ACADEMIC BOYCOTTS

Academic boycotts range from calls to sever some or all relationships with a single university to wholesale efforts to boycott all the universities of a given country. Such boycotts may encompass refusing to participate in any and all activities at the target universities; refusing to write letters of recommendation for students seeking to study there; closing down joint degree programs or research projects with the boycotted universities; refusing to provide external evaluations for faculty or student projects at the targeted schools; refusing to publish articles by students and faculty at boycotted schools; blocking boycotted universities from access to resources from disciplinary organizations like announcements of academic positions or fellowship opportunities; removing faculty from editorial boards; and blacklisting and shunning of faculty. Such boycotts interrupt the free flow of ideas and block the pursuit of knowledge, a principle underpinning the very essence of academic freedom; and the argument raised by some that boycotts focused on institutions will not affect individual scholars and students is completely specious. Boycotts generate norms that isolate individual faculty, effectively creating blacklists. Several of BDS's recommendations take advantage of the power dynamic between students and faculty to the detriment of the former.

— CN

RUSSELL BERMAN, ROBERT FINE, DAVID HIRSH, & CARY NELSON

INTRODUCTION

There is one and only one country — Israel — that is the target of an international movement to boycott its universities. The movement is opposed by many academic leaders: more than 450 college and university presidents signed a statement opposing academic boycotts in 2007 as a result of an organized drive to gather signatures; more than 250 issued their own anti-boycott statements in 2014, this time spontaneously; and, although a number of academic organizations have endorsed boycotts, every major multidisciplinary academic organization that has addressed the issue opposes them as well. Yet faculty members in some humanities and social science disciplines continue to approve them as a political strategy, while those in agriculture, computer science, engineering, medicine, and the sciences show little or no interest in them. Proposals to boycott Israeli universities continue to gain limited faculty support, publicity in the press has grown, and there is a long-term potential for impact on public opinion and national policy (Debra Cohen).

In April 2013, the Association for Asian American Studies became the first US academic disciplinary association to vote for a boycott of Israeli universities and academic institutions. Rendered by a small organization, the decision received relatively little press attention. But in December 2013, 66 percent of the 1,252 members of the American Studies Association who voted (out of a total organizational membership of 5,000) voted as well to boycott Israeli academia, and that decision was widely noted and condemned. That same month the council of the small Native American and Indigenous Studies Association voted unanimously to join the boycott effort. Six months later, in July 2014, two more small academic groups — the African Literature Association and the Critical Ethnic Studies Association — added their names to the roster of boycotters. Yet another association, the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies, voted for the boycott of Israeli universities in April 2015. A number of boycott advocates in these groups belong to several academic organizations and have leadership roles in more than one disciplinary boycott effort.

In November 2015 the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) endorsed a broader boycott resolution condemning not only discrimination but also the "military siege and apartheid imposed by Israel on its own Palestinian citizens" and calling not only for a boycott of Israeli universities but also for the "boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) of economic, military, and cultural entities and projects sponsored by the state of Israel." In an effort to connect with the NWSA's core commitments, the group condemned the "sexual and gender-based violence, perpetrated [by Israel] against Palestinians and other Arabs in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, within Israel and in the Golan Heights," thereby not only creating a fictional claim about the only Middle Eastern country with relatively full gender equality, roughly comparable to that of the US except for some cultural practices in conservative religious communities, but also ignoring the real violence against women and repression of women's rights throughout much of the Arab world. Embracing an ahistorical "intersectional" perspective, the NWSA argues that all oppression is "interconnected," but apparently some examples of oppression are more...