Just weeks after the American Association of University Professors reversed course and dropped its longtime opposition to academic boycotts, faculty members on several campuses, days into the new academic year, have started implementing aspects of a boycott of Israel by not assigning articles written by Israeli scholars, refusing to invite Israeli academics to conferences or declining to write study abroad letters for students wishing to spend a semester in Israel. 

Critics accuse the AAUP of deserting its commitment to academic freedom —-  and although the policy does not mention Israel — particularly concerned are pro-Israel campus leaders who say the change will be used to promote the boycott of the Jewish state and as a result have negative consequences for Jewish and Israeli students and faculty. 

The policy change is “not just speech and words,” Miriam Elman, executive director of the Academic Engagement Network, told Jewish Insider, outlining various steps she said are already being taken on some campuses. “There has been wall-to-wall condemnation from academics and organizations that aren’t even [necessarily] in the pro-Israel space, they are just in the academic freedom space,” Elman said, adding that “this is the wrong move for a storied organization.” The AAUP did not immediately respond to a request for comment from JI regarding the criticism. 

Even amid widespread rebuke from campus leaders, experts say that AAUP has a history of anti-Zionism — including the group’s ties to faculty members who participate in Students for Justice in Palestine — and therefore is unlikely to revert back to its previous policy unless its leadership changes. 

“When an academic boycott is approved — and we’re going to see some of them approved in the next year or two because the process is underway — then students are empowered to demonstrate against faculty members who have research relationships with Israel,” warned Cary Nelson, a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign professor emeritus in the English department who served as the AAUP president from 2006-2012. 

In response to the AAUP’s policy change, Nelson co-authored a petition against it — which has since garnered more than 3,000 signatures from professors nationwide. 

Nelson pointed to the anti-Israel encampments that infiltrated universities last year. Even on campuses where there haven’t been violent demonstrations, the potential threat “contributes to an increasingly nasty campus atmosphere,” Nelson told JI. “You’re still afraid of the violence because even if it’s not on your campus it’s happening on the campus across the state.” The change in AAUP’s policy will exacerbate this rhetoric, and make Zionist students and faculty “feel in danger,” Nelson said.  

The AAUP, founded in 1915, has written widely adopted policies on academic freedom. 

For decades it condemned academic boycotts because “the need is always for more academic freedom, not less.” But its new policy, announced on Aug. 9, argues that on the contrary, academic boycotts can promote academic freedom, since academic freedom is reliant on other rights and freedoms. 

The new policy states that when faculty members choose to support academic boycotts, “they can legitimately seek to protect and advance the academic freedom and fundamental rights of colleagues and students” who face violations of their liberties. 

It goes on to say that in those situations, “academic boycotts are not in themselves violations of academic freedom; rather, they can be considered legitimate tactical responses to conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education.”

Historically, the AAUP reiterated its commitment to academic freedom, even amid political pressure. In 2005, the AAUP condemned a proposed academic boycott by the British Association of University Teachers of two Israeli universities, under which academics refused to have ties with the universities. 

Throughout Nelson’s tenure — and the ensuing years — the group maintained its opposition to academic boycotts against any universities worldwide. But its Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure and its national council both unanimously voted on last month’s change. 

Elman noted that the timing of AAUP’s stance purposefully coincides with a “huge momentum” of university leaders adopting the policy of institutional neutrality — which allows individual faculty to be critics but for universities to not take political stances. “The anti-Israel movement all saw what the AAUP did as a huge success for [the boycott Israel] movement, so now they’re saying universities need to adopt a boycott policy,” Elman said, calling the policy change “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”   

The resulting pushback from campus leaders has been “fierce,” Elman added. “And I don’t think they expected that,” she said of the AAUP. 

Several nonprofit groups dedicated to defending academic freedom, including the Academic Freedom Alliance and Heterodox Academy, have also expressed condemnation of the AAUP’s new policy.  

“Academic boycotts are pernicious precisely because they bring the urge for political activism and the obligations of the academic profession into direct conflict,” Heterodox Academy said in an August statement.

“In affirming that professors have a right to engage in academic boycotts, the AAUP has abandoned an ideal that is close to the core of the scholarly profession itself,” the group’s statement continued. “That ideal roots the rights and responsibilities of the academic profession in the search for knowledge. Erstwhile defenders of academic freedom, and of the rights and responsibilities of self-governance that attend it, the AAUP has walked off the field.The leaders of the AAUP should be aware that there is a price to be paid for the abandonment of scholarship as a unique and specialized set of norms.” 

Nelson said he does not believe AAUP will reverse the policy because of the “anti-Zionist and antisemitic” decision-makers, which includes members who are active faculty participants in campus chapters of SJP and other anti-Israel groups. 

In response to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s condemnation of the illegal anti-Israel encampments and building occupations that overtook dozens of campuses around the U.S. in April, Todd Wolfson, the president of AAUP and a Rutgers University associate professor of journalism and media studies, wrote on X that Netanyahu is a “fascist” who has “no right to talk about peaceful protests in the U.S. as he murders thousands in Gaza.” In July, Wolfson tweeted a petition urging the New Jersey Senate to vote against adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s  working definition of antisemitism. “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism,” he wrote. 

Rotua Lumbantobing, AAUP’s vice president and an economics professor at Western Connecticut State University, signed on to a CUNY system-wide open letter in 2021 that pledged to “initiate, support, and amplify campaigns in solidarity with Palestinian calls for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israeli apartheid, at CUNY and in our wider communities.”  

“If I were 20 years younger, I might [start a new group]” with more moderate leaders, Nelson said, emphasizing that there is a need for one, “but it’s a huge project to start something like that.”

It would “require a lot of money,” Nelson said, “and also a major change in the Jewish community’s philanthropic organizations [because] they have lost interest in faculty.”   

Instead, Nelson said he’s focusing his energy on leading the academic boycott blowback, which has several goals. “One is to give university administrators a feeling that there is a strong faculty constituency in opposition to academic boycotts,” he said. “The AAUP does not speak for all of us, in fact there are thousands of us who feel strongly that this is outrageous.” 

The second goal, Nelson continued, “is to build a movement so that faculty members who are Zionist —  and others who aren’t Zionist but just support academic freedom — get some stiffening to their spines. We need a sense of solidarity and collective support.”  

The pushback is also meant to prevent students “from being victims of this move towards anti-Zionism and antisemitism,” Nelson told JI. But he added that students have several groups on campus, such as Hillel and Chabad, to find support. 

“Faculty really don’t, they don’t have much to turn to,” Nelson said, expressing hope that the strong reaction to AAUP’s policy change will show faculty that they “are not alone and without support in the opposition to academic boycotts and in the opposition to antisemitism.”