What Is at Stake in an Academic Boycott?

At the core of two decades of contemporary debates about boycotting Israeli universities—debates that date to about 2001 in Britain—has been the issue of how boycotts affect the defining pillar of faculty teaching and research: academic freedom. Does an academic boycott imperil the status of academic freedom? Or is an academic boycott a quite separate matter, addressing the tactical need to sanction countries whose conduct is unacceptable?

Can an academic boycott ignore the status of academic freedom in the very country under consideration, setting aside the question of whether its faculty possesses freedom of speech and the freedom to make individual choices about how to teach and conduct research, and instead direct attention toward the nation’s conduct off campus and even outside the target nation-state itself? Is it worth imposing an academic boycott and thus sacrificing the potential for dialogue with dissident faculty members even when their country behaves very badly?

Can the principle of academic freedom survive a series of political debates about whether to boycott universities in a series of countries? Are academic boycotts and academic freedom mutually exclusive? Are they categories—and practices—that cannot coexist in the real world? Does pursuing an academic boycott fundamentally weaken the theory and practice of academic freedom?

These are not just theoretical or philosophical questions. They clarify part of what is at stake whenever the decision of whether to impose an academic boycott is being discussed.

There is little question that the ability to collaborate with faculty members in another country would be affected by a campaign to boycott its universities. Such collaboration speaks to key components of academic freedom as the American Association of University Professors defined it in its 1915 declaration—the right, indeed the necessity, that faculty members be free to exchange ideas, hypotheses and research results with one another, including across international borders; that they be free to meet face-to-face in academic conferences no matter in what country they live and work; that they be free to establish both individual and group collaborations across national borders. Can the principle of academic freedom remain intact if the right to put it into practice is abridged by one or more academic boycotts?

The world does not lack for countries that merit severe sanctions. The U.S. continues to levy economic sanctions against Russia for its invasion and occupation of Ukrainian territory, for starting a war that violates the very principle that national borders must be respected. Freedom of speech in Russian universities does not include the right to publicly criticize the invasion itself or Vladimir Putin’s regime. On both counts one could argue for an academic boycott.

China has demonstrably carried out a cultural genocide among the Uyghurs. Perhaps a million Tibetans have died as a result of China’s long occupation. Faculty members in China are not free to publicly condemn these actions. But international campaigns for academic boycotts of Russian or Chinese universities are nowhere to be seen.

But if a widespread academic boycott were to be put in place for Israel, there would almost certainly be calls for comparable boycotts for other countries. Would justice, human rights or the righteousness of each campaign be the deciding factor? Or would the relative political power and influence of the competing constituencies decide the issue? Among faculty members, the principle that academic boycotts violate academic freedom has repeatedly been the deciding factor when boycott resolutions were defeated.

In the U.S., there has been a series of debates about boycotting Israeli academic institutions in national faculty disciplinary associations for 15 years. In each case those professional groups that rejected a boycott resolution did so in part because the argument over principle won the day. Faculty members often felt the principle should not be compromised, whatever their views of the policies of the country being debated. Faculty members thus also debated about whether historians, literary critics or anthropologists needed a foreign policy. Or should they hew instead to teaching and research in their discipline and leave the principle of academic freedom intact? If the principle of academic freedom seemed less important than the politics and presumed moral imperative behind the boycott resolution, the resolution won the vote.

It is in some ways astonishing that, over a generation in which nation-states’ conduct has frequently been deplorable, a generation that has seen academic freedom assaulted in several countries, only one country has been subjected to a campaign to boycott its universities. And that country, paradoxically, honors academic freedom within the borders recognized by the international community.

If the campaign to boycott Israeli universities succeeds, will it end there? Or will academic freedom itself be imperiled in country after country? Will the principle of the free exchange of research across borders survive? Or will academic freedom itself be reduced to a tactic to be endorsed or rejected as the occasion seems to warrant? Boycotting one country’s universities will inevitably justify campaigns to boycott those of other countries. The principle will become a political football.

The odds are that the triumph of the current academic boycott movement against Israel, part of the broader boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, will herald the end of academic freedom as an international principle and thus the end of academic freedom as we have known it. The triumphant response among BDS advocates to the AAUP’s recent policy reversal, in which the association ended its long-held opposition to academic boycotts, heralds exactly that result. It’s not so much an unforeseen consequence as a consequence some have decided does not matter. For them, a symbolic victory over Israel is worth the long-term price of diminishing the relative autonomy of higher education worldwide, its need to maintain political neutrality as a condition of sustaining its independence.