Academic organizations such as the American Historical Association and the American Chemical Society have long served the useful purpose of gathering far-flung scholars and sharing advances in knowledge. But in recent years, too many of these organizations have taken on a new and inappropriate role: issuing official statements on all matters of political interest. Especially troubling is that these unscholarly pronouncements are coming from organizations that are significant recipients of taxpayer money.
Generally speaking, these statements don’t even pretend to be rooted in member expertise. Following the death of George Floyd, for example, the American Society for Engineering Education declared Floyd’s murder indicative “of learned, ingrained, and automatic behaviors that have and will require persistent, consistent, and resistant action to limit and eventually reverse.”
Likewise, in June 2020, the Modern Language Association issued a statement, joined by nine other organizations, condemning “the systemic racism in police forces, in educational institutions, and throughout society.”
The American Physical Society, which represents physicists, has an entire webpage devoted to its official positions on “Education,” “National policy,” “Human rights,” and “Ethics and values.” The organization denounced the Russian invasion of Ukraine and has urged “actions that will reduce the emissions and ultimately the concentration, of greenhouse gases as well as increase the resilience of society to a changing climate.”
This year, the American Sociological Association issued a “call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza.”
Meanwhile, the Middle East Studies Association has issued six anti-Israel public statements since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack, most recently condemning the “accelerating scale of genocidal violence being inflicted on the Palestinian population” and the “cultural genocide that is the result of the wanton destruction” of Gaza.
While such examples are easy to find, it has not been clear how common this kind of political posturing is. That’s why, in a new analysis, we examined 99 academic associations, spanning the full spectrum of academic disciplines, to see how many had issued an official position on five contested political questions: race and affirmative action, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Israel-Hamas war, immigration, and climate change.
Eighty-one percent of the academic associations we examined had adopted a formal stance on at least one of these five issues. Many issued multiple proclamations. And there is no evidence of intellectual heterodoxy in these statements. Indeed, they uniformly depict America as systemically racist, endorse race-based college admissions, oppose restrictions on immigration, deem climate change a catastrophic threat, denounce the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and, with only two exceptions, deplore Israel’s military action in Gaza.
In other words, they reflect the kind of dogma one might expect from Democratic officials in San Francisco, Chicago, or New York. Agree or not, there is nothing obviously academic or scholarly about any of this.
To make matters worse, these organizations receive significant funding from public universities and, thus, from taxpayers. While university policies vary, full-time faculty members typically receive a modest budget each year to cover membership dues, conference registration fees, and academic travel. In our analysis, we estimate that public colleges and universities spend nearly $183 million a year subsidizing dues and fees that flow to politicized associations.
For perspective, it’s worth considering how much $183 million really is. It’s roughly what leftist billionaire George Soros and his affiliated nonprofit organizations spent on the 2022 midterm election cycle and many times the amount contributed by high-profile Republican donor Peter Thiel during that cycle.
Professors, just like Soros and Thiel, have the right to organize and agitate. But just as there’s no expectation that public funds should subsidize Soros’s or Thiel’s efforts, the same holds true for these no-longer-academic entities.
If academic associations were private entities supported by private funds, their efforts to promote ideological agendas at the expense of scholarly independence would be troubling, but not necessarily a public concern. That logic no longer holds when they collect vast sums of public funds. The legislators who fund public universities and the trustees who oversee them should insist that no more public funding flow to these organizations. They can surely find better uses for this money.
State policymakers can address that by prohibiting public colleges or universities from spending funds on membership dues or conference registration in any academic organization that has either adopted official stances on contested political issues within the last five years or that refuses to disavow such past statements.
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This will have two salutary effects on higher education. First, it will strengthen the hand of the apolitical majority in many of these associations. Serious academics will suddenly have cause to assert themselves and restore these associations to their ostensible purpose. Second, if associations choose not to change their ways, it will create a pool of resources available for faculty who choose to start or join new, apolitical research associations.
Faculty members have a First Amendment right to freely associate with politicized academic organizations. But they have no right to do so on the public’s dime.
Jay P. Greene is a senior research fellow in the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation. Frederick M. Hess is the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. They are the authors of the new AEI report “Academic Associations Gone Wild: Stop Publicly Funding Scholarly Groups That Trade Academics for Advocacy.”