When the Guild Shows Its Hand: The AAUP and AFT Just Told Us What They Think Academic Freedom Is For.

Speaking as chair of the Faculty Senate, University of Michigan history professor Derek Peterson used his five minutes at commencement to praise pro-Palestinian activists for opening “our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza.” This was not an exercise of academic freedom. It was an abuse of his position and a violation of the university’s institutional neutrality policy.

Yet within 72 hours, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) issued a joint statement defending Peterson. They claimed his remarks were “squarely within the protected sphere of faculty speech,” condemned the “escalating campaign of political pressure” against him, and demanded that Michigan guarantee “no discipline for his protected speech.”

But why does the AAUP treat this as a matter of academic freedom? Its own foundational documents—the 1915 Declaration, the 1940 Statement of Principles, the 1964 Statement on Extramural Utterances—define academic freedom as the freedom to teach, to publish, and to speak as a citizen on matters of public concern. None of those describes what Peterson did. Selected only because he is the Faculty Senate chair, he was speaking in a delegated institutional role for which he was required to submit his text in advance. Peterson accepted feedback from university officials, agreeing to remove the word “genocide,” but then deviated from the approved text on the day to deliver a contested political verdict on the most explosive question on American campuses before a captive audience of graduates and families. That is not extramural utterance. It is a breach of a delegated role.

The AAUP-AFT statement waves the distinction away in a single sentence: Faculty members “do not surrender their rights to speak as scholars and citizens when they participate in university forums – whether in classrooms, public venues, or ceremonial settings.” By this logic, every microphone the university hands a faculty member is insulated from institutional expectation. The chair of a hiring committee could announce her vote at a candidate’s job talk. The marshal at orientation could editorialize on Israel-Palestine to incoming freshmen. The category collapse is the point. The AAUP treats universities as vehicles for the political goals of its leaders and seeks to insulate one kind of speech—the kind these organizations happen to favor—from the ordinary expectation that institutional roles carry constraints.

The AAUP also remains ambivalent about institutional neutrality, a policy universities like Michigan have adopted to protect free expression and intellectual diversity. Michigan’s bylaw bars “chairs, and others in similar positions” from issuing statements that do not “directly relate to matters of internal governance.” Peterson violated it.

The politicization of the AAUP under its new president, Todd Wolfson, is unmistakable. One of his first official acts was to call J.D. Vance a fascist. The AAUP then reversed its long-held position against academic boycotts at a moment when the only boycott on the table was Israel. It refused to call mandatory diversity statements ideological litmus tests. Most recently, Wolfson dismissed us as “clowns” for arguing in The Wall Street Journal that students should be required to take economics or statistics; he insisted that society itself “shows us exactly how capitalism works” and students need not study it academically. Now he signs a statement calling a commencement address that took one side of the most contested question on American campuses “measured, principled,” and “squarely within the protected sphere of faculty speech.” Each move, taken alone, might be regarded as a misstep. Together, they reveal an organization that has chosen a side.

The AAUP is no longer a guild defending the conditions of free inquiry across the ideological spectrum. It is a movement organization that selectively deploys the vocabulary of academic freedom to defend speech with which it agrees. A faculty member who used a commencement lectern to denounce affirmative action or transgender medicine for minors would not be receiving a joint defense statement within 72 hours.

The AAUP’s authority rested on its claim to neutrality. The 1940 Statement worked because it bound liberals and conservatives to a common procedural commitment. When the guild abandons that posture and starts picking sides, it forfeits the authority that made its defenses worth issuing.

The lesson is not that Peterson should be fired. Michigan should simply acknowledge the mistake and clarify that delegated ceremonial speakers may not use approved institutional roles to deliver contested political verdicts before captive families. That is routine governance, not a free-speech crisis. The larger lesson concerns the institutions that rushed to Peterson’s defense. The AAUP built its authority over the course of a century by claiming to defend academic freedom across the ideological spectrum. Now, statement by statement, it is spending that credibility down in defense of speech its leaders happen to like. The guild has shown its hand.

This piece was originally published by AEIdeas on May 7, 2026.