The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) was founded in 1915. The Declaration of Principles published at its foundation affirmed “the absolute freedom of thought, of inquiry, of discussion and of teaching, of the academic profession”. The Association has a long history in defence of these freedoms: a statement it published in 1940 promoted academic freedom on the grounds that “institutions of higher education are conducted for the common good [. . . which] depends on the free search for truth and its free exposition.” And as recently as 2005, responding to a vote by the Association of University Teachers (AUT) in favour of resolutions demanding the boycott of two universities in Israel1, the AAUP issued a notable statement that included the following sentence: “We reject proposals that curtail the freedom of teachers and researchers to engage in work with academic colleagues, and we reaffirm the paramount importance of the freest possible international movement of scholars and ideas.”

Is it possible to uphold the paramount importance of the freest possible international movement of scholars and ideas and nonetheless to engage in an academic boycott of universities? At first sight the answer is obviously No: an academic boycott is incompatible with the free interchange of scholars, thoughts and materials that normally characterises scholarly work. But might there be circumstances so exceptional that the normal rules have to be suspended? If so, what would these circumstances need to be, and who would decide whether they exist? These are difficult questions, but one point is surely axiomatic: that any criteria for defining circumstances as exceptional, and any mechanism for determining whether such criteria are met, would have to be universally applicable. If they were not, it would be open to any political movement to pursue its ends by demanding an academic boycott of this country or that country, and the universality of scholarship on which the worldwide academic community depends would be destroyed.

The AAUP has now published the September-October issue of its journal, Academe:Bulletin of the AAUP, devoted in good part to the proceedings of a conference on academic boycotts. But the planned conference in fact never took place, and most of the papers that were prepared for the conference and are now published in Academe deal not with general questions of the sort I have mentioned but with the specific question of whether universities in Israel should be boycotted. Nine out of 12 of the contributions to this section of the journal address this question; six of these nine favour a boycott, one opposes it on balance (although its author is one of the most active leaders in Israel of the opposition to the occupation of the West Bank), and two are equivocal.

The implacable, black-and-white world of the contributors is well summarised by Anat Biletzki: “the Israeli occupation of Palestine is the epitome of evil”2, and the theme that comes most strongly through this collection of papers is that Israeli universities are complicit in the occupation. Thus “the universities have not harbored many dissidents; rather, they have tended to harass and restrain such individuals”3; Israeli educational institutions are serving the state “through their links with the military, the political parties, the media, and the economy”4 (educational institutions in other countries, of course, have no such links); “the suppression of dissenting voices in the Israeli academy is one indicator among others of the complicity of university administrations and faculty bodies in the occupation and, indeed, in racism”5; and “no university . . . has ever issued a statement expressing opposition to the occupation”6 (a complaint that casts a new light on the functions universities should be expected to fulfill). The obvious irony – that Anat Biletzki (see her remarks2 above) is a Professor at Tel-Aviv University, and that one of the most outspoken papers in this volume is by Omar Barghouti, who is (or was until recently) a doctoral student at the same University – seems to have passed the contributors by.

In any case the claim that dissidents are hardly to be found in Israeli universities can be easily rebutted. Of the many Israeli academics who question the received wisdom of Zionist history, geography or politics in extremely radical ways one might mention Neve Gordon (Ben-Gurion University), Lev Grinberg (Ben-Gurion), Menachem Klein (Bar-Ilan University), Adi Ophir (Tel Aviv University), Ilan Pappe (Haifa University), Yoav Peled (Tel Aviv), Dan Rabinowitz (Tel Aviv), Uri Ram (Hebrew University), Tanya Reinhart (Tel Aviv), Yehouda Shenhav (Tel Aviv) and Oren Yiftachel (Ben-Gurion). (A perusal of Theory and Criticism, a journal edited by Shenhav, or of the works of the scholars I have mentioned, all of whom can be found via Google, will substantiate what I say). Academics are prominent in the anti-occupation organisations Be’Tselem, Gush Shalom and Yesh G’vul, and of course in Ha’Kampus Lo Shotek (The Campus is not Silent). At last count 358 members of the faculties of Israeli universities had signed a petition on-line demanding an end to the occupation of the West Bank and stating: “We wish to express our appreciation and support for those of our students and lecturers who refuse to serve as soldiers in the occupied territories.”7

To those of us who regard the tragic history of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians as terrible indeed but not, when put alongside Chechnya, Tibet or Darfur, the epitome of evil, no reason is offered in Academe for proposing an academic boycott against institutions in Israel rather than those in Russia, China or Sudan8. Why then did the AAUP, with its noble history of opposition to academic boycotts, publish so dispiriting a collection? And, no less important, why did the AAUP organise what purported to be a serious academic conference but invite so many participants with strongly held views on one of the most intractable of international conflicts? By chance I am in a position to provide partial answers to these questions, and I ask the reader to bear with me if I give an account of my personal experience of this Conference that never happened. I hope that the history will be illuminating.

