The American Association of University Professors has canceled an international meeting that it postponed last month after several professors scheduled to attend complained that an article the association sent them was anti-Semitic. The association said it had included the article in reading materials for the meeting by mistake.
The meeting, on the subject of academic boycotts, was scheduled to take place February 13 to 17 in Bellagio, Italy, with 22 participants, including both Israeli and Palestinian academics. In a letter to the participants, the AAUP said it had decided to cancel the meeting “with great unhappiness,” because the event “would have been a fruitful opportunity to address issues of academic freedom.”
The Bellagio meeting was to have centered on a discussion of whether academics should boycott a country’s universities as a way of voicing their opposition to the policies of that country’s government.
The AAUP became involved in the issue last spring, when it opposed a short-lived boycott by Britain’s largest faculty union, the Association of University Teachers, against two Israeli universities. Under the boycott, British scholars were asked to refuse to collaborate with academics from the Israeli institutions. The boycott was backed by Palestinian academics.
The article the AAUP mistakenly distributed appeared in the January-February 2001 issue of The Barnes Review, a magazine of revisionist history published by the founder of the conservative group Liberty Lobby, which ceased operations in 2001. The article, “The Jewish Declaration of War on Nazi Germany: The Economic Boycott of 1933,” states that Hitler’s actions against Jewish people were a response to Jewish leaders’ call for an economic boycott of Germany.
In its letter, the AAUP said it would have preferred to reschedule the meeting. But opposition to the meeting had been building even before the association mistakenly distributed the article. Some Israeli professors complained that the AAUP had invited Palestinians who were supporters of boycotts and sanctions against Israel. But last week, those same professors — who are members of an anti-boycott group called the International Advisory Board for Academic Freedom — lamented the AAUP’s decision to cancel the meeting. A statement released by the board said professors “would have preferred to see it take place at a future date in an objective, nonbiased, and nonpoliticized format.”
In its letter, the AAUP said that instead of holding a meeting, it would publish papers from conference participants in the September-October issue of its journal, Academe.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 52, Issue 30, Page A14
