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From: Len Gutkin
Subject: The Review: Historians fight over a Gaza resolution
As Jennifer Schuessler reported last week in The New York Times, members of the American Historical Association (AHA) voted — 428 to 88 — in favor of a
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As Jennifer Schuessler reported last week in The New York Times, members of the American Historical Association (AHA) voted — 428 to 88 — in favor of a resolution condemning “the Israeli violence in Gaza” for vitiating “the right of all peoples to freely teach and learn about their past"; calling for “a permanent ceasefire"; and pledging the AHA to “form a committee to assist in rebuilding Gaza’s educational infrastructure.” (The vote represents a majority of those present at the AHA’s annual business meeting.) The future of the resolution is uncertain. As Schuessler explains, the AHA’s executive council has the option either to endorse the measure, veto the measure, or send it to the entire AHA membership — over 10,000 historians — for a vote. That would certainly be the most democratic option. For the moment, according to the AHA’s executive director, James R. Grossman, the AHA “has postponed a decision on how to act until its next meeting, which will be within a few weeks.”
It’s not the first time in recent memory that controversy at the AHA raised fundamental questions about when and how historians should weigh in on political questions of the day. In an opinion essay criticizing the AHA’s resolution, the columnist Pamela Paul quoted Grossman’s AHA statement from September: “The AHA cannot, does not, and should not intervene everywhere. ... [W]e keep our distance from issues that are controversial within and among our members. And we keep in mind that our effectiveness rests on our legitimacy, our reputation for even-handedness, professional integrity, and appropriately narrow boundaries.”
Read in light of the recent vote condemning Israel, Grossman’s statement sounds like a criticism of this sort of organizational activism. And the incoming AHA president, Suzanne Marchand, opposed the measure. As Paul points out, though, there’s recent precedent for official AHA statements on foreign affairs. Back in 2022, the organization condemned “in the strongest possible terms Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine,” for instance. Like a host of college administrators before them, the AHA’s leadership may be discovering too late that a past habit of public statements has left them vulnerable to irreparable schism when it comes to the war in Gaza.
For senior leaders like Grossman, the concern seems to be that weighing in on Gaza, a subject on which the AHA’s opinion is perhaps unlikely to be decisive, will weaken the organization’s influence when it comes to topics over which they have more power. Schuessler quotes from a written version of Grossman’s remarks read at the annual meeting: “We are not a political organization, which is essential if we are to have any standing to provide Congress with briefings on such issues as the histories of deportation, taxation, civil service, and other pressing issues.” To the historian Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, quoted in Schuessler’s article, the AHA’s resolution risks entrenching the image of academics as left-wing ideologues just at the moment when they can least afford it: “This feeds directly into the idea that academics are unapologetically political and are all on board with a pretty far left-wing view of the Israel-Hamas war.”
For those in favor of the resolution, the moral urgency of the subject overrides such worries. But their stance is practical, too, or purports to be, hence the task of forming “a committee to assist in rebuilding Gaza’s educational infrastructure.” There’s something quite moving about this quixotic proposal, as if an internally divided and far from wealthy professional organization, one that hasn’t even been able to arrest the contraction of its discipline here at home, could materially assist in healing one of the most devastated regions on earth. It’s easy to laugh at such idealism. But whatever the fate of the larger resolution, should AHA members really devise ways to help rebuild higher education in Gaza, I’m rooting for them.
I have an essay in the most recent issue of Liberties — “The Wages of Cultural Secularization” — which serves as a sort of companion piece to some of my writing for The Chronicle. Although higher education is not its primary focus, the decline of majors, enrollments, and tenure lines in the academic humanities form the essay’s essential backdrop. I hope you’ll check it out.
Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com.
Yours,
Len Gutkin
