The Importance of War Trustees in Universities

The AUP was founded in the early 20th century because a powerful alumni and donors would intervene to say, you have some economist who's writing academic articles, they go against the economic interest of my company. And so I think the safest best way of preserving universities is to keep the war trustees out of this decision kind of decision making. They shouldn't be making substantive decisions about which faculty deserve tenure appointments and which ones do not. We need university faculty to be willing to do research, even if it's undermining the economic interests of a powerful donor. Otherwise we don't learn the truth about those subject matters.