From the beginning, the AAUP embraced academic freedom as the rationale that would not only preserve the faculty’s professional standing but also guarantee the autonomy and integrity of higher education by enabling professors to do their teaching and scholarship limited only by the parameters of their disciplines and the judgment of their peers. Its founding document, the 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure, defined academic freedom as a public good, while describing the conditions required for its protection: faculty governance and, especially, tenure. In cases where tenured professors’ jobs were at stake, the 1915 Declaration demanded that faculty members participate in the decision-making. Outsiders, like politicians or trustees without academic training and expertise, “have neither competency nor moral right to intervene.”
Over the following years, the AAUP developed procedures for handling the sorts of cases that had led to its founding. It did not investigate every complaint it received, nor did it take on the essentially futile task of trying to compel institutions to reinstate the individuals whose claims it validated. Instead, its leaders sought to create a body of quasi-judicial reports that could become the basis for a kind of common law that colleges and universities would honor.
The AAUP also worked with college and university administrators to gain widespread acceptance for its vision of academic freedom. In 1940, in collaboration with the Association of American Colleges, an organization that represented several hundred four-year liberal arts colleges and universities, it published a revised version of its founding document. Not only did the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure spell out in much greater detail the specific procedures that institutions would be expected to follow if they sought to dismiss a tenured professor, but it also paid more attention to the off-campus political activities that often provided the rationale for firing a controversial instructor. While explaining that professors should not be disciplined when they “speak or write as citizens,” the 1940 Statement also stressed that they should do so with restraint and should, above all, emphasize that they are not speaking for their institution. That emphasis on propriety reflected the AAUP’s perennial concern about protecting the faculty’s status as highly respected professionals and its own reputation as a responsible, politically neutral organization.
Updated with interpretive comments in 1970, the 1940 Statement has had a long shelf life. To this day, it provides the canonical definition of academic freedom, referred to in almost every one of the AAUP’s official reports and policy documents and cited by or directly incorporated into faculty handbooks and union contracts of some six hundred four-year institutions. Nonetheless, despite its ostensible concern with protecting the rights of faculty members, the AAUP was sometimes missing in action. All too often, when confronted by political repression, it tended to remain on the sidelines, releasing principled policy statements but not taking more concrete action.