The National Association of Scholars, one of the nation’s leading advocates for better higher education policy, this week published a lengthy statement denouncing the American Studies Association’s recent controversial decision to boycott Israeli academic institutions.
It suggests the effort is not only a violation of academic freedom, but a very cancer eating away at the heart of academia.
It reads in part:
The National Association of Scholars opposes the movement in American higher education to single out Israeli academic and cultural institutions for punitive treatment. We stand against this movement because it violates core principles of academic freedom. It attempts to limit the free expression of ideas; it attempts to use instruments of coercion to advance a point of view; and it attempts to politicize the content of education and research. …
The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement is a growing presence in American higher education. Though the name does not announce the intention, BDS aims to stigmatize the state of Israel and exert pressure on behalf of the political aims of some Palestinian factions. BDS is, in briefest compass, a political movement. The means it employs to reach its goals has varied but little from the terms enunciated in its name. BDS seeks to recruit American academics, their academic organizations, and colleges and universities to join in boycotting Israeli institutions, divesting from Israeli companies, and creating other sanctions against the state of Israel. …
The National Association of Scholars deplores the decisions of these scholarly organizations to make themselves accomplices to a political movement that subverts fundamental academic values. …
More than 200 college presidents have so far issued statements opposing the ASA boycott in particular. The presidents of some colleges and universities have gone further by dropping their institutional memberships in ASA.[4] These are commendable actions and one indication of the extremism exhibited by the BDS movement and its new institutional supporters. …
The National Association of Scholars calls on higher education to stand firm against the continuing pressure to boycott Israel. Colleges and universities should be above politics. They should be devoted to good argument, sound evidence, eloquence in defense of basic principles, consistency, and integrity. They should never bow to threats. Politics may intrude; threats may come; those charged with making good arguments may falter; but we should at least be clear about our foundational principles. The BDS movement is only the latest of many illiberal assaults on the integrity of academe. We should give it no welcome and repudiate those organizations that have erred by deciding to support it.
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