BY HANK REICHMAN

On Thursday, May 28, a website called Israel-Academia-Monitor published an “editorial note” entitled “AAUP Losing Credibility over the Palestinian-Israeli Dispute.”   It begins:

The prestigious academic organization, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), is losing credibility.  Founded in 1915, the AAUP has helped to shape the standards and procedures of higher education to maintain quality in education and academic freedom.  However, of late, it has taken a wrong path.

It is unclear with whom, other than Israel-Academia-Monitor, AAUP is allegedly losing credibility or what is wrong with whatever path it may be on.  While the Monitor claims to uphold academic freedom and free speech and has endorsed the joint AAUP-AAC 1940 Statement on Academic Freedom and Tenure, its application of these principles seems highly selective.  They appear eager to support the rights of pro-Israel scholars with whom they agree, but far less willing to extend that support to those even vaguely critical of Israel, much less supporters of the BDS movement, whose rights may also be threatened.  And this was not the first time that the group published similar criticism of the AAUP and of me personally, about which more later.

In this latest note the group presents two pieces of “evidence” for the AAUP’s loss of “credibility.”  The first is that the Association recently announced three co-winners of its Georgina M Smith Award, one of whom was Professor Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi of San Francisco State University, who the group charges with antisemitism.  (The Monitor’s note fails to mention that Professor Abdulhadi shared the award with others.)  The second piece of “evidence” is a recent post to this blog, described as “an outfit of the AAUP,” entitled “International Scholars Oppose Political Litmus Tests in Germany,” written by me.  I will address each of these in turn but first let me, yet again, say a few words about the AAUP’s position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the BDS movement.

As I and others have repeatedly stressed the AAUP takes no position at all on the merits or demerits of either side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  Our mission does not include issuing proclamations on issues in international affairs.  We have members who advocate Zionism and members who are anti-Zionist.  With respect to BDS, as I wrote in a piece published on Inside Higher Ed in August 2018, “since 2005, the AAUP has opposed academic boycotts, including the academic boycott of Israel, and has on multiple occasions urged other scholars and scholarly organizations to join that opposition.  Where appropriate, the association will continue to do so.”  However, I continued, “With respect to divestment and strictly economic sanctions or boycotts . . . we remain neutral.”  I then quoted a piece I had also written for Inside Higher Ed five years earlier to justify our opposition to academic boycotts, including the boycott of Israeli institutions:

The whole idea of boycotting academic institutions in order to defend academic freedom is utterly wrongheaded.  Violations of academic freedom can be found anywhere.  In the AAUP, we encounter such violations, petty and large, on a daily basis in the United States.  In the very worst of these cases, when all efforts to correct the situation fail, we place administrations on our censure list. But that list is not a boycott list.  We do not and will not ask our colleagues to boycott institutions that violate academic freedom or that support policies we abhor. Instead we call on people to organize and struggle to effect change in such institutions, both from inside and out.  If we resist the temptation to boycott offending institutions in our own country, where we have full opportunity to determine all the relevant facts, how then can we agree to support such boycotts of foreign institutions?”

At the same time, I continued in the 2018 piece,

the AAUP has also consistently opposed efforts to silence or discipline advocates of such boycotts.  We cannot help but recognize that supporters of BDS have repeatedly had their rights violated.  The right of individuals to engage in or advocate boycotts is well established in the United States; any attempt to limit that right is clearly unconstitutional under the 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision in NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co.  No one is obligated to support a boycott, but opposition to a boycott does not justify silencing its advocates.  Just as the AAUP defends the right of faculty members to make extramural comments that most of us may find repulsive, so too do we defend the right of faculty members to support policies we may oppose, including policies that may threaten academic freedom.

