Since College President Phil Hanlon announced his opposition to the American Studies Association’s boycott of Israeli institutions in an email to campus on Dec. 28, many Dartmouth students and faculty members have echoed his statements, while others have spoken out in vehement support of the boycott.
With his announcement, Hanlon joined more than 80 college and university presidents nationwide in condemning the group’s objection to scholarly collaboration with Israeli universities. The association, composed of academics who study American culture and history, voted by a two-to-one margin in favor of the boycott, which was sparked by disapproval of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
Although the association has under 5,000 members, making it smaller than other academic organizations, its boycott received widespread publicity and has sparked debate on university campuses nationwide. Every Ivy League university president has publicly opposed the association’s decision, many through statements sent to their respective campuses and others by signing the Association of American Universities’ anti-boycott response.
“Collaboration, especially across significant points of tension and difference, is essential to fostering mutual understanding and solving the world’s most complex problems,” Hanlon said in his statement.
Six institutions to date — Indiana University, Brandeis University, Bard College, Pennsylvania State University at Harrisburg, Kenyon College and the University of Texas at Dallas — have withdrawn their Association membership in response to the boycott.Other college and university presidents who oppose the boycott, including Hanlon, have taken more moderate stances, encouraging students, staff and faculty to voice their personal opinions and engage with the debate and with the Association freely.
Zachary Kamin ’14, co-chair of pro-Israel and pro-peace student group J Street U, said an academic boycott is not conducive to creating healthy discourse and a more peaceful world.
“I support the opposition,” he said. “In general, academic boycotts stifle open dialogue that can be important to creating a more peaceful and cooperative world in the long run.”Religion professor and Jewish studies program chair Ehud Benor said he agreed with Hanlon’s statement, citing the importance of Israeli academia in the discourse about Israeli-Palestinian relations as a reason to oppose the Association’s stance.
“The Israeli academy has been the one consistent force attuned and committed to the reasonable expectations of the international community,” Benor said. “Boycotting your ally is a poor substitute to boycotting your rival.”
Government department chair John Carey also emphasized Israel’s distinguished academic reputation and the connection between scholars there and at Dartmouth.
Many Dartmouth professors have professional relationships with Israeli academics, he said.
Carey rejected the idea of an academic boycott of any kind, a sentiment that Hanlon also expressed.
“Clearly this was motivated by an opposition to Israeli government policy, but I don’t see a boycott of Israeli academic institutions as a constructive step,” he said. “I don’t support it in any regard.”
Ala’ Alrababa’h ’14, who recently restarted Dartmouth’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, emphasized that scholars on both sides of the issue stand together in disagreeing with the boycott.
“President Hanlon is trying to do what is best for Dartmouth, and his decision makes sense,” Alrababa’h said. “Even pro-Palestinian scholars, including [University of Michigan professor and Middle East expert] Juan Cole, have opposed such boycotts of Israeli academic institutions because Israeli academics tend to be among the most moderate and pro-peace parts of Israeli society.”
History professor Russell Rickford, who has publicly endorsed the boycott, said he found Hanlon’s statement insincere and believed it asserted a false equivalency between Israel and Palestine.
“It’s absurd to suggest that in the absence of boycotts, an open forum for free exchange about Israel and Palestine exists in the academy or in our society,” Rickford said in an email.
Rickford also said academics should bring the pro-Palestinian perspective to light. Mainstream media and culture perpetuate American support for “Israeli militarism and imperialism,” he said.
“Scholars have a responsibility to speak truth to power, and to expose the suffering of the oppressed and the colonized at the hands of world powers,” he said. “The ASA boycott is only another small but important challenge to the massive bias toward Israel that exists among the institutions of the wealthy and the powerful — a bias that is aggressively cultivated and maintained.”
Native American studies program chair Bruce Duthu, who also supports the boycott, joined in a statement written by the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, of which he is the treasurer. The statement asks academics to continue “honoring this boycott until such time as the rights of the Palestinian people are respected and discriminatory policies are ended.”
Simon Bronner, an American studies professor at Penn State Harrisburg and an association member who has broadly criticized the boycott, said Hanlon’s statements, while symbolic, reaffirm universities’ missions of promoting dialogue.
“These statements reassure the public, students and faculty that the university continues to stand for being an open forum,” he said.
Some university presidents, however, have faced criticism for their anti-boycott stances.New York University president John Sexton has been accused of hypocrisy for opposing the Association boycott but failing to speak out against the United Arab Emirates, where NYU operates a satellite campus, for alleged transgressions against academic freedom. At Trinity College, 21 faculty members wrote an open letter to President James Jones, saying his statement opposing the boycott “avoids the fine-grained conversation and returns to cliched denunciations.”
Last weekend, the Modern Language Association’s annual conference in Chicago drew more than 7,000 people, including more than 20 Dartmouth professors. During the conference, the association’s delegate assembly voted in favor of a resolution calling on the U.S. State Department to challenge Israel’s blockade of American scholars to Palestinian academic institutions. The association denied, however, that its vote was a precursor to a boycott, and struck down a measure in support of the American Studies Association.
Staff reporter Iris Liu contributed reporting to this article.
