Boycotts Cannot Become the New Normal

The American Association of University Professors has not just long been a staunch defender of academic freedom. It more or less invented the concept upon its founding in 1915. Which is why its new statement on academic boycotts, abandoning its previous opposition to them, comes as such an unwelcome and shocking surprise. The AAUP’s current stance represents nothing less than a profound and dangerous (attempted) normative shift in how the profession should think about academic freedom.

Since the AAUP announced its new stance, a small tsunami of blistering critiques and equally passionate defenses has followed. Some have raised legitimate questions about how the individual faculty member’s right to engage in a “systematic” boycott might harm colleagues’ right to pursue the research of their choosing with the collaborator(s) of their choice in the location they wish. Others have charged that the AAUP’s new approach to academic boycotts is simply gussying up anti-Israel sentiment among its leaders and members. But much of the commentary sheds more heat than light, because it does not address the fundamental principles at stake.

The AAUP is still the king of membership-based faculty organizations. But when it comes to arguments in favor of academic boycotts, this emperor is not wearing any clothes.

Serious Arguments Against Academic Boycotts

Most scholars have long been allergic to academic boycotts for the same reasons the AAUP condemned them in 2006. First, academic boycotts are in deep tension with the basic animating spirit and values of the academy. Scholarship depends on the free exchange of ideas, and this in turn requires the free movement of people and the cultivation of relationships among universities and scholars wherever they may be located. Academic boycotts limit scholarly exchange and harm scholarship.

Second, academic boycotts are generally collective punishment, which is patently unwarranted and unjust. They effectively ostracize individual scholars for the alleged misbehavior of their national government and/or their academic institutions. They adjudge scholars complicit in policies that they had no role in formulating or implementing. No scholar is under any obligation to interact with colleagues whose behaviors they find objectionable and, at the extreme, whose views they find offensive. But that is a boycott of an academic, not an academic boycott.

Third, academic freedom presumes that the only relevant measure of scholarly value lies in the contribution of the scholarship itself, not the place where its authors reside or are employed.

These positions have behind them the weight of both moral principle and scholarly tradition. It is telling that in two recent essays defending the AAUP’s stance—one by Rana Jaleel, the chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, and Todd Wolfson, AAUP’s president, and another by John K. Wilson, the author of Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies (Routledge, 2008)—these articulate, well-informed and passionate writers do not directly rebut these central arguments against academic boycotts. Their argumentative stances seek to sidestep these claims in four ways—none of which are persuasive.

Unserious Arguments in Favor of Academic Boycotts

First, one might argue that the AAUP’s new policy is more consistent with academic freedom, because the organization now allows scholars to act in line with their conscience and values. The AAUP, Jaleel and Wolfson suggest, has merely returned to its “nearly hundred-year official silence on academic boycotts,” before the organization waded into the Middle East’s wars by taking a stand against boycotts in 2006. They accuse the old AAUP position of contributing to “the extreme politicization of academic boycotts” and suggest that theirs is a truly neutral stance: “the goal of the AAUP is not to promote or discount boycotts,” they contend.

Wilson defends the AAUP on these grounds as well: “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.”

But the AAUP’s new position on academic boycotts is hardly neutral. It is nothing less than an endorsement and normalization of boycotts as “legitimate tactical responses” designed to produce political change necessary for “the freedom to produce and exchange knowledge.” By abandoning its position against academic boycotts, the AAUP seeks to reconfigure the normative terrain on which they might rest. Under the old stance, boycotts could be legitimated only as an exception, and advocates were compelled to set out the narrow circumstances under which a particular boycott would be justified. If the AAUP now has its way, academic boycotts will become the new normal of academic life. Its current position seems to be: boycott fellow scholars as you see fit, as your conscience dictates and as your political acumen advises. The AAUP has given academic boycotts its imprimatur. While it is, and will likely remain, neutral with respect to boycotts of particular academic institutions or national systems of higher education, the AAUP is certainly not neutral on the legitimacy of the tactic.

Nor does condemning academic boycotts as a matter of principle in any way restrict the freedom of individual scholars to endorse, lobby for or participate in them, no matter how wrong they may be. There is no tension between the two—just as there is no tension between condemning expressions of racism while simultaneously recognizing them as protected speech. I agree with the AAUP that “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 of those with whom they disagree.”

Second, because it is impossible to deny that academic boycotts do significant harm to academic freedom, one rebuttal is a form of whataboutism. “How is academic freedom not harmed and the advancement of knowledge not stalled when scholars are imprisoned or murdered for their beliefs and associations or when universities are razed?” Jaleel and Wolfson ask rhetorically. “What does a commitment to the free exchange of knowledge and ideas actually mean in that context? … Pious emphasis on an abstraction—‘the free exchange of knowledge’—means little if we do not admit to the many ways that such exchange may be compromised.”

This is argument by misdirection. Academic boycotts run roughshod over academic freedom, Jaleel and Wolfson effectively say, but don’t trouble yourself. These minor harms pale next to the much greater evils of which people and governments are capable. But “two wrongs make a right” is an argument unworthy of the playground, let alone the AAUP. Jaleel and Wolfson are right to condemn all violations of academic freedom. But violating others’ academic freedom through boycotts does not meaningfully solve those problems.