Speaking as an individual, and a proud Jewish American, albeit not one whose attachment to Israel is at the core of my Jewish identity expressed as either strongly pro-Israel or as anti-Zionism (many BDS supporters are Jewish), I have my own views of the conflict.  But at least as long as I have held prominent positions in the AAUP I have not and will not express these publicly.  Suffice it to say, however, that some of my views will be anathema to groups like the Monitor and others abhorrent to BDS supporters.  Not that it matters.

Now, let’s turn to the matter of Professor Abdulhadi and the Georgina Smith Award.  Although I live in the Bay Area I have never met Professor Abdulhadi; indeed, I had heard little about her until recently.  I also played no part in the process of selecting this year’s awardees.  That was done, as usual, by a committee.  And, once again as usual, such a process pretty much always results in some disagreement with the committee’s decision.  After all, the AAUP is an organization with over 40,000 members.  I can’t imagine we’ve done almost anything that some segment of our membership does not find objectionable.  There are many ways one might judge the credibility of the AAUP and whether it is on a “wrong path,” but looking at a list of those whom one of its committees has selected to bestow with some honor hardly seems a very critical one.

But “Abdulhadi is controversial,” the Monitor complains.  So?  Last year one recipient of the Smith Award was Christine Blasey Ford, cited for her “remarkable courage, grace, and generosity” during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation process.  I imagine there were some, including among our members, who found that problematic.  So the award is no stranger to controversy.

The Monitor notes that in March 2019 the California State University Board of Trustees (SF State is part of the CSU system) settled a law suit that charged SF State with failing to protect Jewish students on campus from harassment by pro-Palestinian groups.  It would be foolish to deny that some Jewish students at SF State were indeed harassed, although there was also harassment directed against Islamic and Palestinian members of the community, including, as we shall see, Professor Abdulhadi.  Personally, I thought the settlement agreement was reasonable and fair.  Professor Abdulhadi did not, and the Monitor quotes from a Facebook post she made in response to it.  Nothing in that quote even hints at antisemitism, unless one assumes–as apparently the Monitor does–that any criticism of Israel, or recognition that all Jews do not embrace everything its government does, is antisemitic.  But, again, Professor Abdulhadi and I don’t agree about that settlement agreement.  Imagine, two professors, members of the same organization, disagree with each other!  Shocking!  Or, perhaps I should say, incredible.  We each have our academic freedom and free speech rights.

“The AAUP should be reminded,” the Monitor concludes, “that, as per its own definition, academic discourse should be balanced, rather than blatantly biased to vilify a politically convenient target.”  Actually the AAUP does not now and, to my knowledge, has never advocated balance.  In fact, in the 2007 statement Freedom in the Classroom the Association explicitly condemned efforts to impose “balance” in teaching:

To urge that instruction be “balanced” is to urge that an instructor’s discretion about what to teach be restricted.  But the nature of this proposed restriction, when carefully considered, is fatally ambiguous. Stated most abstractly, the charge of lack of balance evokes a seeming ideal of neutrality.  The notion appears to be that an instructor should impartially engage all potentially relevant points of view. But this ideal is chimerical. . . . There is always a potentially infinite number of competing perspectives that can arguably be deemed relevant to an instructor’s subject or perspective, whatever that subject or perspective might be.  It follows that the very idea of balance and neutrality, stated in the abstract, is close to incoherent.

The AAUP understands that academic freedom does not protect or guarantee any sort of “balance” of opinion among the faculty.  Instead, it aims to ensure that faculty members are free as both scholars and citizens to pursue truth and to advocate for causes, including ones that are unpopular and controversial.  I wonder what the Monitor would have said had the AAUP chosen to honor a pro-Israel professor.  Would they have asked for that to be “balanced” with an honor to a pro-Palestinian scholar?

