BY CARY NELSON

John Wilson has recently claimed that official anti-Zionist proclamations by academic departments are protected by academic freedom. “A statement is just a statement,” his Academe Blog post concludes, “It’s not an act of oppression.” Wilson was writing in opposition to my own June 3 essay in Inside Higher Education, “Is Academic Freedom a Casualty of the Gaza War?,” that responded to “Gender Studies Departments in Solidarity With Palestinian Feminist Collective,” itself signed by 130 departments and programs. In response, I should begin by pointing out that some universities have an official policy that academic departments cannot issue any formal statements unless they seek and obtain university approval beforehand. Of course, a group of faculty members in a department can take political positions, just as faculty across campus or across the world can and do sign petitions and position statements. But that, despite Wilson’s suggestion to the contrary, is not what happened. By obliterating the distinction between a group of faculty members who affiliate for purposes of political expression and a university department that officially adopts a political mission, he allows an anti-Israel bias to cloud his judgment and deny the coercive effects that flow from administrative units defining themselves in political terms.

Academic departments can certainly issue statements of any kind, even statements that would be illegal, such as those advocating political violence. But academic freedom does not protect them from consequences for doing so. A department head who endorses a political mission statement without gaining university approval beforehand could be fired from his or her administrative job as a consequence. Tenure would protect that person’s faculty position, but not their administrative role. The AAUP has long acknowledged that administrators are at-will employees. They only possess academic freedom when performing academic functions like teaching or conducting research. So Wilson is being misleading when he states “the notion that academic freedom requires the silence of anyone with authority is erroneous, impossible, and dangerous.” Administrators don’t have to be silent about campus policies; indeed, they should be free to debate them when they are under consideration. But they have to comply with them once they are adopted or risk their jobs. And administrators can lose their jobs if they contest adopted policies like affirmative action.

But that is not the most serious of what I consider to be Wilson’s errors. As law professor Steven Lubet wrote in a June 15 Dispatch article responding to both Wilson and me, “such political declarations by university departments can have a chilling effect on the academic freedoms of other faculty and students, effectively silencing opposing views and thus diminishing their rights.” He adds that “Wilson’s insistence that ‘a statement is only a statement’ trivializes the achievement and impact of obtaining the endorsement of 130 university departments on a single declaration of principle.” Lubet calls the statement in question one “of exclusion and intimidation.” Wilson confuses the issue by claiming I suggested anyone could be “banned from disagreeing with the statement,” an absurd suggestion I did not make. But many students in a department that signed the statement would certainly self-censor if they disagreed. The statement isolates those who disagree, depositing them in a moral wasteland.

In a similar misreading, Wilson declares that “a professor who expresses a political view is not a bully,” but then once again I never made such a global claim. I expressed political views throughout thirty-five years of teaching, but I always welcomed differing views from students, and I routinely announced that I’d grant extra credit to those who disagreed with me. I made it clear that I found unreflective agreement with me boring. The problem in this case arises from faculty political views that have departmental endorsement, an endorsement in this case that grants one political position moral superiority. Faculty members would consequently be persuaded to see anti-Zionism as fundamentally true and less inclined to welcome disagreement. There is already more than sufficient warrant in some disciplines to choose indoctrination over education. Zealous and intolerant classroom advocacy under the circumstances need not seem to those responsible like bullying, but it could be a form of bullying nonetheless.

Wilson puts “bullying” in quotes and dismissively adds “whatever that means.” It means trying to turn students into anti-Israel activists, rather than training them to think independently. Sometimes it means dismissing, disparaging, belittling, or mocking Zionist students. The statement in question discourages responsible advocacy and endorses a political litmus test for department membership instead. As AAUP president, I endorsed responsible political advocacy—advocacy based on evidence and careful reasoning, advocacy respectful of students who differ—and I continue to do so. I never needed a department to buttress my political convictions.

The end result of departmental endorsement of anti-Zionism will be that most Jewish students will keep their distance from such programs. Most Jewish faculty and staff members will also prefer to work elsewhere. Only the “good Jews,” those who oppose the existence of a Jewish state, need apply.

Guest blogger Cary Nelson is professor of English and liberal arts and sciences emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a former president of the AAUP.