American Studies Association Tag

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? Now you can see why universities reacted so swiftly in rejecting the academic boycott -- it's easy to start, but hard to stop. As posted earlier, Inside Higher Ed reports that Salaita allegedly was denied an offer at U. Illinois at at Urbana-Champaign because of his tweets. I don't know if that's true, if it was the anti-Israeli views expressed in the tweets, or if it was that the tweets arguably presented Salaita as an unhinged and unstable demagogue who would bring disrepute on his institution and intimidate his students; or any or none of the above. Many of those rushing to Salaita's defense on the ground of academic freedom, however, themselves are among the worst violators of academic freedom through the anti-Israel academic boycott. They would turn away a Dean or representative of an Israeli academic institution, would bar joint programs and research, and even cooperation in journal publications.

The anti-Israel academic boycott movement has been under the radar the past month, but that doesn't mean it hasn't been working to destroy academic freedom where it can. Two small academic groups recently were added to the short list of academic professional organizations boycotting Israel. The Critical Ethnic Studies Association recently endorsed the academic boycott of Israel. This should not be much of a surprise given that when CESA was formed in 2012, one of its first acts was to plan how to help the anti-Israel academic and cultural boycott movement. CESA  previously supported the boycott passed by the American Studies Association.  CESA represents just about everything that has gone wrong with academia, as expressed in its mission statement:

The Critical Ethnic Studies Association (CESA) aims to develop an approach to scholarship, institution building, and activism animated by the spirit of the decolonial, antiracist, and other global liberationist movements that enabled the creation of Ethnic Studies, and which continues to inform its political and intellectual projects. We seek to move away from current critical deadlocks, to counteract institutional marginalization, to revisit the political ideas that precipitated ethnic studies’ founding moment within the US academy, and to create new conversations. Our Vision:
 Ethnic studies scholarship has laid the foundation for analyzing how racism, settler colonialism, immigration, imperialism, and slavery interact in the creation and maintenance of systems of domination, dispossession, criminalization, expropriation, exploitation, and violence that are predicated upon hierarchies of racialized, gendered, sexualized, economized, and nationalized social existence in the United States and beyond. Our vision of Critical Ethnic Studies highlights how systematized oppression is coterminous with the multitude of practices that resist these systems.

The African Literature Association also passed a boycott resolution at its annual meeting in South Africa.  The ALA's mission statement describes its goals as follows: