A study-abroad program at the University of Illinois at Chicago has become the latest flashpoint in the debate over academic ties with Israel.
A group of Palestinian students at the university, which has a large Arab American population, has filed a federal civil-rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Education, alleging discrimination in the institution’s handling of a planned study-abroad trip to Israel.
The students said they were kept out of an online information session about the program because they had “Arab-sounding names.” And they argue that the program itself is discriminatory because it is difficult for people of Palestinian heritage to travel to and within Israel.
Now the campus’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine is calling on students at colleges across the country to boycott education-abroad travel to Israel. In little more than a week, over 1,000 people and organizations have signed the group’s letter of solidarity.
College campuses have been a critical battleground in the long-running Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, or BDS, against Israel. The events that have unfolded in Chicago raise the question: Could study abroad be a new front in efforts to organize an academic boycott of the country?
“It’s another tactic in the long effort to get Israel made into an academic pariah,” said Marc Stern, chief legal officer for the American Jewish Committee, which opposes BDS.
While Israel is not among the top destinations for American students going overseas, more-widespread efforts to cancel study-abroad and exchange programs to the country could present an additional complication for study-abroad offices still working to regain their footing after Covid shut down international travel.
For college leaders, it could be a thorny debate to navigate, one that provokes strong emotions and has important implications for academic freedom.
Anger on Both Sides
Indeed, the one thing that the Palestinian students and study-abroad staff members agree on is that they think UIC administrators mishandled the institutional response, leaving both groups feeling that their concerns were not taken seriously.
The controversy began in January 2022, when the study-abroad office first posted information to its social-media accounts about the program to Israel, which was to be held that summer. The short trip, to be led by an instructor of kinesiology, Vered Arbel, focused on exploring culture through dance.
It’s another tactic in the long effort to get Israel made into an academic pariah.
A post promoting the program was flooded with critical comments, which also began to appear on other study-abroad posts unrelated to the Israel trip. Critics of the program inundated the study-abroad office with phone calls, said Kyle Rausch, the executive director.
Rausch said he asked senior administrators for guidance, which he said was slow in coming. He said he was advised to ignore emails, calls, and social-media comments and was told that the university would not make a statement about the program. A planned information session was canceled, and over time, the furor slowly died down. The program was canceled, too, for lack of student interest.
While it’s not unusual for education-abroad programs to be called off because of low enrollment — this past year, UIC offered 21 faculty-led programs but only 12 went abroad — Rausch tied the Israel program’s cancellation to the protests. “There was a lack of promotion,” he said. “And if I’m a student and see the vitriolic things being said, I’m going to think twice.”
Still, the trip was again offered this year, and it ignited a new round of critical comments when the study-abroad office began to advertise it in January. Because of the outcry, Rausch said he was told by his boss, Neal R. McCrillis, vice provost for global engagement, to “restrict” participation in a planned online information session to “the relevant majors within the School of Applied Health Sciences” or students who had expressed interest in going on the program. (McCrillis referred a query to a university spokeswoman who said in a statement that UIC does not comment on matters related to pending investigations.)
Meanwhile, members of Students for Justice in Palestine registered for the online session, but when it began, they were kept in the Zoom waiting room.
The two sides differ in their telling of what happened next. Jenin Alharithi, the group’s vice president, said she and others tried to email the study-abroad office about trouble accessing the information session. When they didn’t receive a response, she and two other students changed their screen names to ones that sounded “less Palestinian.” Alharithi became “Hayley,” and the others became “Rebecca Goldstein” and “Alissa James.” Within a few minutes, the three were admitted into the session.
Their pseudonyms couldn’t have been known to program organizers as interested students, Alharithi said, because they “aren’t real people.”
Rausch’s version of events differs. He said the students were admitted to the information session when another student already on the call asked organizers to let her friends in from the waiting room and provided their names. When the students joined the session, they interrupted Arbel’s presentation, repeatedly asking the same questions, despite requests that the professor be allowed to finish or that other students have a chance to pose questions. Rausch said he told students he would be willing to meet with them to discuss their concerns, but he eventually ended the information session early.
Rausch said one student did come to talk with him, but he believes she recorded their meeting without his consent, posting his “out of context” statements online. Two weeks after the info session, a group of students showed up at a study-abroad fair he was organizing. When Rausch told them he couldn’t discuss the Israel program then because he had an event to run, he said they rejected his business card and an offer to talk later, instead yelling questions at him.