I first learned about the planned Conference at the beginning of February 2006. Having had for many years an interest in issues concerning academic boycotts I wrote by email on 3 February to Roger Bowen, the Executive Secretary of the AAUP, setting out my anxieties about certain aspects of the Conference (some of them are mentioned above). I attached to my email a copy of a paper9 on scientific boycotts that three Oxford colleagues and I had published in Nature three years earlier, and to my amazement I got the next day an invitation to the Conference, which was to begin in Bellagio on 13 February and to last for five days. I am not clear whether the organisers seriously imagined that anyone could accept such an invitation at nine days’ notice; I certainly couldn’t, and I declined. Several days later a truly bizarre incident occurred: the office that was organising the meeting sent out to delegates a package of reading materials which (through circumstances that have never been adequately explained) included an article, taken from a Holocaust-denying magazine, entitled “The Jewish Declaration of War on Nazi Germany: The Economic Boycott of 1933”. As a result of this extraordinary error the Ford Foundation and the Nathan Cummings Foundation, two of the sponsors of the meeting, issued a joint statement saying that the credibility of the Conference had been undermined, and the third sponsor, the Rockefeller Foundation (which owns the villa in Bellagio at which the Conference was to have been held), asked the AAUP to delay the meeting. Put under this pressure the AAUP reluctantly agreed to postpone the Conference; in fact it has never been rescheduled.

The postponement of the Conference enraged its chief organizer, Professor Joan Scott of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, who on 9 February published an intemperate note10 on-line blaming the postponement on “a carefully-orchestrated campaign to abort the conference by a lobby of people (pro-Israel occupation) who believe that any representation of a point of view other than theirs is anathema.” I waited three weeks in the hope that Scott would recover her temper, and on 3 March wrote her the following email:

Now that some weeks have passed since the decision to postpone the AAUP Conference at Bellagio, I hope you will allow me to comment on what happened. I shall try to explain my views as someone who has published a study of academic boycotts but who had serious doubts about the arrangements for this particular Conference and suggested its postponement. I shall do my best to write dispassionately, as this important topic deserves.

Three years ago I, together with three of my Oxford colleagues in the biological sciences, Colin Blakemore FRS, Richard Dawkins FRS and Denis Noble FRS, published an article in Nature that set out the conclusions of a series of discussions about boycotts that the four of us had held. The printed article was an abbreviated version of a longer paper we had written, which Nature posted on their web site at the same time as printing the shortened text. [I attach the two papers].

One of our axioms was that conclusions about academic boycotts must be generalisable; clearly it would be wrong to mount a boycott of the academics of one country when in similar circumstances the academics of another country would not be boycotted. We therefore sought to examine the general arguments that forbid boycotts (since they are widely held to be inadmissible), but to see whether there were any circumstances in which these arguments could be overridden.

When, early in February of this year, I heard about the plans for the Bellagio Conference I wrote to Dr Bowen attaching copies of our Nature articles. He was good enough to say in reply:

“We have assigned your superb essay in Nature to the conferees as part of their reading assignment for the first day of the proceedings. It is an excellent piece and it is therefore good to be corresponding directly with the author. I wish we had invited you to attend.”

which, although very flattering, made me wonder how thorough the research had been that led to the choice of participants in the Conference [. . .]

[I was not] reassured when I saw the list of participants. Given the point I made earlier, I should have expected to see substantial contributions from moral philosophers. I should also have expected that physical and biological scientists would be well represented, since any academic boycott would have a particular impact on work in the natural sciences. But neither philosophers nor natural scientists were conspicuous among the participants.

Furthermore, I noticed that among the relatively large number of Israelis and Palestinians were several who are already known for their strongly held political views. It seemed to me to be asking a lot of these participants to act, for the purposes of the meeting, as if they were disinterested scholars. With the Conference focused on such a contentious region of the world, where feelings on both sides run so high, I feared that the discourse was not likely to be one in which issues could be discussed "civilly, with respect for one another's positions even if they are not ours" [a quotation from Scott’s comment on-line] – particularly if generalisable principles had not first been arrived at.

Yet another area of concern was the fact that the only participant from the UK was Professor Hilary Rose, who is one of a small minority of members of the Association of University Teachers (AUT) to favour a boycott of Israeli universities. It is probably difficult for anyone who is a not a member of the AUT to gauge the anger of most members over the tactics that were used by a small, unrepresentative minority to force through their two boycott motions at a poorly attended Council meeting last Spring. I shall not describe here the manoeuvres that led to the adoption of these motions, since these have been well publicized elsewhere. But the fact that an emergency meeting of Council was immediately called to overturn the motions, that one local branch after another voted overwhelmingly to rescind them, and that they were then rejected by a large majority at the emergency meeting, is a token of the paucity of the support that Professor Rose and her associates have among university teachers in the UK. Given that the events at the AUT last year were apparently an important impetus to the calling of the Bellagio conference, I know that I am not alone in finding the choice of Professor Rose as sole participant from the UK distinctly eccentric.
[ . . .]

