On July 31, the American Association of University Professors announced its “first-ever national electoral endorsement,” putting its weight behind Abdul El-Sayed’s bid for the Democratic Party nomination in Michigan’s 2026 senate race. The endorsement marked a dramatic transformation for the 111-year-old national organization for college and university faculty members—from a professional association that advocates for academic freedom and other professional rights to a radical-left activist group that seems determined to play an explicitly partisan role in national politics.
The AAUP’s endorsement of El-Sayed—an AAUP member and “former teacher” who on August 4 narrowly defeated the more moderate Michigan Representative Haley Stevens in the Democratic primary—already says enough. Though El-Sayed has disavowed the “socialist” label embraced by a rising generation of Democrats, his policies place him decidedly on his party’s far left wing. He favors Medicare for all, wants to abolish ICE, advocates tax hikes, and opposes military aid to Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and his parents’ native Egypt—all U.S. allies. He campaigned for the Democratic nomination with New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the DSA-aligned streamer Hasan Piker, who has praised Mao Zedong, lamented the collapse of the Soviet Union, and opined that “America deserved 9/11.”
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According to the Washington Free Beacon, El-Sayed’s father-in-law Jukaku Tayeb, who contributed heavily to a PAC connected to his campaign, is also a longtime donor and member of the Founders Committee of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and a past president and current board member of Michigan’s chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). The Justice Department named both groups as unindicted co-conspirators in a 2007 criminal case in which the defendants—founders of a supposed “relief organization”—were convicted of illegally funneling $12 million to Hamas.
The AAUP apparently overlooked these controversial associations on the theory that “El-Sayed will be an invaluable ally for academic freedom and higher education as a public good” and praised him for having “vowed to stand up to the Trump administration’s ideological assault on the sector and defend the rights of students and faculty to speak out on political issues.”
The AAUP decided to enshrine its own politicization in June, when it says members attending its biennial meeting “unanimously” adopted a package of resolutions “to help better position the union to build power to win the future of higher education and democracy.” The resolutions included a determination to “support and participate in coordinated political and public campaigns” intended “to resist authoritarian policies.” That directive identifies such policies as coming only from one direction. “Right-wing political actors,” it declares, “are advancing coordinated efforts to undermine democratic institutions, restrict voting rights, weaken labor protections, and erode public trust in knowledge-producing institutions,” among which it believes higher education is a “central target.”
AAUP’s repositioning as a radicalized political group has been years in the making. In August 2024, the organization reversed its long-standing opposition to academic boycotts based on “political or religious viewpoint”—virtually all of which target Israel—bizarrely concluding that merely opposing such boycotts as a matter of policy “contravenes academic freedom.” Former AAUP president Cary Nelson denounced the decision in the Chronicle of Higher Education, worrying that the AAUP had “set aside its hundred-year defense of academic freedom” and proclaimed that “we must no longer use AAUP policy as the gold standard” for the concept it had spent a century defending on at least a nominally apolitical basis. In October 2025, the AAUP’s official X account sarcastically posted that “fascism generally doesn’t do great under peer review” in response to musings on why there are so few conservative academics. That same month, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) released a survey suggesting heavy political bias in how faculty unions like the AAUP address complaints alleging free-speech violations: only 7 percent of conservative faculty members reported receiving support in such cases, compared with 29 percent of liberal academics.
Earlier this year, the AAUP’s Isaac Kamola, who leads its Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, said in a leaked audio recording about the many recently created civics institutes that he wants “to strategically map who these f—ers are, and figure out what the weaknesses are, and design a research agenda that just goes through them and tries to knock them out.” So much for the free marketplace of ideas.
Will the AAUP’s politicization move the needle in a divided nation as it hurdles toward contentious midterm elections in November? It may be too early to tell, but its late-hour endorsement of El-Sayed, who was expected to trounce Stevens yet prevailed by fewer than 16,000 votes, didn’t appear to sway the public, and that’s no surprise: only 38 percent of those surveyed express strong confidence in higher education, according to a Lumina Foundation and Gallup poll released in July.
The AAUP’s involvement may even have hurt El-Sayed’s chances. His Republican opponent Mike Rogers, a former congressman who narrowly lost to Elissa Slotkin in 2024 and won this year’s GOP Senate nomination unopposed, consistently trailed both El-Sayed and Stevens in pre-primary polling. The first post-primary poll, however, gives Rogers a four-point edge.