Breaking! Anti-Israel academic boycotters STILL don’t like being boycotted
Humanities and Social Sciences imploding as anti-Israel academic boycotters tear their own programs apart.
This could be a series. In fact, with this post, maybe it is a series.
We have covered many times the faculty members who demand the boycott of Israeli academic institutions (BDS) — which necessarily involves boycotting the individuals who work at those institutions — and then complain when the boycotters become the boycotted.
Controversial professor Steven Salaita had his contingent offer of employment to join the American Indian Studies Department at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign rejected by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees after Salaita went on a multi-month Twitter rant. Salaita, a leader of the anti-Israel academic boycott, claims academic freedom for himself as he seeks to deny it to others. (Salaita’s federal lawsuit is going through motion and discovery practice now.)
As a result of the Salaita non-hiring, an academic boycott of UI-UC was organized, to the cheering of pro-Salaita pro-BDS UI-UC professors in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
But something funny happened on the way the the boycott — it turned out that the only people hurt by the boycott of UI-UC were the pro-Salaita folks in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
As we reported in Academic boycotter doesn’t like being boycotted, UI-UC professor and anti-Israel academic boycott supporter Susan Koshy, an associate professor of English, Asian-American studies, and South Asian and Middle Eastern studies at UI-UC, complained:
For someone like me, who is inside the university and supports Salaita, the boycott [of UI-UC] represents an experiential impasse. I find myself in the impossible position of being the target of a boycott as a member of an institution whose actions I and many others here have challenged. Unlike faculty members outside Urbana-Champaign whose safe target is another university, our target is our own. The frequently repeated joke here—How do we boycott ourselves?—captures this problem. How do you oppose your own institution yet protect valuable parts of it at the same time?
Being inside a boycott has forced me to think hard about the nature of this political weapon, not because I oppose its use but because I have come to see the difficulty of using it with the care it requires. A boycott whose target is a university—particularly one where the faculty has challenged the decision that led to the boycott—carries serious responsibilities for its supporters.
It seems that the situation is even worse at UI-UC than suspected for the pro-boycott cheering section.
Two pro-BDS Anthropology professors Martin Manalansan and Ellen Moodie complain bitterly about their current situation, “Waiting” in the Neoliberal University: The Salaita Case and the Wages of an Academic Boycott (emphasis added):
It is important to note that the boycott has not harmed the vigorous exchanges in the STEM departments and colleges. Instead, the boycott has hit hard on vulnerable humanities and humanistic social sciences, especially those in the interdisciplines such as gender, women’s and ethnic studies. Now the former university system president Bob Easter has forecast new austerity measures, telling us: “Some programs will not survive.”
The UIUC boycott has become unwittingly complicit with the planned dismantling of these interdisciplines by the neoliberal university and the revanchist state. If ongoing events in Wisconsin and North Carolina are any indication, the unintentional crippling of these fields becomes part of the eventual undoing or weakening of these critical knowledge sites where vital critiques of local and trans-national landscapes emanate. Will ethnic studies and other interdisciplines be the necessary collateral damage in the boycott such that we lose the very sites and people that think critically about why we need to act ethically in a political world, whether within the BDS or in other movements?
Well, of course, STEM is free from impact. The STEM professors are almost completely absent from the BDS movement. They are academics, not propagandists with Ph.D’s.
And of course, Humanities and Social Sciences programs are on the chopping block.
Not because the faculty are anti-Israel, but because they have turned themselves into societal laughingstocks, bizarre caricatures of disgruntled parasites on society who have lost the respect of just about everyone outside of their relatively small academic circles. You act like clowns, but express shock when people treat you like clowns.
That’s the real damage to Humanities and Social Science programs nationally when they raise people like Steven Salaita to hero status and demand academic freedom for me but not for thee.
As I pointed out in Steven Salaita controversy points to the hypocrisy of anti-Israel academic boycotters:
I have argued strenuously against the academic boycott of Israel, led by people like Steven Salaita, on a number of grounds.
Not the least of those grounds is that academics who insist on violating the academic freedom of Israelis and those who wish to interact with Israelis do damage to the system in its entirety.
That is one of the reasons why the American Association of University Professors, numerous university associations, and over 250 University Presidents issued statements opposing the academic boycott of Israel passed by the American Studies Association in December 2013.
There is a related point to how academic boycotts have a negative ripple effect.
On what ground do the academic boycotters of Israel claim their own academic freedom if they are so quick to deny it to others?
Because they think they are right? What if the people who want to boycott the boycotters believe just as firmly in their own correctness?
Anyway, here’s the punch line to the article by Profs. Manalansan and Moodie:
We suggest the boycott of UIUC be superseded by an expansive coalition and a multi-stranded set of actions to oppose the virulent and revanchist state apparatus and the increasingly imperial/neoliberal university. Concerned citizens of higher educational institutions in this nation must now fight directly and more forcefully with clearer agendas and goals. Waiting is no longer an option.
Yeah, that’ll work.
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Comments
I was in the graduating class of 67 on the Urbana campus. I was probably the only 1%er motorcycle gang member to have graduated from the place. My love for Israel stems from all the Jewish friends I had on campus after a sheltered Catholic education. Allow me to gloss over all the good Jewish p*ssy I also enjoyed. The reason I’m glossing over it is a long story, but suffice it to say that if you find yourself a good Jewish girl, hold on to her. I had a couple and I didn’t much to my everlasting regret. In any event, I much enjoyed the manner that Salaita was handled and all the coverage this website devoted to it. But I still won’t give them a dime until they restore Chief Illiniwek.
sigh… my mother used to say “arguments from below the belt do not improve a discussion.”
