The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the largest and oldest US organization for defending faculty rights, is picking a fight over the University of Pennsylvania’s efforts to combat antisemitism, arguing that a range of faculty speech and conduct considered hostile by Jewish members of the campus community are key components of academic freedom.

In a letter to the administration regarding antidiscrimination investigations opened by Penn’s Office of Religious and Ethnic Interests (OREI), the group charged that efforts to investigate alleged antisemitism on campus and punish those found to have perpetrated can constitute discrimination. Its argument reprises recent claims advanced by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) group, notorious for its defense of Sharia law and alleged ties to jihadist groups such as Hamas, in a lawsuit which aims to dismantle antisemitism prevention training at Northwestern University.

“Harassing, surveilling, intimidating, and punishing members of the university community for research, teaching, and extramural speech based on overly broad definitions of antisemitism does nothing to combat antisemitism, but it can perpetuate anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Palestinian racism, muzzle political criticism of the Israeli government by people of any background, and create a climate of fear and self-censorship that threatens the academic freedom of all faculty and students,” the AAUP said, threatening to scrutinize the university. “AAUP-Penn will continue to monitor reports related to OREI.”

Additionally, the AAUP described Penn’s efforts to protect Jewish students from antisemitism as resulting from “government interference in university procedures” while arguing that merely reporting antisemitism subjects the accused to harassment, seemingly suggesting that many Jewish students who have been assaulted, academically penalized, and exposed to hate speech on college campuses across the US are perpetrators rather than victims. The group also argued that other minority groups from “protected classes,” such as Arabs and African Americans, are disproportionately investigated for antisemitism.

Despite the AAUP’s claims, some University of Pennsylvania faculty have played an outsized role in organizing antisemitic activities on campus, as previously reported by The Algemeiner.

In 2023, professor Huda Fakhreddine helped organize the “Palestine Writes Festival,” a gathering of anti-Zionists which featured Gaza-based professor Refaat Alareer, who said in 2018, “Are most Jews evil? Of course they are,” and Salman Abu Sitta, who once said in an interview that “Jews were hated in Europe because they played a role in the destruction of the economy in some of the countries, so they would hate them.” Roger Waters, the former Pink Floyd frontman, was also initially scheduled as a speaker, despite a documentary exposing his long record of anti-Jewish barbs. In one instance, a former colleague recalled Waters at a restaurant yelling at the wait staff to “take away the Jew food.”

That event prompted a deluge of antisemitic incidents at the University of Pennsylvania, including Nazi graffiti and a student’s trailing a staffer into the university’s Hillel building and shouting “F–k the Jews” and “Jesus Christ is king!” overturning tables, podium stands, and chairs. Fakhreddine, who days after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel attended an on-campus rally in which a speaker castigated what he called “the Israeli Jew,” later sued Congress to halt its investigation of campus antisemitism at Penn.

The professor’s civil complaint brimmed with classic antisemitic tropes, describing efforts to eradicate antisemitism as a conspiracy by “billionaire donors, pro-Israel groups, other litigants, and segments of the media” to squelch criticism of Israel and harm Arab students and academics. It also disparaged the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, calling it a tool of a “militant minority which believes that Israel can do no wrong” and alleging that it is “unconstitutional” and the bedrock of a larger plan of a “social engineering movement” to abolish the First Amendment of the US Constitution. A federal judge ultimately threw the case out of court.

The following year, the University Pennsylvania pledged in a report on antisemitism that it would never again confer academic legitimacy to antisemitism and formally denounced the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel as “discriminatory” and “anti-intellectual.” The university also passed other policies aimed at protecting academic freedom and free speech from attempts to invoke them as justification for uttering hate speech and founded the Office of Religious and Ethnic Interests, which the AAUP is now accusing of breaking the law.

The AAUP has defended antisemitic speech before.

In 2014, it accused the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign of violating the tenets of academic freedom when it declined to approve the hiring of Steven Salaita because he uttered a slew of antisemitic, extramural comments on social media, such as “Zionists transforming ‘antisemitism from something horrible into something honorable since 1948,” “Every Jewish boy and girl can grow up to be the leader of a murderous colonial regime,” and “By eagerly conflating Jewishness and Israel, Zionists are partly responsible when people say antisemitic s—t in response to Israeli terror.”

An AAUP report that chronicled the incident, which mushroomed into a major controversy in academia, listed those tweets and others but still concluded that not hiring Salaita “acted in violation of the 1940 Statement of Principles of Academic Freedom and Tenure” and “cast a pall of uncertainty over the degree to which academic freedom is understood and respected.” At the same time, the AAUP said that it was “committed to fighting systemic racism and pursuing racial justice and equity in colleges and universities, in keeping with the association’s mission to ensure higher education’s contribution to the common good.”

Other actions have moved the AAUP further into the world of left-wing anti-Zionism, tarnishing its image as a bipartisan guardian of scholarship and inquiry.

Following Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, two and a half weeks passed before the AAUP commented on the ensuing conflict between Israel and Hamas, and when it did, the group said nothing about the Palestinian terrorist group’s atrocities, instead discussing the importance of academic freedom. At the time, many professors cheered Hamas’s violence and encouraged extreme anti-Zionist demonstrations in which masses of students and faculty called for the elimination of the Jewish state “from the river to the sea,” which is widely interpreted as a call for genocide.

In August 2024, the AAUP issued a statement in support of academic boycotts, a seismic decision which reversed decades of policy and cleared the way for scholar activists to escalate their efforts to purge the university of Zionism and educational partnerships with Israel.

Coming amid a bitter debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on college campuses and Israel’s war to eradicate Hamas from the Gaza Strip, the statement did not mention the Jewish state specifically, but its countenancing the anti-Israel BDS movement was made clear, according to Jewish and pro-Israel leaders, by a section of the statement which said that boycotts “can legitimately seek to protect and advance the academic freedom and fundamental rights of colleagues and students who are living and working under circumstances that violate that freedom and one or more of those rights.”

In March, the AAUP held a webinar which promoted false claims about Israel’s conduct in the war with Hamas in Gaza.

Titled “Scholasticide in Palestine,” the virtual event accused Israel of “scholasticide” and “exterminationist” tactics of war. Such accusations cite damages sustained by education institutions and loss of life in Gaza, but rather than describing those misfortunes as inevitable consequences of a protracted war that Hamas started by launching the surprise Oct. 7 massacre, those leading the AAUP event argued that Israel’s aim was to murder educators and erase Palestinian history and culture.

“We are very concerned that AAUP, whose stated mission includes representing all academics and ensuring ‘higher education’s contribution to the common good’ continues to act in ways that demonize Israel, marginalize Jewish and Israeli members, and promote policies and events that portray a one-sided, politicized view of complex issues,” Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive officer of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), said at the time.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.