As AAUP’s Committee A stressed in its 2011 report “Ensuring Academic Freedom in Politically Controversial Academic Personnel Decisions,” the Association’s entire history has not been about ensuring balance but focused instead on protecting unpopular and controversial faculty members subjected to inappropriate external pressures:

Beginning with professional economists who ran afoul of the conservative business community in the Association’s early days, the individuals who lost their positions for political reasons have been involved with some of the most controversial issues of their time.  Whether by deviating from the hyperpatriotism of World War I, or refusing to answer questions about communism during the McCarthy era, or taking an unpopular stance toward the current conflict in the Middle East, the protagonists in these academic-freedom struggles have tested the limits of permissible dissent within the academic, as well as the broader, community.

Moreover, if “balance” is to be a criterion of judgment, what about the imbalance of the Monitor’s presentation of Abdulhadi’s role?  For while they focus on the settlement agreement that she criticized, they neglect to point out that she had personally been an initial target of that suit but a federal judge dismissed her as a defendant prior to the university reaching agreement with the plaintiffs.  Even more egregiously they fail to mention that Abdulhadi has herself filed suit against SF State for failing to uphold provisions of her contract, including providing her with funding, resources and staff to launch a promised program focused on scholarship and analysis of issues affecting Arab and Muslim communities.

The suit also claims that the university has not accommodated Abdulhadi’s disabilities and has discriminated against her “based on her race/national origin, and her religious affiliation and who she associated with,” largely, she contends, owing to improper influence by pro-Israel groups.  In 2016 and 2017 Abdulhadi was on three separate occasions a target of ugly harassing posters baselessly charging her with “terrorism” and illegally put up on campus by the David Horowitz Center, an extremist pro-Zionist group.  James Martel, president of the California Faculty Association San Francisco Chapter, said that the union supported Abdulhadi in her claims. “We are concerned about academic freedom and professors being able to uphold their political beliefs without paying a price for it,” he said.

Apparently the Monitor thinks that giving the Georgina Smith Award to someone whose views they find disagreeable is a threat to academic freedom, but the ongoing harassment of that person for expressing those views is not.  Who lacks credibility here?  Who is on the “wrong path?’

This brings me to the group’s second charge, that in the above-mentioned blog post I somehow endorsed antisemitic views.  Frankly, this is ridiculous, as any fair-minded reading of that post would reveal.  But more important, perhaps, the Monitor might want to acknowledge this statement that is prominently displayed on the blog: “The blog and Academe are published by the American Association of University Professors, but opinions published in them do not necessarily represent the policies of the AAUP.”  So even had I been guilty as charged here, so what?  The AAUP believes strongly enough in academic freedom and free speech that we open our publications to a variety of viewpoints, whether our organization fully endorses them or not.

My post, it may be recalled, reported on two statements issued by scholars protesting efforts by the German government to restrict the academic freedom and free speech rights of artists and scholars suspected of supporting BDS.  One of these statements came from Jewish scholars in Israel and elsewhere.  Apparently the Monitor’s commitment to free speech is so superficial that not even Israelis are entitled to it.

The Monitor’s note concludes with the prediction that “for the prestigious AAUP, this is probably just the beginning, and there will be more to come.”  The group pledges that they “will continue to report on this new and worrisome trend.”  Of course they will, as is their right.  But will their reporting have credibility?  The evidence suggests otherwise, not only in this incident but in a preceding one.  As I mentioned earlier, this was not my first clash with the group.  In 2018 they posted a tendentious critique of a portion of my annual Committee A Report for that year.  That post charged that AAUP’s opposition to academic boycotts and its defense of the right to advocate such a boycott is “confusing.”  In an email response to the group I wrote,

the AAUP regularly defends the rights of individuals to make statements with which we may disagree.  For an explanation of why we do so, analogizing our position to that of a defense attorney who defends the rights but not always the actions of a client, see this short piece I published in our magazine Academe in 2016: https://www.aaup.org/article/state-profession-defending-our-principles#.WzVOOYonZAg.

I then went on to use some of the same language I would employ in the Inside Higher Ed piece quoted above.

