The AAUP Is Right. Supporting Boycotts Is Academic Freedom.

As I read Cary Nelson’s recent attack on the American Association of University Professors’ statement on academic boycotts, I wondered: What has become of Cary Nelson, co-editor of the 1988 classic Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, which contains essays — complex and varied — by the likes of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Étienne Balibar, Stuart Hall, Fredric Jameson, Chantal Mouffe, Perry Anderson, and many others? What has become of the close reader of the revolutionary American poetry of the 1930s (Revolutionary Memory, 2003), attentive to the meanings of language, to complexity and nuance, to voices critical of capitalist and state power in its many forms? How could this once-careful reader now read the AAUP statement so badly? It is a reading peppered with a series of unfounded apocalyptic speculations: “The AAUP’s position … will be honored in the breach.” “Expect organized demonstrations.” “Expect more efforts … to compromise student academic freedom.”

This is an incoherent rant against the organization Nelson once capably headed. A rant that accuses critics of Israel of being dedicated to a “Manichean notion that Palestinians are but a force for good and Israelis a force for evil,” yet that is itself driven by that notion’s Manichean inverse. It is sad to see this substitute for the more subtle politics of his earlier work. Nelson seems to think that there should be no academic freedom for critics of Israel, that Zionism is a flawless project, and that its critics (Jews among them) are antisemites.

Nelson distorts the meaning and intention of the AAUP statement. The text itself is clear. It is worth reading in its entirety, though I can only cite some of it here.

Nelson reads the AAUP statement as the organization’s endorsement of the boycott, divest, and sanction movement (BDS), which is nowhere mentioned in the text. Indeed, it is not a call for boycotts at all. It is, instead, a reminder that academic freedom extends to “extra-mural” expression, that is, to the political positions that one takes outside of research and teaching. It is an assertion of a faculty and student right not to be disciplined for supporting academic boycotts, whether of Israel or, for that matter, any other authoritarian power (India, Hungary, Turkey, Russia) that interferes with what is taken to be “the mission of higher education.”

Nelson dismisses the AAUP’s assertion that boycotts can be “legitimate tactical responses” as an abrogation of principle — a descent to “mere tactical matters.” But it is principle (“the mission of higher education”) that is assumed to inform any tactical response. And he accuses the AAUP of “an ill-considered pretense at being evenhanded” for asserting that even in the United States, faculty and students are denied “freedom of thought … and other basic rights. What on earth, one asks, does the AAUP have in mind?”

Where has he been these last years, one wonders, as red state legislatures try to outlaw the teaching of slavery and gender studies? As book banning, in Florida, descends to the level of Nazi book burning? Just last week hundreds of books on gender and diversity from New College’s library were disposed of in a garbage dump.

Where has he been as students and faculty who have protested Israel’s destruction of Gaza have been expelled, fired, or harshly disciplined by university administrators bowing to the likes of the extremist Republican representatives Virginia Foxx and Elise Stefanik?

Nelson also condemns the AAUP for “piously” declaring that “academic boycotts should target only institutions of higher education that themselves violate academic freedom.” This, he contends, will lead to “thousands of faculty in the West who will have no problem, absent proof, claiming that Israeli universities have violated academic freedom for decades.” What can he possibly have in mind? In the case of Israel, the evidence of the violation of Palestinian academic freedom is overwhelming. Maya Wind’s Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom is a thoroughly documented study of the problem. There is, too, the recent case of Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a Palestinian citizen of Israel and law professor at Hebrew University, who was jailed for political speech. Her case is not unique. Furthermore, the targeted bombings in Gaza that have destroyed most universities and schools there make the pursuit of education itself impossible. One does not have to be a supporter of Hamas, or indeed believe that all Palestinians are “a force for good,” to be aware of these facts.

It is true, as Nelson asserts, that the AAUP statement of 2006 opposing academic boycotts, which he advocated for, was prompted by politics surrounding Israel and Palestine, as was its revision this month. In 1985 the AAUP had, without difficulty, urged divestment (and itself divested) from the apartheid regime in South Africa. The 2006 document was a response to BDS; it declared that academic boycotts were incompatible with academic freedom. I was then a member of the AAUP’s Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure (known as Committee A) and was persuaded to sign on to that document.

I subsequently changed my mind, not only because I learned more about the treatment of Palestinian academics by Israeli universities, but also because of the actions in support of that treatment by Cary Nelson himself. The 2006 statement was controversial from the start. In response to the controversy, I thought it would be a good idea to organize a conference at which the topic of academic boycotts could be debated by representatives of all sides. I got funding from the Nathan Cummings, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations; we were set to meet at the Rockefeller conference center in Bellagio, Italy. I invited a group of scholars with diverse opinions on the question: four supporters of the statement, five critics, three scholars from South Africa with opposing opinions on the value of boycotts against apartheid there, and four with different historical perspectives (the Cuban and Yugoslavian experiences with boycotts among them).

An Israeli scholar, Gerald M. Steinberg, of Bar-Ilan University (one of the BDS targets), took to the internet and, in the name of academic freedom, demanded that we exclude the Palestinians for their “demonization of Israel.” He drummed up angry letters to the AAUP about our invitations, declined himself to participate, and prevailed upon others to withdraw as well, effectively organizing a boycott of the conference. When we circulated documents for the conference (to supplement the papers by the invited scholars), one came from what was thought to be an antisemitic source. It was taken to be evidence that the whole conference (many of whose participants, in fact, had serious questions about academic boycotts) was an antisemitic, anti-Zionist project.

Cary Nelson, vice president at the AAUP at the time, jumped into the fray on behalf of the protesters. And he prevailed in successfully denying academic freedom to scholars who wanted to explore, from their different political and geographic contexts, a burning question of the day. The conference was canceled.

In recent years, Nelson has become a more vociferous, uncritical supporter of the Israeli state, and lately, its genocidal war in Gaza. His recent books proclaim his allegiance: Israel Denial: Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, & the Faculty Campaign Against the Jewish State (2019) and Hate Speech and Academic Freedom: The Antisemitic Assault on Basic Principles (2024). In these books, Nelson effectively embraces the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition that conflates the racism that is antisemitism with political criticism of Israel, assuming that any criticism of that state’s policies is a call for its destruction and, by extension, the extermination of all Jews. Political critics are then described as racists who don’t warrant the protections of academic freedom. For this reason, Nelson opposed the AAUP’s censure of the University of Illinois in the Steven Salaita case in 2014. He has gone further, seeking to punish critics of Israel. He organized an effort to unseat Judith Butler as president of Modern Language Association in 2020; and most recently, he told a journalist that the current head of AAUP’s Committee A should not have been chosen because of her “anti-Zionist” politics.

It is Nelson, not the AAUP, who has politicized the question of academic freedom by objecting to its extension to faculty and students who, for principled reasons, might support academic boycotts in the name of those systematically denied it. Careful, thoughtful AAUP policy is still “the gold standard for academic freedom.” The alternative Cary Nelson offers — a selective principle, an exclusionary practice, driven by a hardline Zionism — is a corruption of that enduring standard.