BY DANIEL A. SEGAL
Screenshot of New Arab video showing the destruction of Al-Israa University in Gaza on January 17, 2024.
At a moment when the Israeli assault on Gaza has destroyed every university that had existed in Gaza, and the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement again calls on academics outside of Palestine to support the nonviolent strategy of institutional academic boycotts, it is time for the AAUP to reconsider its absolutist position on academic boycotts. What follows is not an argument that learned societies, colleges, and universities should adopt the institutional boycotts of Israeli universities that the BDS movement asks of us; that I leave for another day. Here I restrict myself to arguing that the AAUP’s absolutist position is ill-founded, even foolish, and should be overturned as swiftly as possible.
The notion that we should oppose academic boycotts always, with no exceptions, calls on our admirable commitment as scholar-teachers to “the free exchange of ideas” but mistakenly puts that commitment into the service of a categorical position that collapses under scrutiny, harms academic freedom, and evades our responsibility, as human beings and scholar-teachers, to respond to injustice and oppression. There are several ways to recognize this.
To start, as much as we should all agree that academic boycotts (even those targeting formal institutional ties and not scholar-to-scholar communication) should never be undertaken lightly, can we really maintain that there is no circumstance in which a university as an institution merits boycotting? What if a university were to use slave labor (as perhaps in the building and maintenance of a satellite campus of an elite US university with “global” ambitions)? Or if a university were structured by and served South African apartheid? Or if it were structured by and served the Nazi regime? And what, especially, if the victims of these repressive regimes tell us that our institutional ties to their universities contribute to their oppression—and not to helping them—and call on us to boycott these institutions in support of their struggle for freedom? Seriously? No institutional boycotts of universities ever, even in these cases, even under such a circumstance?
Consider, as a comparison, that while all of us may and should abhor violence, very few of us manage to be pacifists on an absolute basis (even if we would like to). How is it, then, that there are no circumstances ever that merit institutional academic boycotts, even if there are some that merit something far worse than any boycott: violence? This comparison alone should tell us that the AAUP’s absolutist rejection of academic boycotts is a dubious piece of goods.
Another way to arrive at this same conclusion is to note that if we embrace the principle that academic boycotts are always wrong, then surely we must also spell out the criteria by which we can determine just what does and does not count as a legitimate or genuine college or university. Otherwise, if we allow either of these two words alone, appearing in an institution’s name, to establish that an institution must never be subject to an institutional boycott, then the self-designation becomes a magic get-out-of-jail-free card: an institution could be complicit in the most heinous evil and deflect a boycott simply by naming itself a university.
The contrary view to the absolutist position is that if an institution systematically prohibits free inquiry and communication, and in this and perhaps other ways plays a significant role in a regime of unfreedom, we should take seriously that affording it legitimacy as an academic institution, as by establishing an institutionalized exchange or study abroad program with it, may do more to harm rather than to support academic freedom and freedom broadly. Is there really a single, uniform answer to this complex issue, across the board, that means it is never the case that we should support institutional boycotts of universities (or of institutions so named)?
The general point is this: as both human beings and scholar-teachers we have an inescapable responsibility to make an ethical judgment about establishing formal ties with other institutions, even if “university” is part of their name. The hollow piety that academic boycotts are always wrong evades the obligation to make such an ethical judgment—with no thinking even needed (a bureaucrat’s dream).
In the end, the absolutist view is so vapid that one must ask why it has had such traction and staying power. Some of this must be that the categorical view flatters us as academics, telling us that what we do is so special that no restrictions are ever warranted on what we choose to do in the name of scholarly communication (a view that sounds much like capitalists objecting to any restrictions on “free markets”). But beyond this, we must recognize that the categorical view has obtained the legitimacy and support it possesses today precisely because it serves to oppose—and even to shut down debates about—institutional boycotts of complicit Israeli universities, which is to say because it serves the Israeli state at the expense of Palestinians. Indeed, it is no coincidence that the AAUP adopted its nonsensical categorical stance in 2005, right after the Palestinian-led BDS movement called for academic boycotts of complicit Israeli universities.
Simply put, there was never a sound basis for the AAUP’s absolutist position; it was, from the outset, about providing impunity for the Israeli state under the guise of a seemingly high-minded principle. And without question, in a very non-AAUP manner, the AAUP’s absolutist stance has served to deflect and hinder open debate about the underlying substantive issue in regard to the Israeli state and its universities.
Right now—in this moment of genocide and scholasticide in Gaza, and of extreme repression of pro-Palestinian speech on our campuses—is the right time for the AAUP to redress its earlier mistake and drop its absolutist stance on academic boycotts. And right now is also the time for us, as scholar-teachers, to confront the ethical choice of heeding or rejecting the call from Palestinian civil society to adopt institutional boycotts of complicit Israeli universities.
Resources
Omar Barghouti, “Boycott, Academic Freedom and the Moral Responsibility to Uphold Human Rights, Journal of Academic Freedom (2013).
Joan Scott, “Changing My Mind about the Boycott,” Journal of Academic Freedom (2013).
Daniel A. Segal is Jean M. Pitzer Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and professor emeritus of history at Pitzer College of the Claremont Colleges. His scholarship ranges from Jane Austen (with Richard Handler) to racial discourses to theorizing states and non-states in world history. He is a past president of the Claremont Colleges AAUP chapter, a member of the Academic Advisory Council of Jewish Voice for Peace, and a member of the coordinating committee of TIAA-Divest!, which organizes to rid faculty retirement funds of fossil fuel investments.
Segal gives the game away when he writes “Right now—in this moment of genocide and scholasticide in Gaza, and of extreme repression of pro-Palestinian speech on our campuses—” as if these were established facts rather than anti-Israel, anti-Zionist propaganda. Of course the AAUP would have to reevaluate its position if Israel was the ultimate global evil that he takes as a given. Similar axiomatic propositions about ultimate global evilness have previously been made about Jews–with well known consequences.
Boycott has to be a part of free speech. One has the right to not exchange or communicate as a message to another.
Members of families do this all of the time even when it may be counterproductive, but it is still a choice, a signal that things have moved too far. A therapist may be necessary to overcome these breaches which we probably need in the Middle East. An effective boycott might lead to such a truth and reconciliation.
Palestinians have tried several strategies to ameliorate their situation legal suits through the UN, International Courts, protests, violence, and terror all to no avail because the right wing Israeli Government and the USA refuse to follow the rule of law. A boycott by anyone is a lesser action, non-violent, and conscience driven.
I support the AAUP’s “absolutist” (i.e., principled) position against academic boycotts by institutions and of institutions. The key reason is that a boycott should be an individual decision. It should be the choice of an individual, not imposed upon them by an institution or an organization. And a boycott should not have the mechanism of collective guilt by association of anyone linked with a particular institution.
That’s why the AAUP’s Censure List, which might seem to resemble a boycott, is not actually a boycott. The AAUP condemns the institutions and administrations for their violations of academic freedom, and yet refuses to boycott them. Individuals may reasonably choose to avoid jobs at colleges that have violated academic freedom, but we should not collectively ban anyone from engagement with these colleges. I think that engagement rather than boycott is the best path to academic reform, but the key point is that I should not have this decision forced upon me by the dictates of an institution or organization.
The obligation to make ethical judgments belongs to individuals, and institutions should not impose those judgments on everyone in an academic community or in an organization. That’s why I think the AAUP opposes academic boycotts by institutions and yet freely allows its members to engage in boycotts and advocate for them as individuals. This is not a “vapid” position but a deeply principled one with a sound basis that should be maintained to protect academic freedom.
This extremist, individualist position rejects MLK’s Montgomery Bus Boycott.
It basically rejects social movements. It’s like saying we have corporations but unions shouldn’t exist or strike, just individuals.
This position leaves the world stacked against resistance to oppression. It’s a principled stance for the established order.
That’s a breathtaking claim without foundation. As the AAUP shows, you can oppose boycotts and fully support the right to unionize and social movements. And I don’t see why my position would ever oppose the Montgomery Bus Boycott. There is an interesting theoretical question here: Should universities in the 1950s have imposed an academic boycott of segregated colleges by refusing to allow their professors to travel to them to speak, or by banning speeches by professors from those colleges? My answer is no, they should have opposed segregation and encouraged interaction with these flawed colleges rather than an academic boycott.
The distinction between sanctions and boycotts seems rather subtle to me given that anyone is free to boycott sanctioned institutions and no one is required to do so even if we call the sanction a boycott. The more important distinction, I suggest, is between (a) sanctions/boycotts aimed at particular colleges because of what that college has done (which can be removed if the institution reforms) and (b) sanctions/boycotts aimed at every college in a country based on what that country has done (which is not under the control of any of the sanctioned/boycotted institutions). I think AAUP is right to target individual institutions based on what they have done.
I’m confused about the response to Dan Segal’s comments–not the first of these above which is purely ideological, but the others. I don’t read him as asking AAUP to endorse BDS (which calls on individuals to boycott Israeli universities complicit in the violation of Palestinian academic freedom), but not to categorically oppose it as a violation of the academic freedom of Israeli academics. I think there are times when boycotts are valid–even of academic institutions–but this needs to be discussed case by case, not dismissed in a blanket refusal to even consider the question. As the toll of the Gaza War mounts, as universities there are in ruins; as the Israeli government clamps down on West Bank educational institutions and what anti-war protests there are within its own universities, it makes sense at least to ask about the legitimacy of BDS as a way of protesting what is going on. The AAUP blanket refusal to discuss this (which began, by the way, when Cary Nelson detected “antisemitism” in a conference I organized in 2006 (?) to have such a discussion) needs to be rethought. If we are committed to open discussion, then what Dan Segal has put on the table needs to be discussed, not dismissed out of hand.
Joan W. Scott
The author states his conclusion up front – that the “Israeli assault on Gaza” – which he apparently believes occurred in a vacuum – constitutes a “genocide.” Then rather than attempting to justify his conclusion with evidence, he attempts to contort the facts of what a boycott means to confirm with his foregone conclusion, that Israel should be boycotted. I can’t think of a clearer example of intellectual dishonesty.
The AAUP might need to investigate (and possibly censure) Israeli universities who punish Palestinian scholars for their speech. https://www.972mag.com/hebrew-university-nadera-shalhoub-kevorkian/