The Trouble With Institution-Led Boycotts

When, if ever, should colleges advocate boycotts? The question is particularly relevant in light of last week’s memorandum, signed by a top University of California at Los Angeles executive, urging the faculty to engage in what amounts to a boycott of an academic publisher, Elsevier. The precedent will most likely lead to a host of unintended consequences.

Elsevier is home to about 2,500 journals that in 2017 published more than 430,000 articles. The University of California system is paying more than $10 million to Elsevier in 2018, and with the current multiyear contract set to expire at the end of December, the system and Elsevier have been in high-stakes negotiations over a new contract.

Last week’s memorandum was addressed to all UCLA faculty members and was signed by UCLA’s executive vice chancellor and provost as well as by the chair of the Academic Senate and by the university librarian.

Titled “Important Notice Regarding Elsevier Journals,” it urged UCLA faculty members to consider “declining to review articles for Elsevier journals until negotiations are clearly moving in a productive direction,” “looking at other journal-publishing options, including prestigious open-access journals in your discipline,” and “contacting the publisher, if you’re on the editorial board of an Elsevier journal, and letting them know that you share the negotiators’ concerns.”

While some have characterized the call for a boycott as faculty-led, the signature of the executive vice chancellor and provost provides a clear institutional imprimatur. And now that UCLA has opened the door to institution-advocated boycotts, where might it lead?

Consider the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. BDS, which I personally do not support, has gained significant momentum on college campuses in recent years. If BDS advocates at UCLA pressure the administration to support the movement, the response can no longer be that “UCLA doesn’t take institutional positions on boycotts.” Rather, UCLA will now have to come up with a framework to decide which types of boycotts the institution can endorse.

How might the UCLA administration approach that challenge? There’s no good answer. The administration first might try to sidestep the issue entirely by arguing that last week’s memorandum wasn’t suggesting a boycott at all. But that would be a dubious assertion in light of the language and calls to action it contains.

The administration might next try to argue that advocating an Elsevier boycott is acceptable, appropriate, and different from other potential boycotts because it involves a matter of direct financial relevance to the university. But many contractual arrangements have major financial implications for UCLA. Which of them warrant a boycott when negotiations get tough?

And why should money be the only factor that justifies a boycott? Any number of potential boycotts might be proposed in the name of human rights — surely a more important concern than whether Elsevier’s profit margins are too high.

After all, why is an institution-supported boycott that might help a vast 10-campus system save a few million dollars a year more acceptable than one that might uplift or even save many lives?

The administration might assert that its actions don’t set a precedent on boycotts because it isn’t mandating anything; it’s simply urging faculty members to engage in certain actions but allowing them full discretion not to participate.

But that is also an unsatisfying answer. For example, if a college administration were to “urge” faculty members to neither travel to nor host visitors from Israel, BDS opponents would quite rightly find little comfort in the fact that faculty participation was recommended, not mandatory.

Moreover, it’s a conflict of interest when college administrators ask faculty members to take actions that reduce their publication options. To be promoted, professors are told they should publish in top journals. Yet now UCLA professors in fields whose top journals are published by Elsevier face an unenviable choice that places their publication interests in tension with the administration’s boycott recommendation.

In short, in an attempt to negotiate a better financial deal with a publisher, the institution that is evaluating professors is asking them to take steps that can impede building the scholarly-publication record that is a central aspect of the evaluation of an academic career.

That looks a lot like the sort of conflict-of-interest scenario that might appear in the mandatory online ethics-training courses that all University of California faculty members are required to complete periodically.

The UCLA administration has a point when it asserts, as it did in the memorandum, that Elsevier’s “profit margin is 40 percent, much of it earned from your intellectual capital and unpaid work.”

But the memorandum also stated that “Elsevier has begun contacting journal editors at some campuses, and its message doesn’t fully represent all sides of the issue or what is being discussed in the negotiations.” That may be true, but the memorandum also doesn’t “fully represent all sides of the issue.”

The UCLA administration’s call for faculty members to boycott Elsevier has blurred the lines between grass-roots, faculty-led activism — a time-honored mechanism that can be very effective for social change — and institution-led activism, which raises complex legal, policy, and ethical issues.

Now that UCLA is in the business of institution-advocated boycotts, I hope that the administration has a plan for handling the inevitable calls for boycotts that will start landing on its doorstep in the future.

John Villasenor is a professor of engineering, public policy, and management and a visiting professor of law at the University of California at Los Angeles. He is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.