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That will include the right to refuse to write letters of recommendation for highly qualified students who wish to study at Israeli universities, an action that will be defended as only boycotting Israeli institutions. Not that any affected student will accept the distinction.
I predict that hundreds of those and other individual micro-boycotts of Jewish and Israeli students and faculty will be initiated during the 2024-25 academic year as a consequence of the AAUP policy change. There will also be dedicated group efforts to criminalize collaborative research projects between faculty in America and Israel, projects that often entail institutional endorsement and support.
The AAUP’s position that “academic boycotts should neither involve any political or religious litmus tests nor target individual scholars and teachers engaged in ordinary academic practices, such as publishing scholarship, delivering lectures and conference presentations, or participating in research collaborations” will be honored in the breach. That principle is in tension with the unqualified freedom that the organization grants to individuals to boycott or not to boycott. Expect organized demonstrations against collaborative American and Israeli research programs. Expect more efforts to block study-abroad programs, efforts that compromise student academic freedom.
Individual students and faculty have always had the right to advocate for academic boycotts, and it is disingenuous to suggest otherwise.
The AAUP concludes its new policy by parroting the long-discredited Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions claim that it boycotts only institutions, not individuals. In 2014, the BDS campaign based in the West Bank at least had the honesty to admit that common sense dictated that individuals would inevitably be harmed by such “institutional” boycotts. Not so for the AAUP. Moreover, although its last sentence piously declares that “academic boycotts should target only institutions of higher education that themselves violate academic freedom or the fundamental rights upon which academic freedom depends,” there are thousands of faculty in the West who will have no problem, absent proof, claiming that Israeli universities have violated academic freedom for decades.
Throughout the Middle East and elsewhere — whether in Egypt, Iran, Russia, Syria, Turkey, and many other countries — there are institutions that have little to no academic freedom. For a time they will nonetheless be held harmless. But not for long. In 2005 the AAUP understood that, unless the opposition to academic boycotts was honored as a universal principle, innumerable debates about boycotting universities in various countries would ensue, and academic boycotts would become routine. The AAUP is now willing to pay that price in the service of its growing anti-Zionism.
It supports that consequence by issuing a fundamental concession to anti-Zionism, declaring that “academic boycotts are not in themselves violations of academic freedom; rather, they can be considered legitimate tactical responses to conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education.” No principles are any longer at stake in academic boycotts. They are mere tactical matters.
Part of what the AAUP, almost comically in my view, seeks to do is to imply that group boycott actions are the collective result of considered decisions by individuals. It would be perhaps the first time in history that reflective philosopher kings alone have organized mass action. We know that social pressure is at least as likely to be responsible.
It would be perhaps the first time in history that reflective philosopher kings alone have organized mass action.
In an ill-considered pretense at being evenhanded, the AAUP asserts that even in the United States, students and faculty are commonly denied freedom of thought and religion, freedom of association and liberty of movement, and other basic rights. What on earth, one asks, does the AAUP have in mind?
But all this is preceded by the AAUP’s undocumented assault on how its opposition to academic boycotts has purportedly been misused for nearly 20 years. It has, paradoxically, so the AAUP contends, been used “to compromise academic freedom.” Its categorical stance “disregards nuance and is inattentive to context.” These unsupported disparaging generalizations are delivered in the face of a nuanced movement dedicated to the Manichean notion that Palestinians are but a force for good and Israelis a force for evil.
Germany’s Friedrich-Alexander University produces an Academic Freedom Index that ranks 179 countries worldwide. The 2024 update places Israeli universities in the upper 20 to 30 percent, substantially higher than those in the United States. The AAUP has made a political decision based not on fact but rather on prejudice. Jewish students and faculty will suffer unjustly as a consequence. Their individual academic freedom and right to be protected from a hostile educational environment will be compromised. We must no longer use AAUP policy as the gold standard for academic freedom.
