Greetings, I am pleased to support this petition against academic boycotts. I enclose the text of the petition’s statement and encourage you to read it and consider signing.
I am grateful for the efforts of three colleagues in political science to organize the petition:
Ronald Krebs, Distinguished McKnight University Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota
Cary Nelson, Jubilee Professor of Arts & Sciences Emeritus, English Department, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Ron Hassner, Professor, Political Science, U.C. Berkeley
The text, authored by these colleagues, I reprint, beginning here:
Against Academic Boycotts
To sign the statement, click here.
On Friday, August 9, 2024, the American Association of University Professors, which has long eloquently defended the core principle of academic freedom, reversed course and declared academic boycotts legitimate.
We believe the AAUP’s new position is wrong-headed and dangerous. We cannot safeguard academic freedom by violating academic freedom. Normalizing academic boycotts poses a profound threat to academic freedom.
Academic freedom is always fragile. We do not defend the academic freedom only of those with whom we agree, but of those—and especially of those—whose views we find odious. The AAUP eloquently asserted the right to academic freedom in its 1915 founding document, and it eloquently asserted that right again in 1940, a moment in US history when US universities were hardly bastions of freedom and when the gates of free expression were, under the pressures of war, swinging shut. The AAUP’s clarion call did not immediately become the norm, and the right to academic freedom was, in the first two decades of the Cold War, observed more in the breach. Indeed, the AAUP itself failed the test of McCarthyism. It has now failed the test posed by the ongoing war in Gaza.
In 2005, the AAUP approved a statement condemning academic boycotts absolutely and unconditionally: “We reject proposals that curtail the freedom of teachers and researchers to engage in work with academic colleagues, and we reaffirm the paramount importance of the freest possible international movement of scholars and ideas.” A year later, a committee of distinguished scholars elaborated and defended the association’s stance. Despite significant debate in the two decades since then, the AAUP has maintained that position. The AAUP was right then—and it is wrong now.
Academic boycotts must be opposed, in principle, for two reasons.
1. Academic boycotts are in deep tension with the basic animating spirit and values of the academy. Scholarly progress depends on the free exchange of ideas, and this in turn requires the free movement of people and cultivation of relationships among universities wherever they may be located. The only relevant measure of value lies in the substantive contribution of the scholarship itself—not the place where its authors reside or are employed. Scholarly knowledge cannot progress if scholars’ voices are silenced for reasons of politics, whether the political entanglements of their institutions or their national government or even the political views of the individuals themselves. The AAUP expert committee argued in 2006, “the search for truth and its free expression suffer if a boycott is in place… the need is always for more academic freedom, not less.” We cannot save academic freedom by endorsing and implementing boycotts that violate academic freedom.
2. Academic boycotts punish individual scholars for the alleged misbehavior of their government and/or of their academic institutions. This is a material fact based on the structure of the modern university. They should not be judged complicit in policies which they had no role in formulating. To punish these scholars for the misdeeds of others is to engage in unwarranted collective punishment.
We are troubled by reports of violations of academic freedom on college and university campuses around the world. If individual scholars could lose their right to academic freedom because their institutions ran roughshod over others’ rights to the same, very few around the world would enjoy the right to academic freedom. Academics in China, Russia, Turkey, the Arab world, Singapore, and many other places should then be subject to boycott. And don’t forget the United States: academic freedom in the United States is under assault today from both the right and the left. If universities need to be free of sin for their scholars to deserve academic freedom, there would be no academic freedom at all.
Defenders of boycotts, including the AAUP in its latest statement, sometimes seek to distinguish between institutions and their members, asserting that they call for boycott only of the former. But this is a distinction without a difference. There is no way to boycott an institution without undermining scholarly exchange, joint research programs, and instructional collaborations and thereby violating individuals’ academic freedom. As the AAUP rightly observed nearly 20 years ago, “The form that noncooperation with an academic institution takes inevitably involves a refusal to engage in academic discourse with teachers and researchers, not all of whom are complicit in the policies that are being protested”—and the vast majority of whom are certainly not responsible for those policies.
Academic freedom is an inviolable right to which all scholars must be entitled regardless of whether they perfectly uphold that right for others. That extends as well to our colleagues who, in a sincere commitment to use whatever tools are at their disposal to effect political change, endorse academic boycotts and thereby violate academic freedom. Faculty members and students should not face institutional or governmental censorship or discipline for endorsing academic boycotts, though participating in boycotts should be seen as a violation of professional norms.
The only circumstance under which we might (and, even then, only might) see a boycott as justifiable is if academic freedom were so restricted that the academy had become simply, and nothing more than, a mouthpiece of government. In such a circumstance, academics have lost their right to freedom because they have become mere apparatchiks. However, if academic freedom were that severely compromised in a country, then a comprehensive economic boycott would be in order, not a targeted boycott of universities.
The AAUP does not speak for us. We call on our fellow scholars to join us in opposing boycotts of fellow scholars wherever they might reside and be employed.
To sign the statement, click here.