Less than a day after it went online, a petition calling for “an academic boycott of International Conferences held in the U.S.” had gathered more than 2,000 signatures from around the world. Rapidly responding to Trump’s executive order banning entry to people from seven predominantly Muslim countries, the petition rightly argues that the order “institutionalizes racism” and discredits academic conferences held in the United States: “We question the intellectual integrity of these spaces and the dialogues they are designed to encourage while Muslim colleagues are explicitly excluded from them.” The order blocks foreign students and faculty members from exercising their academic freedom, and it does so impersonally, indiscriminately, and without justification. But a boycott of academic conferences in the United States, as tempting as it may be, will deny the very values it attempts to protect.
Short of proof of participation in or alliance with a terrorist organization, the only justification for prohibiting a student approved for study or a faculty member invited to lecture in the United States would be demonstrable evidence that he or she has a history of inciting violence. Procedures already exist to consider those cases individually. Unfortunately, the U.S. government does not have a flawless history of adjudicating individual cases either. Over many years it has blocked or tried to block foreign scholars from entering the country on an ideological basis. We don’t have to go back to the McCarthy period to find examples.
In 1983, when Larry Grossberg and I were organizing the international conference “Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture,” we got an urgent call from our keynote speaker, the late Stuart Hall of Britain’s Open University. He had returned to the U.S. Embassy in London when he was scheduled to pick up his visa. They told him they had no record of his applying. So he reapplied. Same result. He applied a third time, and on his third return to pick up the visa he was once again told there was no record of his having applied. I contacted National Public Radio to ask whether they would broadcast an interview if we couldn’t get satisfaction from the State Department; they agreed. I managed to get the name of an official there with the authority to act, told him about the problem and the possibility of an NPR interview, and asked him to get the State Department to honor academic freedom. Stuart got his visa. That was under Ronald Reagan’s presidency.
Twenty years later, the American Association of University Professors protested when the Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan was blocked from entering this country to become a faculty member at the University of Notre Dame. We did not succeed in getting the decision reversed. That was under the George W. Bush administration. I tell these stories in part because I have exactly zero confidence the Trump administration can be counted on to be honorable when it moves from broad-brush discrimination to review individual applications. Our problems may not end with this (supposedly temporary) executive order.
I remain naïve enough to believe that the direct experience of U.S. academic culture benefits all countries involved. The fundamental principle is unambiguous: Academic freedom is grounded in the free exchange of views and research results worldwide. The AAUP said as much in its definitive 1915 “Declaration of Principles,” and in 2005, faced with calls for boycotts of Israel, rejected all academic boycotts. We can either honor academic freedom as a universal principle or abandon it. Some nations may be more equal than others, but we want to talk with their students and faculty nonetheless.
Coverage of how the president’s executive order barring all refugees and citizens of six Muslim countries from entering the United States affects higher education.
On the practical level, the proposal to boycott U.S. academic conferences, as with earlier academic-boycott efforts, effectively punishes some of the most vocal critics of government policy. Indeed, many university presidents have already released letters opposing Trump’s executive order. The enemy is elsewhere. Furthermore, it is hard to believe that the Trump administration, which has shown nothing but contempt for academics and their work, would even register the boycott, much less be moved by it. The only ones who would be hurt are academics.
It would be far better for U.S. faculty and administrators to cancel classes for a day and hold a teach-in about the implications of the executive order. Such teach-ins could help all members of the community learn how to pressure their elected representatives in Congress to overturn Trump’s action.
Faculty in other countries are not powerless to fight the executive order. They can begin by signing the January 29th Statement of Inclusiveness drafted by Juan Souto of the Université de Rennes 1 and already signed by more than 300 scholars. Faculty members and groups that could move a U.S. conference to another country as an economic and political protest might think seriously about doing so. That is the approach taken by the Alliance for Academic Freedom, a group of more than 200 academics focused on defending academic freedom and supporting a two-state solution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. A statement just released by the alliance says, in part, “If we meet in the U.S. when colleagues are excluded from our country because of their religion or nationality, we also give sanction to bigotry. … [I]f our colleagues cannot come to us, we must go to them,” and encourages scholars unable to travel to participate by video link.
The Trump administration’s executive order is not likely to be the last assault on the values academics support. But it is in itself an outrageous and unacceptable action that requires both individual and group resistance. Scholars across the world should stand in solidarity in principled opposition to the policy. That means protecting the integrity of academic freedom so it can be preserved as a basis for unified action now and in the future.
Cary Nelson is a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an affiliated faculty member at the University of Haifa. He is chair of the Alliance for Academic Freedom.
