Excluding Outside Organizations from Interfering with any University is a IAFI Priority

By Alan Fuchsberg

Last month the British Association of University Teachers (AUT) took a decision to boycott two of Israel's eight universities -- Haifa and Bar Ilan -- for their alleged collusion with the Israeli government in its mistreatment of the Palestinians.

Haifa was accused of curbing academic freedom. However, Haifa University is a most diverse Jewish/Arab institution. At Haifa, a fifth of the student body consists of Arab-Israeli citizens. A growing number of faculty, including former and present heads of departments and the new dean of research, are Arabs. The boycott arose from ire over a failed graduate student whose thesis alleged to document a massacre of 200 unarmed civilians by the Haganah (the pre-state army of Israel) at a village called Tantura, near Haifa. The student originally received a grade of 97. But later he was failed when it came to light that the empirical evidence relied on was grossly manipulated by the student in his transliteration of tapes of oral interviews, which were the entire basis of the paper. The incident grew as it came to involve a senior lecturer, a strongly anti-zionist, who came to the student’s defense and he became criticized as well, and he claims he was threatened with dismissal. The AUT also criticizes Bar Ilan University fon the separate ground of maintaining relations with the College of Judea and Samaria, located in the West Bank settlement of Ariel.

The AUT was acting in response to an appeal by 60 Palestinian organizations. The AUT's secretary-general stated that the ban "should take the form described in the Palestinian call for academic boycott of Israeli institutions." According to Academics for Justice, a group of so-called Palestinian academics and intellectuals that have been calling for a boycott since 2003, the boycott entails “a pledge not to support or participate in any conference, cooperative research, grant writing or grant evaluation, or other supportive activities, such as academic exchanges or visits, held at or involving Israeli universities and other state institutions.”

This week the British Association of University Teachers will meet again and reconsider their decision last month to bar Israeli faculty members at Haifa University and Bar-Ilan University from academic conferences and joint research.

This time the issue comes up with a chance for fuller debate. Among the responses this time opposing the boycott are the following notables:

1)         Two university presidents, one a Palestinian and the other an Israeli, have joined to urge an end to an academic boycott of Israeli universities by Britain's leading higher education union. Sari Nusseibeh, the president of Al Quds University in East Jerusalem, and Menachem Magidor, president of Hebrew University, made a joint declaration here at an international gathering of scholars debating human rights.

"Our position is based upon the belief that it is through cooperation based on mutual respect, rather than boycotts or discrimination, that our common goals can be achieved," the declaration said.

"Our disaffection with, and condemnation of, acts of academic boycotts," it said, "is predicated on the principles of academic freedom, human rights and equality between nations and among individuals."

2)         The American Association of University Professors strongly objects to the resolution passed by the British Association of University Teachers and calls for its repeal in the following statement.

“We defend the free exchange of ideas among academics without regard for government policies. We have taken this position with respect to boycotts of South African universities under apartheid and toward Cuban faculty exchanges since the United States imposed an economic embargo.”

“Scholars must be free to work with one another across national boundaries. Academic associations and governments shouldn't use political or ideological litmus tests to block scholarly exchanges.”

3)         Twenty-one Nobel Prize laureates will send a letter to the British Association of University Teachers (AUT) urging it to cancel the decision to impose an academic boycott on the Haifa and Bar-Ilan universities.

"Mixing science with politics, and limiting academic freedom by boycotts is essentially wrong and should be strongly and promptly rejected," the letter says.

The irony of the boycott being directed at Haifa University, is that the complaint is that the University does not respect the academic freedom of an anti-zionist professor, while an academic boycott is another form of infringement on academic freedom. The free market of ideas between Haifa University and the international community is at jeopardy. Even for academics whose pursuits aren’t political, gravitating for instance to the field of science, they are subjected to the boycott because of their national origin, which in this case is a match up with religious belief.

Similarly, last year a British professor, inspired by the call for an academic boycott,  dismissed two Israeli scholars—because they were Israeli--from being on the board of the journal she edits. In a separate incident, a professor rejected a graduate student applicant specifically because of his Israeli nationality.

In the United States, ever since the McCarthy era, when one’s political identity became a reason for government investigation, our judicial system has been pro-active on the issue of academic freedom. Thus academic freedom was viewed to protect a Marxist economist from government interference with his position at a university. Academic freedom is the principle that permits faculty to teach freely, even a subject thought to be subversive.  A college campus is a place where debate and free speech ought to flourish as a constitutional right. Liberals, who may identify with the Palestinians as an oppressed population in need of their support, ought to understand that curtailing academic freedom between universities is antithetical to the concept of free speech, of an open dialogue. The foremost location for free dialogue is within academia. In a historic U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding academic freedom, Justice Frankfurter wrote , a "free society" depends on "free universities" and "[t]his means the exclusion of governmental intervention in the intellectual life of a university."

There is similarity between governmental intervention and a political organization intervention in the operation of our universities. The AUT is a political association of sorts that is seeking, through recommending an academic boycott, to bring political pressure upon a university.  Lee Bollinger, President of Columbia University and formerly the Dean of the University of Michigan Law School, is an expert in academic freedom. Representing the law school, he was a party in a Supreme Court case that decided the school could pursue its interest of achieving a diverse student body, keeping affirmative action legal. Academic freedom was an important principle noted in the decision. Speaking recently at the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, Professor Bollinger urged that “[u]niversities in particular, must stand firm in insisting that, when there are lines to be drawn, we must and will be the ones to do it. Not outside actors. Not politicians, not pressure groups, not the media. Ours is and must remain a system of self-government.”

Do we really want organizations outside of Haifa University or Bar-Ilan University, or outsiders from any university, dictating to a higher education university on how it should instruct or what it should teach, or who can teach, or else bear the consequence of having their good faculty barred from international academia, regardless of the scholarly quality of their work? Should we so dictate to any university, when they are in our world most often the forum for open discussion? Universities must be free from such oppression, which is as likely to come from the right as it is from the left. AUT’s desire to control speech at these universities is an unsound policy that should be reversed.