The American Association of University Professors’ new policy on academic boycotts is a tempest in a teapot. Or maybe it’s a disaster in the making. I can’t make up my mind because I’m not quite certain what the policy means. Even worse, the AAUP doesn’t seem to know either.
Since 2006, the AAUP’s stance on academic boycotts has been decidedly hostile. While recognizing the right of each individual academic to refuse collaboration with a given university, it has opposed what it calls a “systematic academic boycott” — that is to say, the coordinated refusal of multiple faculty members or an academic institution to work with a targeted university. This kind of boycott, the AAUP had declared, “threatens the principles of free expression and communication on which we collectively depend.”
The new policy, drafted in July by the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure and adopted last week by its national Council, abandons that position as “inattentive to context.” Individual boycotts, or even boycotts organized by scholarly associations or whole universities, can be “legitimate tactical responses to conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education.”
But the policy hastens to add that it is ultimately up to “individual faculty members and students … to weigh, assess, and debate the specific circumstances giving rise to calls for systematic academic boycotts and to make their own choices regarding their participation in them. To do otherwise contravenes academic freedom.” It goes on to say that a boycott “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.”
That all sounds good. It puts the faculty member in the driver’s seat, free to choose for themselves whether to participate in a boycott. It also means that a scholar from a university targeted for boycott cannot be denied some opportunity simply because of their institutional affiliation.
But now consider a couple of scenarios. None are especially far-fetched, but feel free to swap out the proper nouns for whatever feels most relevant or plausible to you.
- A professor wants to apply for a one-year visiting fellowship at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University, but her chair, inspired by the example of others, refuses to send the needed paperwork to the search committee.
- A researcher submits an application to her university’s Institutional Review Board, but because the project is based at and will benefit a university in Florida (no friend to the mission of higher education, says the AAUP), the IRB votes the project down.
- A professor would like to organize a conference at his university. His department has a pool of money set aside for such things, but because the conference will be co-sponsored by a university in China, his colleagues deny him the funds.
Each of these scenarios involves a faculty member who seeks to use some university resource. Each requires the support or cooperation of a colleague. And in each, colleagues deny them that resource because it would also benefit a university they wish to boycott. And for what it’s worth, their behavior is consistent with the types of actions demanded by the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.
To be clear, nobody in these scenarios is being punished. But obviously not everyone can be accommodated. Someone is going to be forced to either abandon a boycott they support or be denied a university resource to which they are otherwise entitled.
And all of it is because of a contradiction at the heart of the AAUP’s new policy: that each faculty member has the right to participate in a boycott and also the right to not participate in a boycott. That sounds fine in the abstract, but it’s fatal in a workplace characterized by shared governance. So long as Faculty Member A has authority over Faculty Member B, their opposing positions on a boycott cannot both be accommodated. One will have to give in.
I presented this problem to the AAUP on X, but the answer was not very satisfying. According to the AAUP, a faculty member cannot be denied a university resource due to their lack of support for a boycott. That’s good to know, but it doesn’t quite answer the question of whether they can be denied a university resource due to some other faculty member’s support for a boycott.
The AAUP and Committee A are going to have to make some difficult calls.
After a bit more back-and-forth, the AAUP finally answered in the negative. That’s a relief, but it doesn’t really clarify things very much. If I can compel you — my chair, my departmental colleague, a member of my IRB — to drop your boycott and facilitate my partnership with some targeted university, then what does the AAUP’s new policy actually amount to? Does it just mean that you, acting alone and in a way that affects no one else, can engage in an individual boycott? You already had that right. No need for a new policy; the AAUP affirmed as much all the way back in 2006. I (and I think most everyone else) understood the AAUP to be giving a green light to corporate boycotts, the kind undertaken by whole departments, universities, and scholarly associations. And that’s going to present some major problems for academic freedom.
So what happens now? For one thing, the AAUP and Committee A are going to have to make some difficult calls. Academic boycotts, they say, should only target “institutions of higher education that themselves violate academic freedom or the fundamental rights upon which academic freedom depends.” Are places like the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill or New College of Florida, both of which are the subjects of scathing AAUP reports, fair game for a boycott? Or does the standard only apply to universities in places like Israel, Russia, and Turkey? Cases will inevitably arise, and faculty members will appeal to the AAUP for support. I hope it will have an answer.
It will also have to figure out whether an institution’s decision to boycott adhered to what it called proper “democratic processes” (a criterion that, by the way, appears nowhere in its new policy). Who is supposed to be making this vote? An entire faculty senate or an individual department? All the members of a scholarly association or just its executive team? And what does it all mean for the faculty who voted the other way but, according to the AAUP, are nevertheless supposed to be able to make their own individual choice?
These will be hard decisions. Given the context, they will also be exceedingly bitter and controversial. But it is a problem that the AAUP and Committee A are going to have to solve. After all, they are the ones who opened the door.
