Academic boycotts are now OK

So says the AAUP

I read in Inside Higher Education that the AAUP (American Association of University Professors) has decided that academic boycotts are OK after all. Academics are now free to shun universities if they are embedded in unpleasant politics, which of course means boycotting Israeli academics and academic institutions.

No doubt war crimes and atrocities, as were committed by Hamas on 7 October, and which Hamas has been engaged in for their entire existence, will not be sufficient provocation to boycott Palestinian universities.

Despite mealy-mouthed assurances that the AAUP is “is not advocating for academic boycotts”, they are saying that now academic boycotts are not in contradiction to academic freedom, which the AAUP maintains it’s all in favor of.

Bollocks. I wrote a couple of years ago about the AAUP and academic freedom. See “On Tenure”. Just as the ACLU has dropped its steadfast defense of civil rights in favor of political correctness, the AAUP’s defense of academic freedom is now - conditional. It’s not unexpected. Once the AAUP merged with the American Federation of Teachers, all talk about defending academic freedom is now pure gaslighting.

I have some experience with academic boycotts. Long ago, I had the opportunity to spend some time in South Africa on a research project. The person who was sending me was a staunch supporter of the AAUP, as it was then. At the time, South Africa was in considerable unrest, and all the right thinkers were advocating boycotts of South African universities. My supervisor was having none of it, as he was wedded to the idea that academics had a unique duty to reach out to other academics in troubled countries and maintain ties with them. In that, the AAUP was perfectly in line with him

Even so, there were informal academic boycotts going on. I met with severely disapproving looks from colleagues. But when I arrived in South Africa, I was able to see the situation on the ground there, with no gaslighting. It was an eye-opener. As you probably already have guessed, the boycott only hurt academics who were mostly staunch opponents of apartheid, and who worked assiduously in opposition to that policy. The boycotts were all meaningless virtue-signalling.

I did feel the boycott personally. Even though the AAUP didn’t sanction them, informal boycotts proceeded nevertheless. For example, some prominent academic journals had decided (no doubt to the warm self-satisfaction of the editorial boards) not to accept any submissions from South African authors, or from people (like me) who worked there. After I returned to the US, I had a manuscript unceremonioulsly returned to me unreviewed, because I had done the work in South Africa. No matter, I submitted it to a local journal, who gladly accepted it for publication.

And now the AAUP has abandoned any pretense that it stands for something transcendant. And like its new AFT partner, it has become just another conduit for taxpayer-subsidized progressive activism.

If there are any academics left in the universities who still value intellectual freedom, they should leave the universities and set up new ways they can be intellectually free. They can no longer expect the universities to protect their intellectual freedom.

And by the way: cut off the taxpayer subsidies that are funding, not science or education, but activism. Let universities find other ways to fund that.