Taking all these areas of concern together, I felt that it would be sensible for the AAUP to postpone the Conference and to reconstitute it at a later date when the problems that I have mentioned had been addressed. I wrote to Dr Bowen in those terms, and in my letter I pointed out a number of disadvantages of proceeding with the meeting as it stood. One of these was that the invitation was likely to enhance the position of the boycott campaigners, who would in the future cite their invitation to so prestigious a conference, in so prestigious a location, as evidence that their position was academically respectable and one that the AAUP was taking seriously. (I have seen the boycotters exploit exactly this kind of situation on previous occasions).

I was not alone in suggesting that it was better to postpone the meeting. I don't know the reasoning of the other people who took that view, but it seems likely that they shared some or all of the concerns that I have set out here. You may, of course, think that these concerns were exaggerated, or that they were overridden by other considerations; but it seemed to me proper for them to be expressed by me and others who felt like me, and I think they should have received reasoned answers. Instead of supplying those answers you characterized those who doubted the wisdom of going ahead with the Conference as "lobbyists on behalf of the current Israeli regime (or fellow travellers of those lobbyists)". This charge is insulting and, at least in respect of those people that I know, false. You further wrote that those who supported the postponement of the Conference "believe that any representation of a point of view other than theirs is anathema", a remark that is equally insulting and equally false.

I suggest to you that such language has no place in addressing a disagreement between academic colleagues, and I hope that, now that you have had a chance to consider these matters at further length, you will withdraw your remarks.

I was pleased to find a reply from Scott displayed on my computer an hour later, but less pleased to discover that it consisted of only five words: “Thank you for your communication.” After waiting a further ten days without receiving a substantive answer, I wrote again:

[. . .] In writing to you [on 3 March] I set out my concerns about the Conference by reasoned argument, as befits discussions between academics on academic matters. I am disappointed that you have not replied. I am more than disappointed that your public response to the postponement of the Conference was couched in language that doesn't befit the subject at all: instead of dealing with the arguments of those (like myself) with whom you disagree, you attacked us personally and impugned our motives.

Your language was objectionable for another reason too. One of the many evils that has disfigured the recent past is anti-Semitism that is often expressed through allegations of Jewish "conspiracies" working against the public good. Your statement that the Bellagio conference was postponed because of the activities of "lobbyists on behalf of the current Israeli regime (or fellow travellers of those lobbyists)" contains ugly echoes of those allegations. I am still hoping you will withdraw such remarks, and I also hope that you will reply to the arguments described in detail in my previous letter.

So far I have received no reply to either of the emails I sent Scott. But readers of this issue of Academe who read her “Introduction to Academic Boycotts”11 will learn how greatly she values “the kind of respectful reasonable exchange that characterizes meetings of the [AAUP’s] Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure”. She goes on “I have served on Committee A for some thirteen years, and in that time I have come to assume that serious differences can be aired, that even highly contentious topics can be frankly discussed, and that I could learn from those with whom I deeply disagreed”. I can only regret that I don’t qualify as someone with whom she feels inclined to have a respectful – or indeed any – exchange.

Meanwhile we may note that Scott’s hint of a Jewish conspiracy is enthusiastically taken up by several of the contributors to Academe. Hilary Rose writes of a “powerful Zionist backlash”12 against previous attempts to boycott Israeli institutions and of “strong and well-funded Zionist interests”13; Anat Biletzki of “the power of Jewish lobbies around the world”14; Salim Vally of “the tactics various affiliates of the Israeli state use to suppress the free speech of academics around the world”15. Bear in mind that these quotations are from papers prepared for what purported to be a scholarly conference on academic boycotts, arranged under the auspices of a long-established and once respected professional body.

* * *

Our voluntary associations are highly vulnerable, and there is a real risk that individuals may subvert them for their own political ends.

Michael Yudkin
Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford and an Emeritus Fellow of Kellogg College.

Michael was one of the authors of the authoritative statement on academic boycotts published in Nature in 2003, of which this is a short summary.

1. The resolutions were overturned a few weeks later by a large majority at a special Council meeting of the AUT.

2. Anat Biletzki (2006) Academe:Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors 92 (5): 73.

3. Hilary Rose (2006) Academe:Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors 92 (5): 53.

4. Sondra Hale (2006) Academe:Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors 92 (5): 51.

5. Lisa Taraki (2006) Academe:Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors 92 (5): 56.

6. ibid.

7. http://www.seruv.org.il/UniversitySupportEng_Print.asp

8. Hilary Rose (op. cit.) writes: “An ‘academic boycott is usually at least once removed from the real target,’ the AAUP’s ‘On Academic Boycotts’ argues. Often, maybe. This is perhaps why an academic boycott of Chinese or Indonesian universities – or, for that matter, American or British universities – may not be appropriate.”

9. Colin Blakemore, Richard Dawkins, Denis Noble and Michael Yudkin (2003) Nature 421: 314.

10. Joan W. Scott (2006) http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/02/09/aaup (posted 9 February 2006).

11. Joan W. Scott (2006) Academe:Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors 92 (5): 36.

12. Hilary Rose, op. cit.

13. ibid.

14. Anat Biletzki, op. cit.

15. Salim Vally (2006) Academe:Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors 92 (5): 64.