The Review

The AAUP’s recent reversal of its longstanding opposition — formalized in 2006 — to academic boycotts has occasioned a great deal of debate, including dueling opinion essays in our pages by Cary Nelson and Joan W. Scott. But the practical consequences of the change in policy remain to be seen. Should we anticipate an explosion of academic-boycott activity in the coming year? What, exactly, does the AAUP’s new policy permit?

One basic question, which Jeffrey Sachs has raised in our pages: Could a faculty member who wanted to give a talk at, say, an Israeli university be denied funds if his department had voted to boycott that university? Does the academic freedom to endorse a boycott mean that individual faculty members can be prevented from some academic activities because of the majority preferences of their colleagues?

I put that question to Rana Jaleel, chair of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and co-author, in our pages, of a defense of its new policy. It “would depend on whether there was a democratic process followed,” she said, one that “meets the standards laid out in our writing on shared governance.” When I asked whether this didn’t risk sacrificing the individual right to academic freedom — in its essence a counter-majoritarian institution, meant to guard against both the prejudices of the public and the groupthink of colleagues — she acknowledged that “shared governance is always going to be fraught.”

“Fraught” implies the possibility of trade-offs between competing goods, but on Twitter, the AAUP’s official account seemed to suggest that no such tension should exist: “Pitting shared governance against academic freedom is a grave misstep.” As a response to Sachs’s hypothetical scenario, this strikes me as evasive. The AAUP seems to be duct-taping a facade of coherence over a policy that is anything but.

Although the loudest critics of the revised policy have been those who oppose academic boycotts on principle, supporters of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement will have trouble finding in the new document any broad warrant to boycott Israeli universities in protest of Israeli military or civil policy. As Jaleel and Risa Lieberwitz took pains to emphasize in a recent AAUP “State of the Profession” column: “The new statement concerns only boycotts of ‘institutions of higher education that themselves violate academic freedom or the fundamental rights upon which academic freedom depends.’” This is a major constraint, but it raises many questions when it comes to institutions in foreign countries, where the AAUP has no investigatory powers and no jurisdiction. Who will decide when academic-freedom violations have occurred?

In the short term, Israeli universities will of course be the primary targets of boycott efforts. On the AAUP’s own terms, though, such boycotts cannot be justified merely by opposition to Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Are Israeli universities in egregious violation of academic freedom? If so, how will the AAUP know?

When deciding whether to censure an American university for an academic-freedom violation, the AAUP executes an extensive fact-finding process. And it tends to be extremely conservative, sometimes refusing to add an institution to the censure list even when it confirms that academic-freedom violations have taken place — as in a recent case at Hamline University. In the absence of any analogous capacity for non-American institutions, the AAUP will have to rely largely on foreign news reports.

They could also rely on the Academic Freedom Index, a ranking of academic freedom by country compiled by the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Institute of Political Science. The index assigns countries an academic-freedom score on a 100-point scale, from 0.00 to 1.00. In 2023, Israel received a score of 0.86, which is very high, although not as high as leaders in academic freedom like Nigeria (0.91), France (0.90), and Sweden (0.94). By comparison, the United States received a score of 0.69. Then there are the very low scorers: China, at 0.07, Egypt, at 0.10, India, at 0.18, Iran, at 0.08.

Using this index as a sort of proxy for determining whether a given foreign institution is likely to have violated academic freedom in such a way as to justify a boycott is a plausible measure, but would tend to discourage the notion that Israeli institutions specifically are especially bad actors. But since the AAUP has proposed no way of adjudicating foreign academic-freedom disputes, the score should be taken to provide essential information.

The point is not that institutions in countries with high academic-freedom indices cannot commit violations of academic freedom that, under the new AAUP rules, would justify a boycott. The point is that there is a certain tension between the fact that the new policy has its origins in political protests of Israel and the fact that Israel has a relatively robust record of protecting academic freedom in its universities. The situation is rather strange: The new policy was written under the pressure of activists arguing for the legitimacy of boycotts of Israeli universities, but its own terms would seem to make those boycotts a very tough sell.

Recommended

• “Because lawyers happen to be more comfortable making grand claims about it than they are about other normative ideals, it is unsurprising that the rule of law becomes the vessel into which they pour other normative principles.” In the London Review of Books, Frederick Wilmot-Smith discusses the concept of “rule of law” by way of a review of Jeremy Waldron’s new book.
• “Even as they continued their work, the project was being obstructed by Prince’s estate.” In The New York Times Magazine, Sasha Weiss writes about Ezra Edelman’s nine-hour-long documentary on Prince, which might never see the light of day.
• “Weil’s intellect navigated time and space with supreme self-sovereignty, but her body lacked a steering wheel.” In The New Yorker, Judith Thurman explores life and work of Simone Weil.

Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com.

Yours,

Len Gutkin