The American Association of University Professors’ acronym is AAUP. But its latest action could lead some to read “AAUP” as the “Anti-Israel Association of University Professors.”
Why? Last month, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran a story titled, “Why the AAUP Changed Its Stance on Academic Boycotts,” describing why the AAUP “announced it would no longer categorically oppose academic boycotts, in which faculty members decline to work with other scholars or academic institutions.” Under the new AAUP policy, such boycotts “can [now] be considered legitimate tactical responses to conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education.” In a (failed) attempt to cover itself, the AAUP adds that such boycotts “should target only institutions of higher education that themselves violate academic freedom or the fundamental rights upon which academic freedom depends.”
What does this mean? According to its former president, Cary Nelson, it means that the AAUP has officially greenlighted boycotts of Israeli universities. This new “right” gifted to member universities by the AAUP will, writes Nelson, “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.” This explains the title of Nelson’s article: “The AAUP Abandons Academic Freedom.”
What will be the result of this policy change? Nelson “predict[s] 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. . . . 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.”
All true, sad to say. And from his prior position as AAUP president, Nelson can see that, in this case, the arc of the higher-education universe is not bending toward justice, but its opposite: “In 2005 the AAUP understood that, unless the opposition to academic boycotts was honored as a universal principle, innumerable debates about boycotting universities in various countries would ensue, and academic boycotts would become routine. The AAUP is now willing to pay that price in the service of its growing anti-Zionism.”
Hammering his final nail into the AAUP’s casket, Nelson highlights the utter hypocrisy behind its policy change. He reminds us that the Academic Freedom Index, which “ranks 179 countries worldwide . . . places Israeli universities in the upper 20 to 30 percent, substantially higher than those in the United States. The AAUP has made a political decision based not on fact but rather on prejudice. Jewish students and faculty will suffer unjustly as a consequence.”
Eighty years after the Holocaust, this is what the union of our allegedly brightest minds has opted to impose on us. And it purportedly does so in the name of “academic freedom”! All of which recalls Orwell’s formulation of the Party’s credo in 1984: “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.”
The world has been turned upside down by our academic elites, who have decided that the country that suffered from the Oct. 7, 2023 attack—which killed 1,139 people, including 815 civilians, and in which 251 persons were taken hostage—is in reality a member of “oppressor” class (as taught by DEI), and against whom, apparently, few holds are barred.
The new policy’s justification by the AAUP bears an alarming resemblance to the justification for what is called “the hecklers’ veto,” which is the claim that we have a First Amendment right to shout down the speeches of others. Although our courts have consistently ruled against this claim, the AAUP wants us to believe it when it says that canceling collaborative academic projects between U.S. and Israeli universities is an act of “academic freedom.”
In truth, such cancelations do not serve freedom. They serve the hatred of the anti-Israel mob that has apparently commandeered the AAUP.
