BY LAURA GOLDBLATT, MELISSA LEVY, AND DAN SEGAL

With scant exceptions, US colleges and universities have a board of trustees that is the institution’s highest decision-making or governance body.  In response to the current widespread assault on academic freedom, rights of speech and assembly on campus, and the role of campus governance, the Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace has issued this Preliminary Statement on College and University Boards of Trustees in Our Moment of Campus Repression and Rising Fascism.   We are pleased that this preliminary statement is endorsed also by the Coalition for Action in Higher Education (CAHE).

This “Preliminary Statement” sketches a history of practices and postures of self-restraint and intervention by boards in regard to curricular matters, the delivery of education, faculty personnel decisions, and higher education campuses as sites of debate and dissent.

Looking forward, the Academic Council’s “Preliminary Statement” calls for three actions items as a contribution to redressing this moment’s crises in higher eduction:

“First, as this is a preliminary statement–an outline that must be filled in and given careful documentation–we call for and commit to producing a fuller report on boards of trustees in regards to the questions and issues we have identified here.

Second, inspired in part by the Genocide Gentry project, we call for and commit to researching, identifying, and pursuing campaigns targeting trustees on university and college boards whose other activities, in business and/or politics, pose notable conflicts with their obligations to serve the educational mission of the institution whose board they serve on. This includes but is not limited to their supporting academic freedom protections and rights of speech and assembly at those institutions. We should be concerned, for example, about the prospects for academic freedom protections for honest teaching about Palestine and Israel at an institution where Miriam Adelson serves as a trustee (the University of Southern California). Other cases may involve conflicts of interest with fulfilling the fiduciary responsibilities of trustees, as when making investment decisions: can a trustee who is an oil industry executive, or who is heavily invested in fracking, make an independent judgment about the financial, much less the social risks, of investing an institution’s endowment in the extraction of fossil fuels?

Third, at the same time as we research and expose the most egregious cases of individual trustees whose other activities involve serious conflicts of interest with their role as a trustee, we also call for and commit to rethinking the role, composition, and possibly even the existence of college and university boards of trustees. In this pursuit, the defining goal should be to make higher education institutions into public goods that are democratically accountable to the plural communities they serve, locally and beyond, rather than to wealth and power, as is the case with boards today, or even to academia apart from the wider world.”

JVP’s Academic Council invites participation in these three action items from other movement organizations that (i) share our commitment to academic freedom protections, campus rights of speech and assembly, and robustly democratic shared governance of colleges and universities; and (ii) understand that these commitments must be pursued in conjunction with the project of decolonizing US higher education institutions, including the urgent need to end their complicity in the Israeli state’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

To contact JVP’s Academic council in response to this call, please email Jonah Rubin, Senior Manager of Campus Organizing. 

Laura Goldblatt is an assistant professor in Global Studies at the University of Virginia and a member of Jewish Voice for Peace’s Academic Council. Melissa Levy is associate professor at the University of Virginia’s School of Education and Human Development and a member of Jewish Voice for Peace’s Academic Council. Daniel Segal is the Jean M. Pitzer emeritus at Pitzer College of the Claremont Colleges and a member of Jewish Voice for Peace’s Academic Council.