Last Thursday, March 24, 2022, Brandeis University announced it was leaving the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). Sometime between Friday, March 25, and Monday morning, March 28, MESA removed its list of institutional members from its website. Coincidence?
As we’ve previously reported, MESA passed a resolution at its annual business meeting endorsing the call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel, the world’s sole Jewish nation-state; and ratified it by an institutional membership vote that ended March 22.
LIF’s prior coverage of MESA’s BDS vote has included the following:
The day after MESA announced its ratification of BDS, Brandeis dissociated itself from the association. Brandeis issued a statement explaining its decision:
The Middle Eastern Studies Association’s (MESA) announced on March 23, 2022, that a majority of its members voted in favor of a resolution calling for an academic boycott of Israeli academic institutions. Brandeis University condemns MESA’s boycott of institutions of higher education in Israel. The resolution attacks the fundamental principles of academic freedom and association to which MESA specifically refers in its mission statement, and to which Brandeis is committed. As a matter of principle, Brandeis University opposes academic boycotts of universities in any country. In light of this vote and the boycott, Brandeis dissociates from MESA and reaffirms our support for academic freedom.
Brandeis is the first institutional member known to have cut its ties after MESA ratified the BDS decision. As LIF has reported previously, it is not the first university to have cut its ties since MESA passed the December BDS resolution. The following universities were listed as institutional members of MESA as of November 2021, before MESA passed the BDS resolution, but have since left MESA:
1. Boston College2. Brandeis University3. Duke-UNC Consortium for Middle East Studies4. Florida State University5. Marquette University6. University of Arizona7. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
On March 28, LIF learned that MESA had eliminated its institutional membership list from its website. (The former link to the list now redirects to a message reading, “404 – Not Found.”) LIF reached out to MESA asking why, and whether the webpage had been or would be restored to a different location. MESA has not responded to our inquiry.
Thirty American and Canadian universities remain institutional members of MESA. They are:
1. Bridgewater State University2. Brown University3. California State University, San Bernardino4. Columbia University5. Cornell University6. Dartmouth College7. George Washington University8. Georgetown University (through 3 separate centers)9. Harvard University10. Indiana University Bloomington11. McGill University12. New York University13. Ocean County College14. Portland State University15. Princeton University16. Simon Fraser University17. Stanford University18. Syracuse University19. University of Arkansas20. University of California, Berkeley21. University of California, Los Angeles22. University of California, Santa Barbara23. University of Chicago24. University of Michigan25. University of Pennsylvania26. University of Southern California27. University of Toronto28. University of Washington29. Vanderbilt University30. Yale University
The AMCHA Initiative has put together contact information for the American universities, and it is available online. AMCHA has also prepared an email template urging the universities to revoke their MESA membership.
Three of the universities belong to the University of California (UC) system. On March 29, the Academic Engagement Network (AEN) wrote to the UC system president, Michael V. Drake, MD, suggesting that MESA’s boycott strategy makes continued UC membership in the association untenable in light of the 2018 UC chancellors’ joint statement against boycotting Israel. That statement “forcefully and unequivocally denounced the boycott of Israeli academic institutions and/or individual scholars as a ‘serious threat’ to the academic freedom of UC faculty and students.” AEN also suggested that continued membership in MESA might be inconsistent with continued receipt of federal funding under Title VI. Finally, AEN explained how BDS poses a threat to academic freedom:
Firmly committed to the free flow of ideas and intellectual engagement across national, religious, and cultural divides, AEN opposes the BDS academic boycott against Israel even as we recognize that, as individuals, faculty have the right to endorse and advocate for BDS and to support its call for an academic boycott of Israel’s universities and colleges. But University of California centers do not have the right to violate the academic freedom of UC faculty or to deny educational opportunities to UC students.
We will continue to monitor and report on MESA’s activities, and on which institutional members will continue membership in an organization devoted to the destruction of Israel.
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