On December 14, members of the American Studies Association (ASA) voted to endorse a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. The boycott resolution, which passed with two-thirds of the 1,200 participating members voting in favor, forbids the ASA from engaging in institutional collaborations with Israeli universities or the Israeli government, although it has no legislative authority over its members or member institutions.
The backlash was immediate and surprising in its scope and intensity. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) condemned it as a violation of the academic freedom of American and Israeli scholars. Brandeis University, Indiana University, Kenyon College, and Penn State Harrisburg withdrew institutional membership in the ASA in protest, and presidents of over a hundred American universities issued statements in condemnation of the boycott. Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust characterized the boycott as a “[subversion of ] the academic freedoms and values necessary to the free flow of ideas, which is the lifeblood of the worldwide community of scholars.”
The resolution was celebrated in Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) circles as a turning point in public debate on Israel and an indicator of growing skepticism towards Israeli state policy. Whether or not the boycott is a harbinger of things to come, the ensuing debate has exposed, perhaps unwittingly, some of the central issues at stake in the debate about Israel in the United States.
A Question of Academic Freedom?
Though supporters of the boycott have been unabashed in their critique of Israeli state policy, much of the debate over the ASA boycott has been couched in the language of academic freedom. The ASA resolution, for example, cites violations of free academic exchange as the driving force behind the boycott.
Professor Ashley Dawson, editor of the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom and a supporter of the ASA boycott, told the HPR, “The academic freedom of Palestinians has been systematically infringed upon, and if we don’t think about the various material and institutional ways in which that’s taking place … academic freedom becomes hollowed out as a concept.”
The backlash was immediate and surprising in its scope and intensity. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) condemned it as a violation of the academic freedom of American and Israeli scholars. Brandeis University, Indiana University, Kenyon College, and Penn State Harrisburg withdrew institutional membership in the ASA in protest, and presidents of over a hundred American universities issued statements in condemnation of the boycott. Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust characterized the boycott as a “[subversion of ] the academic freedoms and values necessary to the free flow of ideas, which is the lifeblood of the worldwide community of scholars.”
The resolution was celebrated in Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) circles as a turning point in public debate on Israel and an indicator of growing skepticism towards Israeli state policy. Whether or not the boycott is a harbinger of things to come, the ensuing debate has exposed, perhaps unwittingly, some of the central issues at stake in the debate about Israel in the United States.
A Question of Academic Freedom?
Though supporters of the boycott have been unabashed in their critique of Israeli state policy, much of the debate over the ASA boycott has been couched in the language of academic freedom. The ASA resolution, for example, cites violations of free academic exchange as the driving force behind the boycott.Professor Ashley Dawson, editor of the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom and a supporter of the ASA boycott, told the HPR, “The academic freedom of Palestinians has been systematically infringed upon, and if we don’t think about the various material and institutional ways in which that’s taking place … academic freedom becomes hollowed out as a concept.”
In the same vein, a delegate assembly at the meeting of the Modern Language Association this January voted to censure Israel for “denials of entry to the West Bank by U.S. academics who have been invited to teach, confer, or do research at Palestinian universities.” The full MLA membership plans to vote on the resolution this spring.
Opponents of the boycott have protested its chilling effects on academic speech. David Hirsh, founder of Engage, a campaign against academic boycotts of Israel, wrote earlier this year that boycotts imply “that Israeli institutions are guilty [and] Israeli intellectuals are guilty … The danger is that Israelis will be asked not to disavow Israel politically, but to disavow their university ‘institutionally’ as a precondition for recognition as legitimate members of the academic community.”
Henry Reichman, chair of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, echoed this sentiment, telling the HPR that, in effect, “a message has been sent to Israeli scholars that unless they themselves have a particular point of view that is dissenting from their institution, they are not welcome.” While the ASA has noted that the boycott only applies to Israeli academic institutions and not individual scholars, many remain skeptical that the distinction will prove meaningful.
While travel restrictions on residents of the Palestinian Territories have certainly hampered the ability of Palestinian academics to undertake academic collaborations, the potential impact of a boycott on academic exchange between the United States and Israel is likewise difficult to ignore. Upon further inspection, however, while debates over academic freedom have dominated public disagreement about the boycott, even deeper convictions are at stake.
Henry Reichman, chair of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, echoed this sentiment, telling the HPR that, in effect, “a message has been sent to Israeli scholars that unless they themselves have a particular point of view that is dissenting from their institution, they are not welcome.” While the ASA has noted that the boycott only applies to Israeli academic institutions and not individual scholars, many remain skeptical that the distinction will prove meaningful.
While travel restrictions on residents of the Palestinian Territories have certainly hampered the ability of Palestinian academics to undertake academic collaborations, the potential impact of a boycott on academic exchange between the United States and Israel is likewise difficult to ignore. Upon further inspection, however, while debates over academic freedom have dominated public disagreement about the boycott, even deeper convictions are at stake.
Of Academic Boycotts
It has gone largely unsaid how unusual academic boycotts are as a form of nonviolent protest. While economic boycotts rely in principle on market forces and economic self-interest to bring wayward actors in line with acceptable norms of behavior, academic and other cultural boycotts seek to isolate institutions that are ostensibly complicit in unjust state policy. Yet the academy is not a market except in the crudest sense, nor is the common currency of academic exchange—ideas—typically conceived of as a good to be traded freely or withheld on principle.
The history of academic boycotts is a sparse one; the BDS movement is keen to draw a historical analogy to the academic and cultural boycott that was part of the international campaign to end apartheid in South Africa. The effectiveness of the boycott is still a matter of historical dispute, and critics of the ASA resolution are skeptical that the academic aspect of the boycott of South Africa had much of an impact in comparison with the more materially damaging economic measures.
