Academic Boycotts
Michael Yudkin and Gerald M. Steinberg
To the Editor
Let me respond to the question Roger Bowen posed in his column in the March–April issue of Academe: “Why, then, would American and British academics who are opposed to academic boycotts protest a meeting whose central purpose was to denounce academic boycotts?”
The plans for the conference in Bellagio, Italy, on academic boycotts to which he refers, which I learned about early in February, by no means suggested that its central purpose was to denounce academic boycotts. I wrote to Bowen about the conference and sent him an article that I and three Oxford colleagues had published in 2003 in Nature setting out the conclusions of discussions we had held about boycotts (see www.nature/com/nature/cbboycott_full). He wrote back, “We have assigned your superb essay in Nature to the conferees. . . . I wish we had invited you to attend.” Although Bowen’s reply was flattering, it made me wonder how participants in the conference had been chosen.
I had several additional reasons for feeling doubtful about the meeting. In a scholarly conference “whose central purpose was to denounce academic boycotts,” one would expect to find several contributions from philosophers and several from natural scientists: any academic boycott would have a particular impact on scientists, who rely on unhampered exchange of materials, methods, and information. But hardly any philosophers or scientists were invited. Instead, the participants included several with strong, publicly expressed views in favor of boycotts. Were these scholars told that the central purpose of the conference was to denounce boycotts.
The only participant from the United Kingdom was one of a small minority of members of the Association of University Teachers (AUT) who forced motions to boycott two Israeli universities through a poorly attended council meeting in 2005. An emergency AUT council meeting overturned these motions by an overwhelming majority only a month later. Why invite to Bellagio only a
representative of the tiny minority?
Joan Wallach Scott, one of the organizers of the conference, has written that “the point of the conference was to hear out our critics, never [her emphasis] to change the document we have published as a final statement of our viewpoint.” I could make no sense of this remark. If an organization has published a “final statement” that can “never” be changed, why arrange a conference to “hear out [its] critics”?
Given such concerns, I wrote to Bowen on February 3, suggesting that the AAUP might postpone the conference and reconstitute it later with a less politicized list of participants and a clearer aim. I am not ashamed of making that suggestion.
Michael Yudkin
Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry
University of Oxford
To the Editor
As an invitee to the canceled Bellagio conference, I share Roger Bowen’s sentiment, expressed in his column published in the March–April issue of Academe, that academic boycotts have no place in politics, including in the Arab-Israeli conflict. However, Bowen’s presentation of the events is incomplete. The cancellation was not due to efforts by “well-organized individuals,” but by the glaring contradiction between the stated goals and the agendas of many participants.
The intent, as stated by Bowen, was to “to discuss an AAUP policy statement . . . unambiguously opposed to this noxious and blunt instrument that stifles academic freedom.” However, many participants were clearly devoted to an entirely different and opposing goal. This conference would likely have been dominated by invitees whose obsessive anti-Israel campaigning is well documented, including Hilary Rose, Omar Barghouti, Lisa Taraki, and Ur Shlonsky. They make no distinction between legitimate criticism and wholesale demonization, using terms like “war crimes,” “racist,” and “apartheid” in reference to Israel, in which the context of Arab terror, wars, and rejectionism are absent. Yet another unbalanced and emotional exchange on the Arab-Israeli conflict was entirely inconsistent with the proclaimed objectives.
The ensuing debate focused correctly on whether the conference would become a venue for demonization along the lines of what occurred in Durban at the 2001 World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, as the funding organizations also recognized. They called for postponement, based on substantive grounds and reasoned argument. AAUP vice president Cary Nelson stated that the AAUP’s elected leadership also questioned the contradiction between the program and the intention behind the conference and the AAUP’s deeply held position supporting academic freedom.
The proboycott conference invitees then attacked critics as a nefarious lobby, demonstrating their preference for libeling opponents rather than engaging with the issues. Blaming the cancellation on “a carefully orchestrated campaign” invoked the canard of Jewish conspiracies. ( Joan Wallach Scott, an editor of the section of Academe designed to replace the canceled conference, and a prominent anti-Israel campaigner, has used similar language.) This exchange illustrated the dominance of the obsessive and emotional agendas and the absence of an academic foundation.
There are important discussions to be held about academic freedom, which should extend to the situation in Iran, Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere. And while I congratulate Bowen for his support for this principle, in this case, the means that were chosen were not consistent with these noble ends.
Gerald M. Steinberg
Director, Program on Conflict Management
Bar-Ilan University and Executive Committee Member, International Advisory Board on Academic Freedom
Roger Bowen Responds
Michael Yudkin’s and Gerald Steinberg’s letters describe their interpretation
of the issues surrounding an AAUP conference on academic boycotts that was to take place in Bellagio, Italy, in February 2006.
On pages 36–38 of this issue of Academe, one of the conference organizers, Joan Wallach Scott of the Institute for Advanced Study—who defines herself as a critic of current Israeli policy, not as a “prominent anti-Israel campaigner”—offers a different and more accurate account, from the AAUP’s viewpoint, of the developments that ultimately made it impossible to convene the conference. It should be clear from her account that the conference was not aimed at "denouncing” academic boycotts (as Yudkin asserts), but at discussing the pros and cons of the AAUP position, with an eye not to changing it, but to hearing from the critics and to clarifying the nature of the debate. Ernst Benjamin’s comment (pages 79–82) is an example of such clarification. Statements from some of the invitees to the conference follow Scott’s introductory essay.
|