Colleges are entering what is likely to be their greatest crisis since the McCarthy period. We have lost public confidence, and the Trump administration has made clear that business as usual is no longer an option. Winter is coming.

Instead of rising to meet the challenge, the organization nominally committed to defending us has chosen to double down on some of the very policies that have attracted so much hostility to higher education. In so doing, the venerable American Association of University Professors — founded over a century ago to defend academic freedom — is putting us all at grave risk.

The past several months have seen a series of confused reports by the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. Each takes a particular policy and defines it to be consistent with academic freedom, if conducted in a particular way. In each case, the actual facts are elided. The reports are tellingly silent on how the policies they insist are compatible with academic freedom have in fact been deployed. And each emphasizes “shared governance” as a way of authorizing practices that are in fact highly contestable — and routinely in significant tension with academic freedom.

Read more at The Chronicle of Higher Education