“There was a comprehensive economic boycott [in South Africa],” Cary Nelson, professor of English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a member of the AAUP’s Committee A, told the HPR. “That … affected universities just as it did any other sphere of life in South Africa, [but] there was no separate academic boycott.”
Yet, the connection with South Africa may be stronger than its critics would like to admit. Perhaps tellingly, unlike Iran or Cuba or the Soviet Union, Israel—as South Africa before it—is a democratic state. Economic boycotts of countries and corporations alike have a long legacy, but academic and cultural boycotts are far rarer, perhaps because the act of boycott assumes that cultural exchange between the parties is valued and valuable.
It has gone largely unsaid how unusual academic boycotts are as a form of nonviolent protest. While economic boycotts rely in principle on market forces and economic self-interest to bring wayward actors in line with acceptable norms of behavior, academic and other cultural boycotts seek to isolate institutions that are ostensibly complicit in unjust state policy. Yet the academy is not a market except in the crudest sense, nor is the common currency of academic exchange—ideas—typically conceived of as a good to be traded freely or withheld on principle.
The history of academic boycotts is a sparse one; the BDS movement is keen to draw a historical analogy to the academic and cultural boycott that was part of the international campaign to end apartheid in South Africa. The effectiveness of the boycott is still a matter of historical dispute, and critics of the ASA resolution are skeptical that the academic aspect of the boycott of South Africa had much of an impact in comparison with the more materially damaging economic measures.
“There was a comprehensive economic boycott [in South Africa],” Cary Nelson, professor of English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a member of the AAUP’s Committee A, told the HPR. “That … affected universities just as it did any other sphere of life in South Africa, [but] there was no separate academic boycott.”
Yet, the connection with South Africa may be stronger than its critics would like to admit. Perhaps tellingly, unlike Iran or Cuba or the Soviet Union, Israel—as South Africa before it—is a democratic state. Economic boycotts of countries and corporations alike have a long legacy, but academic and cultural boycotts are far rarer, perhaps because the act of boycott assumes that cultural exchange between the parties is valued and valuable.
Their Fault, Our Faults
For Reichman, it is clear that academic freedom, however cherished, serves only as a proxy for other political agendas. “There are strong advocates on both sides of this issue for whom academic freedom is something that, where it’s convenient to them, they evoke it, but that’s not their principal concern.”
Nor is it immediately clear what changes the boycott movement expects from the recent resolution. “It remains to be seen what practical effect the boycott will have,” Samer Ali, chair of the session on Palestine at the recent MLA conference, told the HPR, “but it’s a way of getting the conversation going so that we’re not so passive and complicit [in the occupation of Palestine].” Nevertheless, it is unclear how disengagement from the Israeli academic establishment will ensure greater academic freedom for Palestinians, especially as the academy in Israel is home to many vocal critics of Israeli state policy.
Calling the resolution an “attack on academic freedom in the name of phony progressivism,” Wesleyan University President Michael S. Roth wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “The ASA has not gone on record against universities in any other country: not against those that enforce laws against homosexuality, not against those that have rejected freedom of speech, not against those that systematically restrict access to higher education by race, religion or gender. No, the ASA listens to civil society only when it speaks against Israel.”
Implicit in the objections of Roth and others is the notion that Israel has been unfairly singled out by this boycott measure, which in a sense, it has. Israel is a liberal democracy in the style of Western liberal democracies, and the flaws plaguing Israel, are perhaps in some deeper sense, ours.
Far from a mere contest over academic freedom in a contentious region of the Middle East, the arguments for and against the academic boycott of Israel seem to suggest that, as with South Africa before it, the stakes are different. Troubling as it may be, perhaps it is that our moral commitments to the ideals of democratic societies, whether in theory or in practice, are what truly demand closer scrutiny.
Image Credit: Jerusalem Post
For Reichman, it is clear that academic freedom, however cherished, serves only as a proxy for other political agendas. “There are strong advocates on both sides of this issue for whom academic freedom is something that, where it’s convenient to them, they evoke it, but that’s not their principal concern.”
Nor is it immediately clear what changes the boycott movement expects from the recent resolution. “It remains to be seen what practical effect the boycott will have,” Samer Ali, chair of the session on Palestine at the recent MLA conference, told the HPR, “but it’s a way of getting the conversation going so that we’re not so passive and complicit [in the occupation of Palestine].” Nevertheless, it is unclear how disengagement from the Israeli academic establishment will ensure greater academic freedom for Palestinians, especially as the academy in Israel is home to many vocal critics of Israeli state policy.
Calling the resolution an “attack on academic freedom in the name of phony progressivism,” Wesleyan University President Michael S. Roth wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “The ASA has not gone on record against universities in any other country: not against those that enforce laws against homosexuality, not against those that have rejected freedom of speech, not against those that systematically restrict access to higher education by race, religion or gender. No, the ASA listens to civil society only when it speaks against Israel.”
Implicit in the objections of Roth and others is the notion that Israel has been unfairly singled out by this boycott measure, which in a sense, it has. Israel is a liberal democracy in the style of Western liberal democracies, and the flaws plaguing Israel, are perhaps in some deeper sense, ours.
Far from a mere contest over academic freedom in a contentious region of the Middle East, the arguments for and against the academic boycott of Israel seem to suggest that, as with South Africa before it, the stakes are different. Troubling as it may be, perhaps it is that our moral commitments to the ideals of democratic societies, whether in theory or in practice, are what truly demand closer scrutiny.
Image Credit: Jerusalem Post
