In Defense of the AAUP’s Statement on Boycotts

The American Association of University Professors has received blistering criticism for a new Statement on Academic Boycotts that superseded a 2006 report denouncing all academic boycotts. The new statement argues, instead, that “academic boycotts are not in themselves violations of academic freedom.” The statement notes that professors may choose to engage in boycotts to advance the academic freedom rights of others and asserts that academic boycotts “can be considered legitimate tactical responses to conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education.”

I was initially skeptical of the AAUP’s change in policy because I oppose all academic boycotts and divestment campaigns. I think academic boycotts are ineffective, can endanger academic freedom and undermine intellectual engagement.

I strongly disagree with academic boycotts, but I agree with the AAUP’s new statement about them. I think it’s appropriate for the AAUP to remain neutral on the question of academic boycotts rather than condemn them under all circumstances.

The AAUP’s modification of its policy has been described in apocalyptic terms. The AMCHA Initiative said the decision is “not just a catastrophe for Jewish students and faculty, but for the future of higher education in America.” Heterodox Academy warned that the AAUP statement was “something close to a rejection of the professional ideal of scholarship itself.” American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Samuel J. Abrams wrote in AEIdeas that “trustees, presidents, and the groups that promote open inquiry must denounce this disgusting political position immediately, for higher education’s core value is at real risk.”

All of this alarmist rhetoric stands in sharp contrast with the reasonable and moderate language in the AAUP statement itself.

The AAUP’s change isn’t a sudden flip in positions. It’s a recognition that a blanket, absolute condemnation of academic boycotts isn’t automatically correct and that it is legitimate for academics to engage in personal boycotts against repressive institutions that violate academic freedom.

One of the most visible critics of the new AAUP statement is former AAUP president Cary Nelson, who begins his essay attacking the shift by declaring that “the American Association of University Professors set aside its hundred-year defense of academic freedom by opening the door to any number of individually initiated academic boycotts.” Whatever moral stand the AAUP takes on one topic does not constitute an abandonment of its “hundred-year defense of academic freedom.” But Nelson is not merely guilty of hyperbole in claiming that academic freedom has been destroyed by a minor statement. He’s also on the wrong side of academic freedom in this case.

Nelson objects that the statement endorses new rights for professors to participate in boycotts without fear of punishment, including, he laments, a “right to refuse to write letters of recommendation” for students who want to study, say, at Israeli universities. But professors need to have the discretion to make their own ethical choices about recommendations. When those choices are wrong, they should be criticized, and professors who disagree should step forward instead. But compulsory recommendations under threat of punishment are a danger to academic freedom, not a defense of it.

Nelson has supported personal academic boycotts when he agrees with the cause. In 2006—the same year as the old AAUP statement against boycotts—Nelson as the incoming AAUP president urged other professors to join his “personal boycott” of New York University over its refusal to recognize a graduate student union. Nelson’s academic boycott included refusing to speak at the university, advising students to avoid attending or working there and generally having “no active relationship” with NYU.

I don’t agree with Nelson’s 2006 call for a collective boycott of NYU even though I also support the right of all academic workers to unionize. I believe in speaking at—and criticizing—universities that violate the rights of their students and workers rather than engaging in academic boycotts. But I see little difference in principle between Nelson encouraging other faculty members to join his ”personal boycott” of NYU and other academic boycotts in support of fundamental rights. It seems hypocritical for Nelson to engage in an academic boycott for union rights and then denounce the AAUP as destroying academic freedom when it merely agrees with the position that not all academic boycotts are inherently wrong.

Peter Wood, the president of the National Association of Scholars, argues that the AAUP’s new position would “abandon more than a hundred years of advocating for principled neutrality among faculty to lurch into support for academic boycotts.” But the new policy of the AAUP is much closer to “principled neutrality” than the old one. The AAUP today is refusing to take a stand for or against boycotts and leaving it to individual members to decide. That’s literally a neutral position. The old policy denouncing academic boycotts was a violation of neutrality principles.

