Introduction to Academic Boycotts

The individual papers published in this special section of Academe are reflections on the AAUP report On Academic Boycotts,which appears on pages 39–43. The papers were prepared for a conference on academic boycotts that was to have been held in February 2006 at the Rockefeller Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy. Although the conference was canceled, the AAUP resolved to publish the papers so as to present the viewpoints that would have been debated at the conference. All conference invitees were invited to submit their papers for publication; some chose not to do so, as Joan Wallach Scott explains in the introduction that follows. The publication of this issue of Academe and these papers was supported by the Ford Foundation and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. Ernst Benjamin and Joan Wallach Scott, both members of the subcommittee of Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure that organized the conference, edited the papers. The opinions expressed in the papers are those of the authors and do not represent the views or policies of the AAUP.

Joan Wallach Scott,
Harold F. Linder Professor, School of Social Science,
Institute for Advanced Study

In retrospect it seems surprising that we thought we could hold a conference that would address a controversial issue dispassionately, with the kind of respectful reasonable exchange that characterizes meetings of the Association’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. I have served on Committee A for some thirteen years, and in that time I have come to assume that serious differences can be aired, that even highly contentious topics can be frankly discussed, and that I could learn from those with whom I deeply disagreed, even if I didn’t change my mind. It was the Committee A experience that led those of us who organized the Bellagio conference on academic boycotts to think we could productively bring together the critics and supporters of a report we had written, in order to explore our differences. Alas, we were wrong. The political climate, particularly as it applies to the Israel-Palestine conflict, is far too volatile to permit the reasonable conversation we hoped to have.

Our report condemning academic boycotts, issued in response to a call by the British Association of University Teachers (AUT) in spring 2005 for a boycott of two Israeli universities, Bar-Ilan and Haifa, elicited comments from many quarters, not all of them Israeli or Palestinian, not all of them polemical. It was clear that we had touched a nerve, that this was an issue that would not go away (as indeed it hasn’t—another academic boycott is in the works as we go to press). We thought that the AAUP might play a helpful international role if we could engage (and perhaps persuade otherwise) people who believed that academic boycotts were a useful political tool. In the comments we received regarding our position, there were philosophical discussions of the concept of the boycott and historical examples offered both to bolster and to question the case we had made. Even some of the polemics had buried in them critical political and philosophical reflections. There seemed to be the beginnings of a conversation worth having, despite or maybe because of the political stakes involved. Could a principled opposition to an academic boycott—the position we had taken—ever be compromised by its political applications? Were there contexts in which adhering to principle would lead to undesirable results? Was principle merely an excuse for inaction, a weapon of the strong to deny a voice to the weak or oppressed? What was the relationship between abstract principle and concrete reality?

As it turned out, we were unable to pursue these questions because some of those we invited to discuss them objected to the positions of others we invited. Early in the process of organizing the conference, we received e-mails from Jonathan Rynhold and Gerald Steinberg of Bar-Ilan University expressing “concerns” about the balance of the participant roster. They felt that the proponents of the academic boycott of Israel whom we had invited held unacceptable positions that amounted not only to “demonization,” but also to a denial of the legitimacy of the state of Israel itself. Wrote Rynhold, “At least eight participants are pro-boycotters, most (perhaps all) of whom effectively deny Israel’s right of exist [sic] and/or imply or directly state that Zionism is racism/Apartheid.” “Demonization” is here equated with charges that Israel’s policy toward Palestinians is racist and that there are analogies to be made with apartheid. While these are characterizations one could strongly disagree with, they don’t amount to a call for the destruction of the Israeli state. Indeed, the writer’s use of the term “effectively” leaves open many interpretive possibilities and, thus, grounds for honest disagreement about what such criticisms might imply. In any case, we did not feel we could let one side of a political debate set the limits for what it was permissible for the other side to say. But those who felt the AAUP must set those limits persisted. They copied their e-mails to a long list of their colleagues in Israel and the United States. They also suggested inviting several more antiboycott scholars. Eventually we did invite Jon Pike of the Open University in the United Kingdom to join the conference. Later, at the suggestion of his colleagues, we asked Michael Yudkin, a professor emeritus of biochemistry at Oxford, to permit us to include his previously published paper. (Both declined.)

This did not calm the furor that had been unleashed, and there then began a systematic campaign for “clarification” of the purposes of the conference. Edward Beck of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East later wrote to Ha’aretz, “From the first invitation, faculty from Israel, the UK and America, from the left, right and center worked to try to get this conference postponed until it was better defined.” “Better defined” could only mean disinviting the representatives of unacceptable positions, those who had supported the boycott of Israel and had engaged in “demonization” as their critics understood it. We were not willing to do that, believing still that a reasonable conversation was possible and that those we invited had a right to be heard, even if we did not agree with them. It made sense, after all, to invite some of those who had supported the boycott of Israel if we were to understand their motivation. But our critics insisted that inviting them to the conference gave them and their position a kind of legitimacy they must not be allowed to have. Yudkin wrote, “They will benefit from an invitation to a meeting of a prestigious organisation held at a prestigious location, and will on future occasions cite the invitation as evidence that their views are academically respectable and worth taking seriously.” The issue became one of academic freedom in ways we hadn’t expected: we were being asked to declare views we had not fully heard (we had no papers at this point) beyond the pale, outside the scope of rational discourse.

