On August 9, the American Association of University Professors announced that it would no longer oppose academic boycotts, reversing a position it had held since 2005.

Then: “we reaffirm the paramount importance of the freest possible international movement of scholars and ideas”

Now: “Academic freedom and productive debate may not always be appropriately secured by a categorical position that disregards nuance and is inattentive to context.”

The move appears to be a response to the current Israel-Palestine conflict:

In 2005, near the end of the second intifada, a Palestinian uprising, the AAUP denounced such boycotts; the following year, it said they “strike directly at the free exchange of ideas.” That statement has now been replaced by one saying boycotts “can be considered legitimate tactical responses to conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education.” The new statement doesn’t mention Israel, Palestine or other current events—but the timing isn’t coincidental.

Ryan Quinn, “AAUP Ends Two-Decade Opposition to Academic Boycotts,” Inside Higher Education, August 12, 2024

Claim: Academic freedom can include boycotts

Adrienne Lu, a reporter for Chronicle of Higher Education, offers some background:

Rana Jaleel, chair of the AAUP’s committee on academic freedom and tenure, which wrote the new statement on academic boycotts, said the previous position opposing academic boycotts had drawn criticism since it was adopted, in 2006. “As soon as it was passed, it was a contested policy,” said Jaleel, an associate professor of gender, sexuality, and women’s studies and Asian American studies at the University of California at Davis. “It’s been an ongoing discussion.” …

Jaleel emphasized that the AAUP is not advocating for academic boycotts but merely clarifying that they are not categorically prohibited by a commitment to academic freedom.

Adrienne Lu, “Why the AAUP Changed Its Stance on Academic Boycotts,” Chronicle of Higher Education, August 16, 2024

Outside of the university, most people would say that, boycotts are the opposite of academic freedom. But the word of the day appears to be “complexity”:

Ellen Schrecker, a historian, retired faculty member, and member of the academic-freedom committee, sees the new position as a sign of the association’s willingness to revise an “outdated conceptualization.” And while Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel moved the issue to the front burner, Schrecker said, “it had been a long time coming because the previous statement about academic boycotts turned out not to be useful for dealing with the complexity of the issues.”

Lu, “Academic Boycotts”

A green light to broader boycotts?

Economics prof Jeffrey Sachs finds the new policy incoherent and worries that it will open the door to chaos:

But now consider a couple of scenarios. None are especially far-fetched, but feel free to swap out the proper nouns for whatever feels most relevant or plausible to you.

1. A professor wants to apply for a one-year visiting fellowship at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University, but her chair, inspired by the example of others, refuses to send the needed paperwork to the search committee.

2. A researcher submits an application to her university’s Institutional Review Board, but because the project is based at and will benefit a university in Florida (no friend to the mission of higher education, says the AAUP), the IRB votes the project down.

3. A professor would like to organize a conference at his university. His department has a pool of money set aside for such things, but because the conference will be co-sponsored by a university in China, his colleagues deny him the funds.

Each of these scenarios involves a faculty member who seeks to use some university resource. Each requires the support or cooperation of a colleague. And in each, colleagues deny them that resource because it would also benefit a university they wish to boycott. And for what it’s worth, their behavior is consistent with the types of actions demanded by the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.

Jeffrey Sachs, “The AAUP’s Incoherent New Boycott Policy,” Chronicle of Higher Education, August 16, 2024

The AAUP assured Sachs that things wouldn’t turn out that way. But his assessment is blunt: “I (and I think most everyone else) understood the AAUP to be giving a green light to corporate boycotts, the kind undertaken by whole departments, universities, and scholarly associations. And that’s going to present some major problems for academic freedom.”

A bleak view

English prof Cary Nelson, AAUP president from 2006 to 2012, offers a bleak view of the new regime:

Last week, the American Association of University Professors set aside its hundred-year defense of academic freedom by opening the door to any number of individually initiated academic boycotts. Individual students and faculty have always had the right to advocate for academic boycotts, and it is disingenuous to suggest otherwise. But an unqualified right “to make their own choices regarding their participation in them” and not face discipline for doing so validates “rights” that have not previously existed.

That will include the right to refuse to write letters of recommendation for highly qualified students who wish to study at Israeli universities, an action that will be defended as only boycotting Israeli institutions. Not that any affected student will accept the distinction.

I predict that hundreds of those and other individual micro-boycotts of Jewish and Israeli students and faculty will be initiated during the 2024-25 academic year as a consequence of the AAUP policy change. There will also be dedicated group efforts to criminalize collaborative research projects between faculty in America and Israel, projects that often entail institutional endorsement and support.

Cary Nelson, “The AAUP Abandons Academic Freedom,” Chronicle of Higher Education, August 13, 2024

At The College Fix Virginia King notes that over 1000 scholars have already signed a petition opposing the change:

An open letter that opposes the American Association of University Professors’ new position to support academic boycotts quickly gained over 1,000 signatures from scholars and faculty upset by the recent decision.

“We believe the AAUP’s new position is wrong-headed and dangerous,” the petition states. “We cannot safeguard academic freedom by violating academic freedom. Normalizing academic boycotts poses a profound threat to academic freedom.”

Virginia King, “More than 1,000 scholars sign petition against AAUP for supporting academic boycotts,” College Fix, August 19, 2024

Question from the floor

While it seems clear that the current move targets Israeli or Jewish universities and researchers, why do the academics believe that boycotts will stop there? The intellectual boycott is an academic system’s usual defense against any ideas it can’t handle — and not necessarily because those ideas are wrong. Life is never as simple as that!

Also, anyone who believes that many junior scholars will not be forced to go along with boycotts just to survive is touchingly naive. That’s why academic freedom advocates have habitually opposed them.

But if AAUP members have run out of challenging new ideas themselves, they can at least suppress the ones that are introduced by others. That sort of thing has been known to suppress new ideas for centuries. It used to be thought of as a negative idea though, a sort of dark ages…