Greg Lukianoff’s Substack newsletter, The Eternally Radical Idea, published yet another attack on the AAUP, “Is Higher Education Even Interested in Reform?,” co-authored with Lukianoff by Samuel Abrams and Adam Goldstein. This time, the target is an article in the AAUP’s magazine, Academe, by Lisa Siraganian, “Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity.”

Criticizing an article is great, but by the time the authors get to Thesis 7, “The argument for viewpoint diversity is made in bad faith,” they stop referring to Siraganian by name and instead write, “The AAUP accuses critics of bad faith …”

One of the co-authors, Abrams, wrote, “For many observers, publishing such a manifesto sends a message that the AAUP not only tolerates but amplifies these ideas.”

But that’s what viewpoint diversity requires: You amplify ideas even if you don’t agree with them. It’s positively bizarre when people arguing for viewpoint diversity declare that any statement by an employee or a writer must be the official position of an institution. You can’t have viewpoint diversity unless you allow dissenting voices and reject the belief that every writer speaks for the publisher or the college or the organization.

I’ve previously written “In Defense of FIRE” and “In Defense of the AAUP” against attacks by members of these groups, and I don’t find denunciations of the organizations leading the fight against censorship to be a particularly persuasive form of literature.

Lukianoff, Abrams and Goldstein have an alarming view of viewpoint diversity, one that makes academic freedom contingent upon it: “If the classroom ceases to be such a marketplace, academic freedom ceases to be necessary, because its primary value to society is to ensure the freedom to challenge orthodoxy in the institutions where orthodoxy has traditionally been challenged.”

This is a particularly dangerous idea, because they are suggesting that academic freedom isn’t a fundamental right to be defended even when you don’t always like how it is used, but a conditional value that can be abandoned if someone doesn’t like the range of views expressed in classrooms. Saying that “academic freedom ceases to be necessary” seems to be another way of saying that you don’t support protecting academic freedom in the current structure of academia since it doesn’t have a diversity of ideas.

Academic freedom is even more necessary to protect minority views if the viewpoints found in classrooms fall short of a perfect distribution of beliefs. And even if some particular view becomes a dominant orthodoxy in a field of study, that’s not a legitimate reason to destroy academic freedom and seek to suppress that viewpoint, nor is government control an effective way to promote viewpoint diversity.

They claim, “If higher education ceases to function as this ‘marketplace,’ there will be no First Amendment justification for academic freedom and academic freedom will cease to exist. In that, the AAUP and the Trump administration seem to be in total agreement; they just disagree about which political orthodoxy should be permanently imposed upon academia.”

To claim that the AAUP wants to permanently impose a political orthodoxy on academia because its magazine published an article questioning government-imposed viewpoint diversity is a really bad argument. But it’s far worse to suggest that the First Amendment is not a fundamental right and it can be tossed away if the government doesn’t like the viewpoints of professors.

But it would be wrong to conclude that FIRE is abandoning academic freedom just because its CEO writes something I disagree with—just as it would be wrong to claim that the AAUP is abandoning academic freedom because one professor wrote something people opposed. In fact, it would be wrong to claim that Lukianoff himself is opposing academic freedom just because he makes a flawed argument. It’s perfectly possible for people to write things I disagree with and still regard them as essential allies in the fight for academic freedom.

They conclude their essay with an ultimatum: “If you’re serious about reform, prove it in two moves: First, say it out loud: ‘We have a homogeneity problem that makes error invisible and dissent costly.’”

Actually, if you’re serious about opposing homogeneity, you probably shouldn’t pressure people to all make the same statement—particularly one with a dubious claim that all academics think alike.

They add another demand: “Second, do the basics: End compelled statements and ideological screens. Adopt institutional neutrality and robust free-expression commitments. Protect due process. Build recurring, in-house debates across real schools of thought.”

Even by this standard, the AAUP is a great advocate of reform. The AAUP recently issued a statement that opposes separate diversity statements (but opposes compelled bans on diversity, which could also ban viewpoint diversity) and it opposes all ideological screens proposed to ban hiring of conservatives (or liberals)—unlike some of the advocates of viewpoint diversity who call for ideological hiring.

The AAUP has written almost all of the robust free expression policies and due process protections for faculty on college campuses. The AAUP has been the leading proponent for more than a century of the two most important solutions to any homogeneity problem: tenure and academic freedom. Nothing has done more to protect individual dissenters on campus than the AAUP’s protections for academic freedom and tenure, and the AAUP’s unionization work and fight against mistreatment of adjunct faculty has done far more for these broader reforms than any other organization.

As for “recurring, in-house debates across real schools of thought,” that’s a great idea. I’ve tried to encourage campus debates everywhere (and accept every invitation to participate in one). Back when the AAUP had enough money to hold an annual academic conference, I organized sessions where I invited leaders of conservative groups (and libertarian groups such as FIRE) to debate ideas with AAUP members.

As one of the founders and former editors of the AAUP’s blog, AcademeBlog.org, I routinely published articles, interviews and comments that differed from or criticized the AAUP’s position, and sometimes I criticized the AAUP myself. It’s notable that AcademeBlog published essays in recent weeks by Dale E. Miller and Eric J. Weiner criticizing the article by Siraganian, which seems like “in-house debates” to me.

How can you call for “in-house debates” and denounce the AAUP for publishing an idea you dislike? The first step toward encouraging debates and viewpoint diversity is to reject the mistaken notion that colleges and organizations are guilty by association with any professor who says or writes something controversial.

The AAUP has chapters and state conferences that organize a wide range of events, as well as publications such as Academe, the Journal of Academic Freedom and AcademeBlog, all of which frequently debate ideas without control by the AAUP’s leadership. Why isn’t FIRE using its vastly greater resources to launch publications and invite dissenting views and create student and faculty organizations to organize debates, rather than blaming the AAUP?

Consider this analogy: There is a monster attacking higher education and free speech, and many of us want to stop the government’s censorship monster. Some people (like Lukianoff) think the best way to fight the monster is to toss it a few juicy steaks of viewpoint diversity and hope it’s satisfied (the “reform” strategy). Some people in the AAUP (the “resist” strategy) think that “reform” is a bad approach and that FIRE helped to feed this political beast and trained it to attack by denouncing academia and encouraging politicians to intervene in the name of reform.

Lukianoff, Abrams and Goldstein are wrong to demand that people must accept their terms for reform or they won’t take them seriously as advocates for free expression. We need to recognize a broad range of views opposing the monster of government censorship, even if we think they have pursued the wrong strategy. We need to see the AAUP and FIRE as essential (if sometimes contentious) partners in a common struggle against repression.