brown, History Karen Caplan, History Shantee Rosado, Africana Studies and Latino and Caribbean Studies Thayane Brêtas, Global Urban Studies Andrew Goldstone, English Melissa De Fino, Rutgers University Libraries Troy Shinbrot, Biomedical Engineering James Brown, English and Communications Lilia Fernandez, Latino and Caribbean Studies Julien Corbo, Neurosciences Rebecca Kunkel, Law Library Jeffrey Dowd, Sociology Ana Pairet, French O. Batuhan Erkat, Neuroscience Hussein Khdour, Neuroscience Paul Boxer, Psychology Rob Scott, Anthropology Fernanda Perrone, Rutgers University Libraries Audrey Truschke, History Toby C. Jones, History Maya Mikdashi, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Noura Erakat, Africana Studies and Criminal Justice Deepa Kumar, Journalism and Media Studies Zahra Ali, Sociology and Anthropology Yasmine Khayyat, African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures Omar Dewachi, Anthropology Melissa M. Valle, Sociology and Anthropology & African American and African Studies Sahar Aziz, Law Johan Mathew, History Christien Tompkins, Anthropology Mayte Green-Mercado, History Nukhet Varlik, History Nermin Allam, Political Science Sylvia Chan Malik, American Studies Domingo Morel, Political Science Leyla Amzi-Erdogdular, History Sadia Abbas, English Laura Lomas, American Studies Manu Samriti Chander, English Wendell Hassan Marsh, African American Studies and African Studies Charles G. Häberl, African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures, and Religion Kathleen C. Riley, Anthropology Asli Zengin, Women’s and Gender Studies Paul O’Keefe, Geography Lyra Monteiro, History David Fogelsong, History Ousseina Alidou, African, Middle Eastern, South Asian Languages and Literatures Bridget Purcell, Anthropology Alison Howell, Political Science Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo, Political Science Gabriela Kuetting, Political Science Carlos Ulises Decana, Latino Studies, Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Atif Akin, Art & Design Meril Antony , Public Administration Genese Sodikoff, Sociology and Anthropology Karen Caplan, History Shantee Rosado, Africana Studies and Latino and Caribbean Studies Thayane Brêtas, Global Urban Studies David Hughes, Anthropology Meril Antony, Public Administration Icnelia Huerta Ocampo, CMBN Dana Luciano, English, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Elizabeth Surles, Rutgers Libraries, Institute of Jazz Studies David Winters, Journalism and Media Studies Mukti Mangharam, English Terry Matilsky, Physics and Astronomy Sara Elnakib, Family and Community Health Services Meheli Sen, African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures David Kurnick, English Jawad Irshad, OIT Beyza Guven, Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience Andrew T. Urban, American Studies and History JB Brager, Douglass College
israel-academia-monitor.com 