To Rausch, the Palestinian students’ actions crossed the line to harassment and cyberbullying. Online and in flyers posted around campus, he, Arbel, and another study-abroad staff member were called racists and Islamophobes, he said. In a TikTok video, the student he had met with made a point that Rausch was gay, something he had told her in private but had not meant for public disclosure.
The Israel trip, planned for this summer, did not run. The ripples were broader: A student planning to study in Germany dropped out, citing the criticism, and at least one office on campus reconsidered its partnership with the study-abroad office. Student peer advisers came to Rausch with concerns about the Palestinian students’ allegations and asked for a forum on the program.
Rausch said he asked university administrators to make a statement about institutional policy on academic programming with Israel and to hold a mediated forum on views about Israel and Palestine where the study-abroad program could be discussed, but he was rebuffed. (The university did hold a “teach in” for faculty and staff members about challenges facing Arab Americans in higher education as well as an invitation-only forum for students, but Rausch said neither dealt with issues specific to the trip.)
In a detailed timeline provided to The Chronicle, Rausch documented numerous instances in which he asked senior administrators for guidance or support and received little or no response, or advice he said was inadequate. He filed a complaint about the students’ conduct with the university’s Office for Access and Equity, but in July it was dismissed because investigators found no violation of the university’s policy on nondiscrimination.
Rausch said he feels like he was “left out to dry” because of the controversy, noting that his office did not propose or conceive of the Israel program in the first place. (Faculty-led programs are approved by the professor’s department and school, and then by a campuswide faculty committee that makes recommendations to the vice provost for global engagement; the study-abroad office essentially acts as program support.)
“My main critique,” Rausch said, “is of campus leadership.”
Allegations of Discrimination
In an emailed statement, the university said, “We strive to be a place where everyone feels welcome … We care deeply about all members of our community, and we are committed to maintaining a campus climate that respects and advances tolerance, inclusion, and diversity.”
But the Palestinian students said that in running a study-abroad program to Israel, the university was being anything but inclusive.
The students filed a Freedom of Information Act to obtain emails between program organizers leading up to the information session in which the organizers exchanged concerns about potential disruptions to the webinar. The organizers’ plans to limit attendance “shows the school didn’t really want to hear the students’ questions,” said Zoha Khalili, a staff attorney with Palestine Legal, which filed the civil-rights complaint on behalf of the students. “You can see the defensive maneuvers the school was undertaking to avoid pushback.”
Alharithi, the Students for Justice in Palestine vice president, said she thinks the study-abroad organizers didn’t want other students to hear the concerns about the Israel trip. She sees the other events through a different lens than Rausch: For example, she said that a study-abroad fair seemed like a legitimate place to raise questions about a study-abroad program, and that students weren’t shouting but trying to be heard in the noisy center where the expo was held.
It raises ethical and moral problems to study abroad in an apartheid state.
In the civil-rights complaint, the students also detailed a separate incident in which they were stopped by professors when putting up flyers protesting the Israel trip in an academic building that houses Arbel’s office. Alharithi said the students tried to leave but were stopped by University of Illinois police, one of whom grabbed her hijab, or head scarf.
Police filed a misconduct report against the students because they had not received approval to post the flyers — an action that Alharithi and Khalili called a disproportionate response to a postering policy that they said was rarely enforced on campus.
The students submitted their own complaint alleging discrimination to the university’s Office for Access and Equity, but, like Rausch’s, it was dismissed in July. Palestine Legal then filed a federal civil-rights complaint on behalf of seven current and former students on September 12.
In the statement to The Chronicle, the University of Illinois said it had not received formal notification of the federal complaint or “specific details regarding its nature or content.”
“To maintain a fair and impartial process, the university refrains from commenting on matters related to ongoing investigations, including those initiated by” the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, the statement said. “We take all allegations of civil-rights violations seriously and will fully cooperate with any inquiries that may arise from a complaint.”
In the complaint, the students ask for changes to the process of reporting allegations of discrimination, mandatory training for staff members on “anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism,” and the establishment of a formal advisory committee on Palestinian student life. They also said that the university should immediately end all programs that “systemically exclude or disadvantage” Palestinian students, including study-abroad travel to Israel.
Alharithi, a dual American and Palestinian citizen, said it would have been difficult, if not impossible, for her to take part in the program. Under the Israeli policy in place at the time the trip was scheduled, U.S. citizens with Palestinian identity documents like her were not permitted to fly into Tel Aviv, as the program planned, but were instead required to enter the country through the land border with Jordan. Alharithi said she feared that she and others of Palestinian descent could be stopped when traveling in Israel or restricted in where they could go within the country. (The policy has since been changed so that Israel could join the American visa-waiver program, and Rausch said he had met with the Israeli consulate to get assurances that students would be able to take part.)
Other Programs Targeted
But the students’ objections to the study-abroad trip weren’t simply a matter of access. They also argued that the University of Illinois shouldn’t run a college-sponsored program in Israel because of the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians — the central argument of the BDS movement. “It raises ethical and moral problems to study abroad in an apartheid state,” Alharithi said.
Supporters of BDS have pressed colleges to divest their endowments from companies with ties to Israel and to limit institutional ties with Israeli universities and research institutes. Last year the Middle East Studies Association endorsed an academic boycott of Israel; in July, the American Anthropological Association backed a similar policy.
Study abroad has been a less visible front in the fight. Melissa Torres, president of the Forum on Education Abroad, an association of American and overseas colleges and independent study-abroad programs, said she knew of no other college beyond the University of Illinois at Chicago where students were protesting a program to Israel. Then again, she said, it’s quite possible that a national organization like hers wouldn’t know if a college decided to quietly cancel or alter a program in the country.
In fact, BDS advocates have recently made other study-abroad programs in Israel a target. When Tufts University’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine started a boycott campaign last year, they asked students to refuse to join campus groups or programs that “normalize or benefit” Israel, including study abroad there.
In 2019, a joint committee of students and faculty members at Pitzer College voted to end the California institution’s longstanding study-abroad partnership with the University of Haifa, a move that would have removed the program from the college’s preapproved list of education-abroad sites, requiring students to get special permission to study there.
But the decision was overturned by Melvin L. Oliver, the college’s president at the time. Severing the relationship would have meant taking “an unavoidably political position on one of the most controversial issues of our time,” Oliver wrote in announcing his decision. “It is rarely, if ever, the role of the college to be taking such positions.”
This spring, however, Pitzer students said they were renewing their efforts to end the Haifa partnership.
Stern, of the American Jewish Committee, called the Illinois students’ civil-rights filing “a call for a boycott dressed up in the guise of a discrimination complaint.”
Attempts to chill academic exchange with Israel “is a dangerous thing, in our perspective,” he added.
Could the attention attracted by the controversy give fresh momentum and a higher profile to such efforts across the country? Perhaps, although Palestinian students are a particularly vocal presence on the Chicago campus, which is home to the first cultural center serving Arab American students at an American college.
Still, a letter of solidarity posted by University of Illinois students that calls study abroad to Israel “something that almost every [Students for Justice in Palestine] chapter has to fight against” has already gotten signatures of support from college groups, including at Yale, Rice, and Ohio State Universities and the University of California at Berkeley.
If such efforts gain traction, they could create new pressures for college leaders who have typically opposed academic boycotts as limiting academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas. “It’s a clever tactic, but it’s antithetical to the purpose of a university,” Stern said.
Israel attracts relatively few students to academic study abroad — only about 3,500 Americans studied there in 2018-19, the last academic year before Covid disruption, and the country didn’t crack the list of the 20 most popular destinations. But any effort to halt study-abroad travel there could have broader implications: After all, governments around the world have put in place policies that students may disagree with or even find discriminatory because of religion, national origin, sexual orientation, or other beliefs or identities.
A number of countries, for instance, have laws outlawing homosexuality or banning abortion. In France, one of the most popular destinations with Americans, the wearing of face-covering veils is forbidden in public. Would study-abroad offices need to create policies to reflect such considerations?
Torres, of the study-abroad association, said she was sympathetic to the concerns of the Palestinian students, but that she believes dialogue and mutual understanding offer better solutions to tackling complex problems. “Education abroad can be that bridge,” she said. “I don’t think closing the door is the answer.”
As for the University of Illinois at Chicago, the debate over student travel to Israel may now be mostly academic. Rausch said the Israel program has not been proposed for 2024.
