American Association of University Professors Embrace Anti-Israel BDS Movement

American Association of University Professors Embrace Anti-Israel BDS Movement

This decision will take higher education to a very dark place very fast.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports:

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.

The AAUP’s position that “academic boycotts should neither involve any political or religious litmus tests nor target individual scholars and teachers engaged in ordinary academic practices, such as publishing scholarship, delivering lectures and conference presentations, or participating in research collaborations” will be honored in the breach. That principle is in tension with the unqualified freedom that the organization grants to individuals to boycott or not to boycott. Expect organized demonstrations against collaborative American and Israeli research programs. Expect more efforts to block study-abroad programs, efforts that compromise student academic freedom.

The AAUP concludes its new policy by parroting the long-discredited Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions claim that it boycotts only institutions, not individuals.

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