Ironically again, it is the NAS, not the AAUP, that endorses academic boycotts. Earlier this year, the NAS praised Texas A&M University for eliminating a branch campus in Qatar and in effect called for an academic boycott of the entire country: “The NAS is overjoyed with Texas A&M’s decision. Universities that work with Qatar expose themselves to values unbecoming of American institutions.” If the NAS can demand, in effect, an institution-imposed academic boycott of countries with “values unbecoming,” why can’t individual scholars personally choose to boycott countries that violate academic freedom and other important values?

The NAS has also advocated closing Confucius Institutes funded by the government of China and called for “prohibiting federal funding to colleges and universities that enter research partnerships with Chinese universities involved in China’s military-civil fusion,” as well as caps on “the amount of Chinese funding a college or university may receive before jeopardizing eligibility for federal funding.” Such actions impose government control over colleges’ research and teaching initiatives and violate the rights of individual scholars.

Similarly, two weeks after Abrams of AEI, another conservative group, called for the denunciation of the AAUP’s statement, claiming it “undermined core values about research, exploration, innovation, and open inquiry,” a new AEI report advocated for a state-imposed boycott of academic associations that express political views: “State policymakers should prohibit public colleges or universities from spending public moneys on membership dues or conference registration in organizations that have adopted official stances on contested political issues.”

Other critics misread the AAUP statement. Jeffrey Sachs has attacked the new AAUP policy as “incoherent,” complaining that the statement fails to clarify whether it could be used by faculty to compel other faculty to participate in a boycott by denying them access to institutional resources (for example, if a department chair refused to submit paperwork for a faculty member who wanted to apply for a visiting fellowship at an Israeli university). According to Sachs, “I (and I think most everyone else) understood the AAUP to be giving a green light to corporate boycotts, the kind undertaken by whole departments, universities, and scholarly associations.”

Sachs is wrong. The AAUP’s statement is very clear that it applies only to individual boycotts (“Committee A therefore holds that individual faculty members and students should be free …”). Collective boycotts—when groups of individuals pursue a common goal—are radically different from corporate boycotts (when an institution imposes a boycott on individuals).

My interpretation is supported by this line in the AAUP statement: “faculty members and students should not face institutional or governmental censorship or discipline for participating in academic boycotts, for declining to do so, or for criticizing and debating the choices.” If the AAUP was endorsing corporate boycotts by universities, it would not prohibit punishing anyone who violated that boycott.

After the AAUP responded to Sachs and clarified its view that an individual professor should not be denied institutional support because of another faculty member’s support for a boycott, Sachs complained that “it doesn’t really clarify things very much” because then the AAUP is only endorsing the right of individual boycotts, and under the old AAUP statement, “You already had that right.” But Sachs’s error is imagining that the AAUP’s revision of a policy must be a revolutionary change simply because its critics condemn it as such. There is nothing incoherent about the AAUP reinforcing its commitment to individual rights.

Individual academic boycotts have always been protected by academic freedom. The AAUP is not “opening the door” (as Nelson complained), because that door has always been open. The AAUP’s previous 2006 statement “recognizes the right of individual faculty members or groups of academics not to cooperate with other individual faculty members or academic institutions with whom or with which they disagree.” The AAUP’s past opposition to boycotts only applied to “a systematic academic boycott.”

The only change in the revised AAUP statement is its removal of the absolutist moral condemnation of all academic boycotts and adoption of a more accurate “it depends” standard. There is no change in the academic freedom rights and protections for faculty. There is only a shift in the AAUP’s moralistic finger-wagging.

Even though I still agree with the old finger-wagging against boycotts, I’m perfectly capable of wagging my own finger with moral vigor and need no assistance from the AAUP. The danger of finger-wagging is that the AAUP’s moral prescriptions can become justifications for repressing faculty freedom as unprofessional conduct, which is precisely what inspired the AAUP to change this policy, because the old statement had been “used to compromise academic freedom.”

Those of us who believe that academic boycotts are always wrong should not see the AAUP’s new statement as a betrayal of our values but as a principled recognition of the right of individual faculty to disagree. We should make the case against academic boycotts not by demanding that the AAUP endorse our side but by presenting sound arguments and evidence to support our beliefs.