At this point one of those accidents of history conspired to undermine our efforts to resist the pressure to “postpone” the conference. A staff member in the AAUP’s national office gathering documents from the Internet related to academic boycotts included one article that had not been properly vetted and that turned out to have come from a Holocaust-denial Web site. Before we realized its provenance, however, it was sent out in a packet of background readings. When we realized our mistake, we notified all conference participants and withdrew the article. But it was too late. For those who needed it, this inadvertent mishap became proof of our lack of credibility; it was as if the document itself had been written by one of the proboycott invitees (of course, it was not). The document’s anti-Semitism seemed to substantiate the charge of our critics that the conference organizers were irresponsible, allowing morally unacceptable views to be expressed. (The conflation of moral and political unacceptability is noteworthy here and is not confined to one side in the arguments about Israel and Palestine.) The question might also be raised about why such a document could not be part of the proceedings. It is, after all, a historical document, much as Mein Kampf is. That text used to be regularly assigned in Western civilization courses so that students could take the measure of Hitler’s anti-Semitism. Reading abhorrent material doesn’t make you a partisan of it!

In the wake of this event and of the uproar that followed it, and because of the advice of the conference’s funders (the Ford, Nathan Cummings, and Rockefeller foundations), the conference was postponed. We were encouraged by our funders to reschedule the conference. Our critics, too, urged us to reschedule, but with new participants and a new agenda, one that would not grant legitimacy to “demonizers” of Israel. We felt we could only hold the same conference with the participants we had invited. To try to do that, however, would reopen the earlier debate. So, instead, we decided to publish the papers that invitees had written, some for the conference in response to the AAUP report denouncing academic boycotts,others written and originally published elsewhere as critiques of the AUT boycott resolution.

Some of those papers are printed in this issue of Academe but, sadly, not all of them. The four who supported our policy statement, particularly as it applied to Israel, declined to be included. Yossi Ben-Artzi, the rector of Haifa University, which was one of those targeted by the original boycott proposal, withdrew his paper without explanation. After reviewing the proposed table of contents and the list of editors, Michael Yudkin refused to let us reprint a paper he had co-authored and that we had planned to distribute at the conference. Jonathan Rynhold did not want his paper to “serve as some kind of fig leaf” for the “demonizing and deligitimising [sic]” of Israel. And Jon Pike, objecting to comments I had made when the conference was canceled, stated that he was “not willing to have my work published in a journal which she in part edits.” In an attempt to get at least one representative of the antiboycott position in print, we then asked Kenneth Stern of the American Jewish Committee for permission to reprint a long and thoughtful e-mail he had written, both supportive and critical of the AAUP report. He, too, declined because I was involved in the editing and because he didn’t want to appear to condone our publishing pieces that would “demonize Israel.”

We deeply regret their absence here, not only because it “unbalances” the discussion, but also because their views deserve to be heard.1 But the views of those they refused to meet also deserve a hearing, and they are published here—not because we endorse them, but because they express ideas and deeply felt positions that help us understand the reasons for their disagreement with our policy. In addition, there are three papers about the 1980s South African boycott that take different sides on the usefulness of this tactic in opposing apartheid. And there are what we have labeled “mixed perspectives”: comments from Israelis who oppose academic boycotts but who are sympathetic to Palestinians who demand changes in Israeli policy; a call by a group of Cuban academics to overturn the U.S. boycott of their country; and the reflections of a Swiss educator on a boycott of Yugoslav universities in the Milosevic era. (A paper by Rajeev Bhargava could not be finished in time for publication.)

The issue ends with a strong reaffirmation of the AAUP report, written by Ernst Benjamin—an insistence on the importance of our principled opposition to academic boycotts, no matter what political pressures are brought to bear to challenge it. We might say, too, that this issue as a whole reaffirms our commitment to the underlying principle, that of academic freedom. In the course of this experience, we have never wavered in our defense of it. ¨

Note

1. The papers by Michael Yudkin and Jon Pike are available elsewhere; see Colin Blakemore, Richard Dawkins, Denis Noble,and Michael Yudkin, “Is a Scientific Boycott Ever Justified?” Nature 412 ( January 23, 2003): 314; and Jon Pike, “Academic Freedom and the Limits of Boycotts: Some Kantian Considerations,” Engage 1 ( January 2006), http://www.engageonline.org.uk/journal/index,php? journal_id=5&article_id=25.

Bellagio Conference Scheduled Participants

ANDRIS BARBLAN, Magna Charta Observatory, Italy
OMAR BARGHOUTI, independent researcher, Palestine
YOSSI BEN-ARTZI, University of Haifa, Israel
RAJEEV BHARGAVA, University of Delhi, India
ANAT BILETZKI, Tel Aviv University, Israel
SORAYA CASTRO, University of Havana, Cuba
SONDRA HALE, University of California, Los Angeles,United States
REMA HAMMAMI, Birzeit University, Palestine
SHIREEN HASSIM, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
JONATHAN HYSLOP, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
HILARY ROSE, University of Bradford, United Kingdom
JONATHAN RYNHOLD, Bar-Ilan University, Israel
UR SHLONSKY, University of Geneva, Switzerland
LISA TARAKI, Birzeit University, Palestine
SALIM VALLY, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

Organizers and Observers

ERNST BENJAMIN, Washington, D.C.
ROGER BOWEN, American Association of University Professors
DAVID CHIEL, Ford Foundation
ROBERT O’NEIL, University of Virginia and the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression
DAVID RABBAN, University of Texas School of Law
JOAN WALLACH SCOTT, Institute for Advanced Study

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