My report included the announcement that Committee A had decided to protest the decision of the Israeli government to bar entry to Columbia University law professor Katherine Franke, a supporter of BDS.  In reporting this I included a hyperlink to a New York Times piece about the case written by Roger Cohen.  The Monitor took me to task for citing someone who, they claimed, “can hardly be described as a neutral observer.”  This was one of the silliest objections I’ve come across.  Here is how I responded:

[T]his was equivalent to a footnote or similar citation.  Citations, as every scholar knows, do not imply endorsement of all the views offered in the source cited nor are they necessarily commendations of the cited author.  Whatever Cohen’s views may be they are totally irrelevant to the AAUP’s position or to Committee A’s report.  What justifies our position is not Cohen’s op-ed, but the facts of the incident themselves, which exist independently of any account of them.  Franke was denied entry to Israel on the basis of reports on blacklisting websites of her political views on BDS.  However, she was visiting Israel in her capacity as a scholar and civil rights leader, not as a supporter of BDS.  (Actually, by seeking to visit Israel one could say that she was already violating the very boycott she was accused of advocating.)  Her plans included meeting with two graduate students whose dissertations she is supervising, meeting with a former Columbia fellow to discuss plans for a possible joint master’s program in human rights, and meeting with colleagues at an Israeli NGO to make plans for Columbia’s Palestine and Law program for the next academic year.  In other words, in the name of opposing an academic boycott the Israeli state — or at least the immigration officer dealing with Franke — in effect imposed its own academic boycott.

The Monitor responded  to my email and in doing so made a telling disclosure of their actual views on free speech and academic freedom:

Reichman’s main argument is that with respect to free speech, AAUP can both oppose BDS, on the one hand, while accepting the right of BDS activists to promote it, on the other hand, just as the saying goes, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”  While this principle was true to the time it was said, however, in our days, speech such as defamation, anti-Semitism, hate speech and Holocaust denial, among other things, are not permitted on or off campus and can not be defended under the category of free speech.  So much so, that in some cases offenders even have been sent to prison for espousing such speech.

Really?!  Who on a college or university campus in the U.S. has been sent to prison for hate speech?  I know of no one.  That is because so-called hate speech (a category, by the way, with no broadly agreed-upon definition) is not legally exempt from the protections of the First Amendment.  The extensive judicial record on that is more than clear.  Here’s how Wikipedia summarizes it: “The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that hate speech is legally protected free speech under the First Amendment.  The most recent Supreme Court case on the issue was in 2017, when the justices unanimously reaffirmed that there is effectively no ‘hate speech’ exception to the free speech rights protected by the First Amendment.”  Were a public college or university–say, San Francisco State–to seek to discipline a faculty member or student for such speech they would run afoul of the Constitution.  As the AAUP put it in its 1994 statement “On Freedom of Expression and Campus Speech Codes,”

rules that ban or punish speech based upon its content cannot be justified.  An institution of higher learning fails to fulfill its mission if it asserts the power to proscribe ideas—and racial or ethnic slurs, sexist epithets, or homophobic insults almost always express ideas, however repugnant. Indeed, by proscribing any ideas, a university sets an example that profoundly disserves its academic mission.

The Monitor claims that Holocaust denial cannot be allowed on campus.  Surely that odious position cannot be taught in a class on 20th century European history, but there is no rule barring its advocacy elsewhere on campus or by members of the community off campus.  As Northwestern University law professor Steven Lubet has written, “I work at a university where Arthur Butz—one of the nation’s premier Holocaust deniers—has been teaching electrical engineering for decades.  As far as anyone can tell, he respects the line between his deeply offensive prejudices, which he does not express on campus, and his teaching assignments.”  And that is as it should be because Butz’s repulsive views, which are irrelevant to his fitness to teach engineering, are protected by academic freedom as extramural expression.

So, in conclusion, one must ask: who is losing credibility?  Is it the AAUP or is it the shadowy Israel-Academia-Monitor, whose claims to support academic freedom and free speech are belied by the ill-informed and biased attacks they have launched on those very freedoms they purport to honor.