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From the General Secretary Academic Boycotts—No!
By Roger Bowen
If we could manage the global academy, the AAUP would issue an edict disallowing “academic boycotts.” No scholars anywhere would then be ostracized because of their own writings or their national government’s policies or be prevented from working in whatever nation they wish, with whomever they wish. The AAUP would enshrine the principle of the free flow of ideas, scholarship, and scholars across all borders.
Is that clear enough? Not, I fear, to some well-organized individuals who asked, or demanded, that the AAUP postpone a conference that had been scheduled for February in Bellagio, Italy, where our intent was to discuss an AAUP policy statement on academic boycotts, a statement that is unambiguously opposed to this noxious and blunt instrument that stifles academic freedom.
It was odd that the very people who asked that we postpone the conference are themselves strongly opposed to academic boycotts. They seemed especially worried about academic boycotts against universities in Israel. So are we, but we also oppose academic boycotts against universities in all other nations as well. In fact, the AAUP was the first higher education organization in America, and perhaps the world, to denounce a proposed academic boycott against two Israeli universities by a British academic union last spring.
Why, then, would American and British academics who are opposed to academic boycotts protest a meeting whose central purpose was to denounce academic boycotts?
Initially, the answer had to do with the list of conferees. Among the twenty-one scholars who were invited to attend the meeting in Bellagio were seven scholars—Palestinians, South Africans, Britons, and Americans—who favor an academic boycott against certain Israeli universities. Having seven boycott supporters among twenty-one conferees struck our detractors as “unbalanced” and as “legitimizing” the arguments of the “enemy.”
The AAUP stood firm in its commitment to holding the conference, but then our sponsors, the Ford, Nathan Cummings, and Rockefeller foundations, as well as the AAUP elected leadership, urged that we postpone the conference. Their urgings followed an act of negligence on the part of the AAUP that shook their confidence in the integrity of the conference: an anti-Semitic and unscholarly article by a Holocaust denier that was found on the Web was mistakenly included in the fifty or so readings we sent to conferees as background material. We discovered this oversight and promptly wrote the conferees with an apology and a request that they remove it from the readings. Someone, likely a conferee, then began disseminating the apology worldwide.
This blunder on our part lent regrettable credibility to those asking that we postpone the conference. Following lengthy discussions among the conference organizers and elected AAUP leaders, the organizers decided not to reschedule the conference and to instead publish responses by the conferees to the AAUP policy statement on boycotts in Academe. Accompanying the responses will be a written reflection by the conference organizers about the controversy and its meaning for academic freedom.Publishing our statement and the boycott supporters’ rebuttals will serve as a reaffirmation of the AAUP’s commitment to an open exchange of competing views.
Perhaps it is a peculiarly American kind of liberalism that assumes good arguments cannot be undermined, but the AAUP believes that the principles we espouse are ones worth defending against their detractors. After all, a strong statement about the damage to academic freedom by academic boycotts will, whether we invite it or not, be subjected to criticism, and we want to know what our critics think. Only by engaging our critics in conversation, if only in print, can we fully appreciate the cogency of our own views. Readers can decide for themselves whether our critics’ views merited a hearing.
The leaders of the Ford, Nathan Cummings, and Rockefeller foundations seem to agree with the AAUP that debating proponents of academic boycotts serves a worthy purpose. I suspect they recognize that preaching to the choir may be spiritually uplifting, but that, intellectually, such exercises can be vacuous.
The AAUP is honoring its nearly hundred-year legacy of defending academic freedom by not excluding our opponents from participation in debate. If only we could require that critics of the originally planned conference join the AAUP and embrace our principles of academic freedom. Alas, we do not manage the American academy, let alone global higher education. But maybe, just maybe, we, or the principles we espouse, should.
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