Higher Ed Faculty Organizations Use Public Funds for Political Advocacy: Report

Taxpayer dollars fund college and university professional membership groups that increasingly promote political advocacy ahead of their stated educational purposes, a new report from a public policy research organization says.

The report says these organizations’ positions “uniformly reflect progressive orthodoxy.”

Public higher education learning institutions spend at least $183 million annually subsidizing membership dues and conference registrations for organizations that have promoted contested political positions within the past five years, according to the report.

“While faculty certainly have a right to participate in such organizations, they have no right to do so with public funds,” the report said.

The report did not list all of the scholarly organizations AEI examined and identified as taking a position on political issues, but it did provide examples for the American Mathematical Society, the American Society for Engineering Education, the American Physical Society, the American Statistical Association, the Modern Language Association, the American Philosophical Association, the American Sociological Association, and the Middle East Studies Association.

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10/31/2023

The AEI report noted that the average annual membership cost for the 99 groups analyzed is $193, and the average registration fee to attend the groups’ conferences is $471, according to the groups’ websites, amounting to an estimated $227 million that public universities provide to academic peer organizations each year.

Since 81 percent of the 99 groups analyzed were found to have taken official positions on partisan issues, this means that $183 million in public funds—or 81 percent of the $227 million total—go to partisan academic groups each year, according to the report.

This is based on the assumption that half of the 527,000 full-time faculty members at public higher education institutions across the country join one of the 99 professional organizations analyzed in the report, and it doesn’t include travel and accommodation expenses. The report said large public universities often reimburse faculty members between $1,400 and $3,000 for travel expenses annually, and academic departments within those schools provide additional financial support for conferences and memberships.

“The result is that political stances get enshrined in formal association policies, held up as professional norms, and parroted in public forums, distorting these associations’ academic mandate in the process,” the report said.

Academics’ Response

Barry Shain, a professor and researcher who has worked in Colgate University’s political science department since 1989, has attended many meetings and conferences hosted by political science peer organizations.

Colgate University, located in Hamilton, New York, is a private institution, but Shain said members at those events also represent public universities. He told The Epoch Times he never got the sense that anyone’s political views “were out in front” at these national gatherings or that they overshadowed the focus of teaching, but said members often belonged to separate smaller organizations where professors were either liberal or conservative.

Isaac Kamola is the director of the American Association of University Professors’ Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom.

Kamola said the members of academic professional organizations discuss the statements issued by the organizations at length, and those positions are relevant to their professional well-being and the institution’s self-reflection.

He took issue with AEI’s statement that the positions constitute progressive orthodoxy.

“Academic statements are not simply whipped up within some partisan blender,” Kamola said in an Aug. 28 email to The Epoch Times. “Rather, they come from organizations led by elected representatives of a field who have reached the pinnacle of scholarly achievement. Like all scholars’ exercises, they are the result of considerable deliberation and discussion.”

William Jacobson, a Cornell University law professor and director of its Securities Law Clinic, said the more significant issue is the nonprofit status that allows scholarly groups to operate as tax-exempt charities if they list their purpose as an educational organization that takes in money only to cover operating expenses.

“That’s not a tax-exempt activity,” Jacobson told The Epoch Times, adding that he never heard back from the IRS. “They are not fulfilling their purpose as an educational organization. In fact, they are destroying education.”

Nearly a decade later, after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel and the continuing conflict in the region, an increasing number of scholarly groups are maintaining their pro-Palestinian positions, even the organizations in the STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and math—which most students and professors would consider apolitical, Jacobson said.

Kelly Benjamin, speaking for AAUP, said that despite the revision, her organization has no plans to call for a boycott against Israeli learning institutions.

The new statement, she said, only targets higher learning institutions that violate academic freedom.

“Academic boycotts should not target states or individual scholars and teachers engaged in ordinary academic practices, such as publishing scholarship, delivering lectures and conference presentations, or participating in research collaborations,” Benjamin told The Epoch Times via email.