Third, to the charge of collective punishment, Jaleel and Wolfson provocatively contend that “academic boycotts do not inevitably infringe on academic freedom in ways that exceed the risks of other forms of collective action that faculty members and students could legitimately choose to undertake.” In support of their position, they cite the AAUP’s defense of the legitimacy of campus strikes, which necessarily have downstream consequences that impinge on individuals’ academic freedom.

But academic boycotts should be evaluated differently from strikes. While a strike necessarily has consequences for the university’s functioning, it does not fully undermine the university’s very purpose: the free exchange of ideas and the development and dissemination of scholarly knowledge. When academics go on strike, they can still host salons and book groups and seminars off campus, for fellow scholars and students alike. Sometimes they can still conduct research and participate in scholarly exchange.

In contrast, an academic boycott strikes directly at the core logic and principles of the scholarly enterprise. Equally important, in the case of a campus strike, those bearing its costs typically have significant influence over the outcome. Students, faculty, staff and administrators jointly control their own fate. As a result, when campus strikes paralyze a university, they can produce real change. In contrast, when academic boycotts are imposed on institutions and individuals because of problematic national policies, the connection between the harms borne and a favorable resolution are far more indirect and uncertain.

Fourth, a tried-and-true debating tactic is to evade your interlocutors’ arguments by pointing out their seeming hypocrisy. To this end, Wilson delights in skewering the AAUP’s critics—from its former president turned critic Cary Nelson to the National Association of Scholars to the American Enterprise Institute—for endorsing academic boycotts in line with their own values. Leaving aside whether, for instance, counseling prospective graduate students against attending a university that has refused to recognize a graduate student union is tantamount to a boycott, all the reader can conclude from Wilson’s ad hominem argument is that it is really, really hard to uphold a principle consistently. What the reader cannot conclude is that the principle itself is faulty. One cannot damn the principled arguments against academic boycotts by pointing out the failings of those advancing those principled arguments.

It is true that, at the level of the individual faculty member, little has really changed between 2006 and 2024. Notwithstanding the AAUP’s prior condemnation of academic boycotts, individual faculty members and groups were free to refuse to work with colleagues pretty much for whatever reason. As Wilson rightly observes, “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.”

I admire Wilson’s sense of moral independence—“I’m perfectly capable of wagging my own finger with moral vigor and need no assistance from the AAUP”—but neither he nor I alone has the same power to shape professional norms as does the leading professional association. None of us need to agree with the AAUP, but historically it has spoken with a moral force, especially on matters of academic freedom, that individuals cannot easily muster. Professional norms establish baseline expectations, and the more permissive those norms are of academic boycotts, the more academic freedom is in peril.

What Are the Academy—and Academic Freedom—For?

Why do the old, serious arguments against academic boycotts get short shrift from defenders of the new AAUP policy? I suspect their silence masks, or rather reveals, deeper, unspoken disagreements over the nature of the scholarly enterprise and the purpose of the university. The traditional view, which I share, is that universities exist to produce and disseminate scholarly knowledge—a critical public good. Both academic freedom and faculty autonomy are crucial means to that end, but they are not ends in and of themselves.

Jaleel and Wolfson seem to believe, however, that the university exists—primarily? in significant measure?—as a site for “the faculty to engage in collective decision-making through appropriate democratic processes. Faculty members possess academic freedom as individuals and as the faculty—as a collective, decision-making body.” However, the faculty collective enjoys a right to democratic self-governance only because, and when, it advances academic freedom and intellectual exchange. Society grants the academy special prerogatives, encapsulated in codes of academic freedom, because it recognizes the larger good the scholarly enterprise serves. Society has little reason to grant the academy those special prerogatives when the faculty collective behaves in ways that no longer advance that public good. When faculty vote for academic boycotts that violate colleagues’ academic freedom and that curb the circulation of ideas, they lose the right to autonomous democratic self-governance.

Defenses of the AAUP statement traffic, bluntly, in Orwellian doublespeak. Proponents of academic boycotts are, they claim, the true defenders of academic freedom. Those calling for unfettered scholarly exchange are, they argue, the enemies of academic freedom. Boycotting colleagues because of one’s politics, they contend, is a courageous ethical stance. Holding the line against punishing colleagues for crimes they did not commit is, they aver, pure politics. Backing the legitimacy of academic boycotts is, they maintain, the only neutral stance.

The AAUP’s new statement on academic boycotts has further delegitimized a once-august institution. It has further opened the door to the university’s already-blooming politicization and polarization. The AAUP has lost sight of the academy’s purpose.

I have abiding faith in the good sense and the values of our colleagues across the academy. I coauthored a counterstatement opposing academic boycotts and articulating the traditional, shared, foundational values of the scholarly community. It was heartening to see that counterstatement, backed by no organization or authority and possessing no mailing list of tens of thousands, accumulate more than 3,000 signatures from fellow scholars in less than a week, during the dog days of summer. I hope the AAUP takes heed, but I am skeptical that it will change course. To the larger community of concerned Americans, I say: The AAUP does not speak for many of us. As for my fellow academics: Speak up for the values the vast majority of us hold dear.