For more than a century, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has presented itself as the nation’s leading champion of academic freedom. At one time this was indisputably true, but little by little the AAUP drifted away from a rigorous defense of the principle of academic freedom to become a strident advocate of faculty privileges that had faint connections to that principle. And yet the AAUP, through its powerful “Committee A on Academic Freedom” persisted in framing its positions as though they were contributions to academic freedom. By the 1990s the AAUP acted as a labor union for faculty members, and its positions frequently looked like ad hoc defenses for the self-interests of its members. As the American faculty became more and more dominated by impassioned supporters of progressive political causes, the AAUP emerged more and more as a left-wing political actor.
This month, Committee A finally crossed the line into outright political action—action that reversed one of the AAUP’s long-standing commitments to academic freedom in favor of academic coercion. This came in the form of a “Statement on Academic Boycotts.” The opening sentence of this statement acknowledges the AAUP’s old position that academic boycotts injure faculty members’ rights to free expression:
The AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure has long held that academic exchange should be freely conducted without regard to political or religious viewpoint.
But times have changed, Committee A now opines. In the past, the AAUP worried (rightly) that academic boycotts are a tool that muzzles dissenters. Those who disagree with the tactic are, if not silenced, at least put under considerable pressure to shut up and conform to the views of the dominant group. If someone, for example, doubted the probity of the African National Congress (ANC), which had a long record of murdering its critics and engaging in violence as a toll against the apartheid regime of South Africa, that person would have had his academic freedom compromised by a faculty majority imposing a policy of boycott against South Africa.
This example is not hypothetical. The new AAUP statement references the anti-apartheid campaign against South Africa, which the AAUP once held was not a valid reason to supersede the principle of academic freedom. Faculty members ought to be free to campaign against apartheid, but collective action in the form of a boycott, which would have the collateral effect of silencing dissenters of the tactic, was deemed impermissible. The same was said of academics who sought to use boycott tactics against supporters of the U.S. war in Vietnam.
All of this was decades ago. The Vietnam War ended in 1975. The ANC came to power on April 27, 1994. Why does the issue of academic boycotts return so prominently to the AAUP’s attention today? Its “Statement on Academic Boycotts” is coyly silent on this, but it is not hard to take a guess. The Boycott-Divest-Sanction (BDS) movement against Israel was organized by Palestinians in 2004 during the Second Intifada (2000-2005) and exported to U.S. campuses in 2005. It remained a mostly marginal campaign for some years after that but gradually gained ground through the efforts of groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). One benchmark of the BDS campaign was the decision of the American Studies Association in December 2013 to join the boycott. Factions in various other academic associations vociferously sought similar endorsements, but generally lost. In April 2023, NAS published a study of the BDS movement, The Company They Keep, that delved into this history.
All this changed, of course, on October 7, 2023. In the aftermath of the massacre of Israelis and foreigners perpetrated by Hamas, we saw the sudden eruption of campus anti-Semitism. This took a variety of forms, one of which was burgeoning enthusiasm for boycotting Israel for its treatment of Palestinians.
While much has been written about the ideological character of this refreshed movement and much more remains to be said, the AAUP’s “Statement on Academic Boycotts” should be seen as another benchmark in the progress of academic anti-Semitism. The AAUP appears to be ready to abandon more than a hundred years of advocating for principled neutrality among faculty to lurch into support for academic boycotts. It is, however, a sly statement and employs finesse to advance its dubious cause. There is no mention of Israel or BDS. Rather, the AAUP employs what would be called in billiards a “bank shot.” The advocates of some boycotts, we are told, “legitimately seek to protect and advance academic freedom and fundamental rights of colleagues and students who are living and working under circumstances that violate that freedom.” And so, it is perfectly reasonable to burn down academic freedom in American colleges and universities to advance the cause of academic freedom elsewhere.
Whether boycotts would be an effective instrument of advancing academic freedom in this unnamed elsewhere is never addressed. If it were, one might raise some questions about the premises. But as it stands, the “Statement on Academic Boycotts” floats above the details in a cirrus-cloud level of abstraction. Boycotts “can be considered legitimate tactical responses to conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education.”
The AAUP is concerned that the advocates and organizers of boycotts do not suffer any adverse consequences. “Faculty members and students should not face institutional or governmental censorship or discipline for participating in academic boycotts,” says the AAUP, nicely adding, “or for criticizing and debating the choices of those with whom they disagree.” Ah, there’s the rub. The “by any means necessary” crowd is not known for its scrupulous tolerance of opposing views. BDS is a weapon of groupthink and intimidation, not an invitation to principled debate.
Of course, the folks on Committee A are aware of that. The AAUP was once aware of that, too. Committee A attempts to keep its hands clean with the proviso that the boycotts that it favors should not “involve any political or religious litmus tests nor target individual scholars and teachers engaged in ordinary academic practices.” That there never has been such a boycott and likely never will be goes unsaid.
There never will be because boycotts, by their nature, are instruments of collective will. Their logic demands that the group prevail over the individual and that the group police the dissenters. There may be a place for this in civil society. The American Revolution commenced with an effort by the Patriots to boycott British tea and other imported goods. But the campus is a special place, set aside for free intellectual inquiry, and in no way suited to the dynamics of mass conformity. By opening the door to academic boycotts, the AAUP undermines academic freedom. And by opening that door right now, it offers cover to the anti-Semites who are using BDS as one of their covers for their campaign to destroy Israel.
By عباد ديرانية - Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=147749568
