Academic Boycotts
Hans Gesund, Max Hailperin, Howard M. Wachtel, Leonard J. Nissim, Arthur G. Werschultz, Jennifer Olmsted
To the Editor:
I have been a member of the AAUP for more than forty years and have never seen a more one-sided presentation of a controversial issue in Academe than the one dealing with proposed boycotts of Israeli universities (see the September–October 2006 issue). Yes, the antiboycott individuals invited to provide papers declined to do so, presumably on the ground that there is no quick answer to “when did you stop beating your wife?” Academe should have simply skipped the controversy or provided a short, balanced summary of the positions of both sides. As it is, printing the articles on dark gray paper seems to make some kind of statement—perhaps that the arguments are shady?
Here are some facts that have not been presented: there are thousands of Muslim Arab students and faculty members in Israeli universities, including the most prestigious. They enjoy equal status with Jewish students and faculty. There are zero, none, zip Jewish students or faculty members in Arab universities, whether Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian, Jordanian, Saudi Arabian, Egyptian, Iraqi, and so on. Now my question is, whose universities should be boycotted for discrimination or their governments’ actions?
Hans Gesund
(Structural Engineering)
University of Kentucky
To the Editor:
Joan Wallach Scott discusses in the September–October issue of Academe the “inadvertent mishap” of a “not . . . properly vetted” article being sent out “[b]efore we realized its provenance” and “that turned out to have come from a Holocaust-denial Web site.” She compares this to an instructor intentionally selecting Mein Kampf as a reading, knowing full well who wrote it and keeping a clear educational purpose in mind. Can she seriously question why the “inadvertent mishap” should be viewed any differently from the considered choice? Or is her inability to do so why she writes that this “question might also be raised,” rather than admitting that she herself is raising it?
Max Hailperin
(Computer Science)
Gustavus Adolphus College
To the Editor:
As a member of the AAUP for over thirty years, I was troubled by the proposed meeting on the Israeli academic boycott. First, the framing of the question dictates the content of the conference. The allegations against Israel that it is an apartheid, racist state; gross violator of human rights; violator of international law; and perpetrator of war crimes is the usual agitprop “paragraph” that you have conscripted to frame the discussion. Each of these charges can be refuted, but it takes time and would have diverted the conference away from the boycott. An alternative framing would produce a different conference. The AAUP’s preparation only disputes the remedy—a boycott—but not the standard “paragraph” that is routinely replayed at these gatherings. This comes through in Joan Scott’s article and in her writing on Israel, the papers you published, as well as a large majority of the speakers you invited.
Second, by granting legitimacy to the premises of the boycott, the AAUP became involved with academic discrimination against Jews. Do the boycotters have in mind restricting Israeli-Arab academics and graduate students, of which there are a large number? Or only Israeli-Jews? Clearly, it is the latter.
Third, the preparatory documents and the boycott itself are an extension of the thoroughly discredited Durban agenda that seeks to delegitimize, demonize, and ultimately bring down the state of Israel. The Ford Foundation was deeply involved financially and otherwise in this project. The conference’s hidden agenda was designed both to grant a covering halo to the foundation and promote its interest in the implementation of the Durban agenda.
The AAUP made a grievous mistake in not consulting widely about the conference before its reputation was diminished by the whole sorry episode.
Howard M. Wachtel
(Economics) and Founding Director, Center for Israeli Studies
American University
To the Editor:
The September–October issue of Academe dealt with what would have been the Bellagio conference on academic boycotts. Said conference was in reaction to the British Association of University Teachers’ move to boycott certain Israeli universities.
The good news is that the AAUP still holds that academic boycotts are inappropriate. The bad news is that this conference was hijacked. Rather than being a discussion of academic boycotts in general, it devolved into a discussion of whether Israel, of all the nations on earth, deserves to be boycotted.
The five papers under the heading “Critics of the AAUP Report” can be described as anti-Israel diatribes. Our distress at seeing these in Academe was only partly assuaged by the statement that “the opinions expressed in the papers are those of the authors and do not represent the views or the policies of the AAUP.”
The paper titled “The South African Boycott Experience” considers Israel to be an apartheid state. Does the AAUP support this conclusion? As a result of the attendant anti-Israel rhetoric, the antiboycott conference participants withdrew their participation. Their presence would only add respectability to a disreputable collection of papers.
Moreover, it is outrageous that an anti-Semitic document from a Holocaust-denial Web site was sent out under AAUP auspices to the potential participants in this conference. It is even worse that Joan Wallach Scott attempts to minimize this outrage by calling it an “inadvertent mishap.” She complains that this cost the organizers of the conference their credibility; as far as we’re concerned, her credibility is now absolute zero.
The AAUP’s main concerns have traditionally been with academic freedom. That’s why we joined the AAUP. We are saddened to see the AAUP squander its limited resources and its good name in such an embarrassing enterprise.
Leonard J. Nissim
(Mathematics)
Fordham University
Arthur G. Werschultz
(Computer Science)
Fordham University
To the Editor:
Kudos to the AAUP and Joan Scott for taking on the issue of academic boycotts and for not allowing a small group of zealots to silence you! I have been meaning to join the AAUP and will certainly do so now.
Jennifer Olmsted
(Economics)
Drew University
The Editors Respond:
We, too, regret the onesidedness of the discussion but, as we explained, we were not, and are not, willing to permit the withdrawal of some participants to prevent the expression of contrary views. We also agree that the omission of antiboycott essays meant that many legitimate arguments in defense of Israel were left unstated, but that would have been avoided had the statements in defense of Israel and opposed to academic boycotts not been withdrawn. And, of course, we do not support a boycott of any university, Israeli or Palestinian.
We did not select the anti-Semitic essay and repudiated it as soon as we discovered it among our papers. But we do not think that even anti-Semitic ideas are outside the range of academic discussion. Indeed, the resurgence of such ideas argues for the need for critical assessment of them. Two of the three South African essays did apply the apartheid analogy to Israel; we did not feel that the expression of that opinion should be suppressed. The longest and most thoughtful of the three did not make that comparison. We included the discussion of apartheid not because we sought to make an analogy to Israel, but because South Africa was the best historical example of a widely supported academic boycott.
As the inclusion of South Africa, Cuba, and Yugoslavia demonstrates, we did not choose to focus the discussion on the academic boycott of Israel, but that became inevitable because the boycott proposal that initiated the current controversy was directed at Israel. Of course, the boycott supporters have an overriding political agenda, but so do those who see a conspiracy involving the Ford Foundation, the Durban conference, and the AAUP when there was none. We continue to believe, moreover, that engagement with ideas with which we disagree will contribute more to the defense of academic freedom than the censoring or silencing of those ideas. As our AAUP report made clear, we think that academic boycotts are contrary to “the free search for truth and its free expression.”
Joan Wallach Scott
Ernst Benjamin
Editors,
Bellagio Conference Papers
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