AAUP Finds Muhlenberg College Violated Academic Freedom

The AAUP Committee of Inquiry on Muhlenberg College’s firing of Dr. Maura Finkelstein in 2024 has released its 32-page findings: https://www.aaup.org/report/academic-freedom-and-tenure-muhlenberg-college-pennsylvania

In it, the AAUP noted that members of Muhlenberg’s own Faculty Personnel and Policies Committee unanimously concluded that Finkelstein should not have been fired. The AAUP report notes the following in concluding that the college violated her academic freedom:

–Muhlenberg had a”degraded climate of academic freedom under financial stress and [a] resultant narrowing of the boundaries of acceptable dissent.”
–In “equating being Zionist with being Jewish, the administration conflated being anti-Zionist with being antisemitic.”
–“It seems evident that the surveillance of Professor Finkelstein’s social media accounts gave rise to the subsequent actions against her. . . .[W]ithout the surveillance and whipping up of student sentiment on this issue, it is unlikely that the controversy and resulting crisis over [her] social media posts would have occurred and that [she] would have been dismissed from her tenured position.”

PA-AAUP joined the national office and other professional association last year in decrying Finkelstein’s firing.