The term “revanchist state” is too cute for words, as in “multi-stranded set of actions to oppose the virulent and revanchist state apparatus and the increasingly imperial/neoliberal university.”
What they call neoliberal is what liberal was before socialism and LBJ.
Damn. That’s me! I always thought of that as liberal, but now I have gotten a spare adjective. I wonder if I can sell it.
Isn’t it, though? The motto in academia seems to be, “Obfuscate, don’t communicate.”
What revenge does the vaunted “revanchist state” seek?
Susan Koshy and her fellow antisemitic leftist faculty members who have such strong objections to 1) Israel, 2) their institutions refusing to boycott Israel, and 3) the denial of a position to a notorious antisemitic crazy, should follow their consciences.
Quit. Get a real job.
Heh.
“Get a real job”? Doing what, pray tell? Given their “academic” specialization, they do not seem to be qualified for any real-world job.
They should probably also boycott Jordan that first ejected the Palestinian terrorists. As well as other apartheid states, including: South Africa, Zimbabwe, Iran, Mexico, China, etc. Why stop with Israel? There are nations galore that actually have State-established apartheid, including America (e.g. “equal” or selective exclusion). Not to mention the human rights violations of a pro-choice or selective-child policy.
Okay, here is what these folks must do: They must immediately leave their current positions and go somewhere else so that they can then be protesting against “others”. They cannot in good conscience remain where they are at since they would just be perpetuating the evil “that is Israel”. They have no choice in this matter and they must do this immediately, no matter what their tenure status is. That is the requirement.
What is that you say? There are no jobs out there in academia for SJWs in the humanities/social sciences who can do nothing but blather on about things they know nothing about? What do you mean that none of the “fellow Arabs” of the Palestinians do anything but keep them in camps and give them no right to work or vote in any country other than Israel?
None of that is important. These professors MUST immediately give up their positions in solidarity with the Palestinians or they are doing nothing but sitting around moving their lips.
Isn’t this what the progs are always saying that Americans must do whenever they identify a “crisis”?
This is gonna be a real problem for many of them, as most are completely unemployable outside of the humanities academic bubble. At least in any any capacity that doesn’t involve asking people “Do you want fries with that?”
Cause and effect. It is simply beyond them.
Dear Professor Jacobson,
Again I thank you for your efforts to provide a classical, informal debate platform.
Curiously, it is the foundation of what all soft science academia should be.
From Wiki: “the quality and depth of a debate improves with knowledge and skill of its participants as debaters.”
Unfortunately many have come to the academic debate platform with only projectile vomiting as “knowledge and skill”
Excuse us while we adjourn to clean up the toxic biohazard.
“Help I’ve fallen and I can’t get my boycott up.”
“…the boycott has hit hard on vulnerable humanities and humanistic social sciences, especially those in the interdisciplines such as gender, women’s and ethnic studies.” And don’t forget to dismantle queer studies, too. Progress at last! Then your departments will be gaining ground, not losing it.
“The UIUC boycott has become unwittingly complicit with the planned dismantling of these interdisciplines by the neoliberal university and the revanchist state…the unintentional crippling of these fields becomes part of the eventual undoing or weakening of these critical knowledge sites where vital critiques of local and trans-national landscapes emanate. Will ethnic studies and other interdisciplines be the necessary collateral damage in the boycott such that we lose the very sites and people that think critically about why we need to act ethically in a political world, whether within the BDS or in other movements?” One can only hope, said the “unwittingly complicit.” All’s well that ends well.
Ethics based on what moral ground? UN-ism? Truth is truth if enough people with power call it truth? Nope!
These sad excuses for humanity are more worried about losing their ‘territory’ then they are about what they protest about. Bwhaaaaa and Boo Hoo is all I can say to them.
The anthropology and humanities departments should offer classes about human stupid: “Stupid Stuff: The Origins of Revanchist Culture Wars.”
I’ve said for years Israel and Israeli institutions should 100% pull all cooperation, support, licensing, research, everything, from all academic institutions that attempt to boycott the Jews. Even if their efforts to boycott the Jews fails, the counterboycott should remain in place permanently. All staff, academic or otherwise should be deported from Israel if they are there and banned from entry for life or for however long they are employed by that academic institution. And any and all research, intellectual property, royalties, patents should be torn up and all agreements cancelled in total. Forever.
They want boycotts, fair enough.
The author of the following should be fired for gross intellectual stupidity: the unintentional crippling of these fields becomes part of the eventual undoing or weakening of these critical knowledge sites where vital critiques of local and trans-national landscapes emanate.
To start with when has any field that included the tag “studies” been the source of any critical knowledge? To end, the following is will forever be a stain on the English language “critical knowledge sites where vital critiques of local and trans-national landscapes emanate”
What a self important ass…
RE: “Humanities and Social Sciences imploding as anti-Israel academic boycotters tear their own programs apart.”
Excuse, me but on first thought, I can find nothing wrong with that and see only positive benefits as the result…..considering the garbage they have dumped on society for the past century……..
If the STEM and other majors with employable prospects weren’t required to subsidize their SJW schools by requiring elective “humanities” electives, these schools on campus would’ve closed. They have a captive audience. Don’t require their classes and you’ll see how they fare
I suggest that instead of boycotting they adopt the protesting child strategy of threatening to hold their breath until they turn blue.