On April 16, the Wall Street Journal published a modest but critical proposal: that American colleges, especially those receiving federal funds, should require students to take one course in economics or statistics before graduation. The argument was diagnostic, not ideological. We have both watched many bright students arrive eager to take positions on economic and social policies but unable to answer basic questions about how prices, incentives, or trade-offs function. They had adopted conclusions without ever encountering the vocabulary to evaluate them. The fix is straightforward: Teach the material.
Todd Wolfson, national president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), objected on X: “These clowns! We all live in this society which shows us exactly how capitalism works. And, it doesn’t work for most of us.” He added, “They [students] see all too well how capitalism works, as it steals the lifeblood of their loved ones!”
He offers no engagement with the curricular question, no acknowledgment of the literature on economic literacy, no recognition that the piece neither defends nor attacks capitalism—it asks whether students should learn how the dominant economic system functions before opining on it. He provides only an epithet and then sweeping assertions offered as self-evident.
Wolfson is the elected president of the organization that has defined the professional norms of the American professoriate for over a century. The AAUP’s 1940 Statement enjoins professors to “be accurate . . . exercise appropriate restraint . . . [and]show respect for the opinions of others.” When the head of that organization dismisses a fellow scholar’s argument as the work of a “clown,” he is modeling for tens of thousands of dues-paying faculty what the professional standard now is, and it is disgraceful and unprofessional.
More importantly, his response is anti-intellectual. Would the professors Wolfson supposedly represents agree that students sufficiently understand capitalism without studying it? No, because just as living in a country does not teach you its constitutional structure, and living in a body does not teach you physiology, living in a market economy does not teach you about elasticity, opportunity cost, the price mechanism, externalities, or the conditions under which markets succeed and fail. The very confidence with which Wolfson asserts capitalism “doesn’t work for most of us” is itself a symptom of the problem. By what measure? Compared to what counterfactual? For which population? These are precisely the questions an introductory course teaches students to ask. Why doesn’t Wolfson want students to ask them?
American higher education has become ideologically homogeneous in ways well documented by FIRE and Heterodox Academy. Within that environment, certain conclusions—that markets have failed, that capitalism does not work for most people—circulate as priors rather than hypotheses. They are not interrogated, because the people who might are scarce—and when this lack of viewpoint diversity is identified, the AAUP and its members routinely deny the problem. Students inherit the conclusions because no one in their curricular path asks them to defend them. And the AAUP’s president, seeing an argument for a better way, defends the status quo with insult and ideological assertion.
The American people are increasingly skeptical of higher education. They see the ideological bias and the intolerance toward heterodox views, and they see that students are not receiving the high-quality education they should be. Cafeteria-style core curricula filled with courses that cater to professors’ ideological interests rather than students’ pedagogical needs are part of the problem. Some higher education leaders—Daniel Diermeier at Vanderbilt, Sian Beilock at Dartmouth, Maurie McInnis at Yale—have acknowledged the need for change. The AAUP, by contrast, remains in full resistance mode, unwilling to concede that faculty have collectively failed to live up their responsibilities. AAUP leadership prefers instead to undermine salutary reforms, advance leftist ideology, and even push students into political activism.
The proposed remedy for the particular problem at issue in this case remains modest. One course in economic or statistical thinking. Not advanced theory, not a particular ideological frame, but foundational literacy: how prices form, how incentives shape behavior, how to distinguish correlation from causation, and how to understand the trade-offs that governments, businesses, and individuals have to consider. Students would emerge better equipped to defend democratic socialism if their reasoning took them there, and better equipped to challenge it if it did not. Either way, they would be reasoning rather than reciting.
The AAUP president’s response does not tell us he is right about capitalism, but it does tell us something about the condition of the American professoriate. Those charged with safeguarding the intellectual seriousness of higher education are increasingly led by people who have forgotten what it looks like. Students and faculty deserve better. A profession that cannot distinguish a curricular proposal from a political threat, or a colleague from a clown, has lost the plot.
This piece was originally published by AEIdeas on April 20, 2026.