BY ANTHONY ALESSANDRINI The AAUP’s new “Statement on Academic Boycotts,” which reverses its prior opposition to academic boycotts, is a major declaration. Stating clearly that boycotts “can be considered legitimate tactical responses to conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education,” it confirms there are instances in which upholding academic freedom may…
Note: At the end of April, the editors of the Harvard Crimson, the university’s student newspaper, penned an editorial supporting BDS and Palestinian liberation. In response,150 members of the Harvard Faculty wrote a statement criticizing the editorial. Another group of faculty penned their own response, which was published in the Harvard Crimson. This letter is…
BY DANA SAJDI Part of my choosing to be a premodern historian is precisely to escape the reality of having been born and raised until adolescence in Nablus, in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. As a schoolgirl, it was a daily routine for me to carry in my lunch tiffin an onion, the root vegetable considered…
BY DAVID G. EMBRICK AND JOHNNY E. WILLIAMS While Israel is actively erasing Palestinians’ land, livelihoods, stories, personhoods, and histories, the United States is providing Israel with funding, technical assistance, hardware, and even language to carry out its ongoing brutal and violent absorption of Palestine into Israel. Though this violation of international law is widely…
BY JOHN K. WILSON The Trump Administration’s decision to ban Omar Barghouti from coming to America is an alarming attack on academic freedom and free speech. Barghouti, a co-founder of the Boycott, Divest, Sanction (BDS) movement, was scheduled to speak at Harvard and New York University but the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) ordered…
BY JOHN K. WILSON The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) has issued a new report today, “Campus Free Speech, Academic Freedom, and the Problem of the BDS Movement.” It opens with a preposterous claim: “One of the greatest threats to academic freedom in the United States today is the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.”…
BY HANK REICHMAN In the Fall of 2014 I posted several entries to this blog (see here, here, and here) suggesting that “recent attempts to enforce standards of ‘civility’ at colleges and universities, often . . . in response to pro-Palestinian expression, recalled previous efforts in the 1940s and 1950s to exclude alleged communists from…
The American Studies Association is being sued by some of its members for a resolution supporting the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement. Kenneth L. Marcus, the president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law which is organizing the lawsuit, said: “People who join an academic association have a right to rely…
This is a guest post by Kamala Visweswaran. She is a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California–San Diego. She is the editor of Everyday Occupations: Experiencing Militarism in South Asia and the Middle East (University of Pennsylvannia Press, 2013). My current Academe article, “Palestinian Universities and Everyday Life Under Occupation,” is not an article that describes causes, but rather the consequences of…
Rep. Alan Grayson is well known as a progressive advocate in Congress, and a strong supporter of civil liberties. That makes the bill he just proposed even more appalling. On May 30, 2014, the very same day that Grayson passed an important amendment banning funding for prosecuting journalists for refusing to reveal their sources, Grayson introduced H.R. 4776, “To prohibit…