Dartmouth College’s government department is recruiting for a new visiting professor position, funded by an anonymous donor and open exclusively to faculty affiliated with Israeli universities. In tandem, Dartmouth’s Kalaniyot chapter — an Israel-specific, faculty-led academic partnership — is expanding support for multiple initiatives that bring Israeli academics to campus and facilitate Dartmouth faculty engagement with Israeli universities.
Dartmouth’s preferential expansion of Israeli academic exchange stands in stark contrast to the near-total destruction of Palestinian higher education. In August 2025, the International Association of Genocide Scholars passed a resolution stating that Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide under 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention. In September, the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry reached the same conclusion. Other prominent human rights bodies — including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch — have likewise concluded Israel’s conduct in Gaza constitutes genocide.
A central element of this erasure has been “scholasticide,” the systematic eradication of scholars, students, academic institutions and the conditions necessary for intellectual life. Most schools in Gaza have been destroyed or severely damaged, along with virtually every university. Gazan children have been denied access to even basic schooling since 2023, placing the future of the Palestinian educational pipeline in doubt.
Scholasticide is not confined to Gaza. Palestinian academics in the West Bank face pervasive travel restrictions that prevent them from traveling within their own country, let alone attending conferences or accepting visiting appointments abroad. Those who protest the destruction of their institutions face violent repression from the Israeli military. Palestinian students and scholars, including those displaced to nearby countries, encounter statelessness, visa denial, and effective exclusion from global academia. These conditions have not abated despite claims of a ceasefire — on the contrary, Israel is accelerating efforts to annex what remains of the West Bank, placing the future of remaining Palestinian universities in jeopardy.
Regardless of the justification for these policies, their cumulative effect is clear: Israel has rendered academic survival for large segments of Palestinians functionally impossible — let alone any sort of academic exchange. In this context, Dartmouth’s preferential expansion of Israeli academic mobility, funding and prestige cannot be understood as neutral.
Consider the government department’s own job posting, which requires applicants to describe how their work advances Dartmouth’s commitment to an academic environment that is “welcoming to all.” Yet eligibility is restricted to faculty affiliated with Israeli universities — institutions operating within a legal and political regime that bars Palestinians from the Israeli-occupied territories from studying, working or even entering their campuses. Israeli courts have upheld stringent criteria governing Palestinian access to Israeli universities, and movement restrictions between the West Bank, Gaza and Israel remain largely closed. Whatever the personal commitments of individual scholars, these institutions are not “welcoming to all” so long as Palestinians living under Israeli occupation are structurally excluded.
These conditions reveal how exclusion is embedded in the partnerships the College is advancing. Under such circumstances, even non-Israeli Palestinian members of Dartmouth’s own community would face legal and logistical barriers to participating in research and collaborations with Israeli universities. This is not a hypothetical concern, but a foreseeable consequence of engaging with an academic system shaped by legal exclusion. Ariel University further illustrates how discriminatory structures shape this academic environment — and the risks this creates for Dartmouth. Built in an Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank, widely regarded as illegal under international law, it is both legally and practically inaccessible to Palestinians from the very communities displaced by the settlement.
Yet nothing in the government department’s posting suggests that candidates from institutions in settlements would not be considered. Indeed, Kalaniyot’s Dartmouth grants appear to welcome academics from Ariel University via its membership in Israel’s Association of University Heads. Whether the posting’s lack of exclusions reflects oversight or deliberate choice, the result is the same: Dartmouth is left exposed to institutional entanglement with serious legal and ethical violations.
In this light, the portrayal of this pattern of preferential Israeli academic access as apolitical is untenable. Kalaniyot’s name and logo invoke Israel’s national flower, and its website frames the program as “mark[ing] the rejuvenation of U.S. campuses following the events of Oct. 7, 2023” — a clear reference to the politicized campus climate that followed Oct. 7. The government department’s initiative falls into the same optics: A visiting professorship in Israeli politics is, by definition, political, and anonymous donor funding raises clear concerns about transparency and intent.
Opposition to these programs has been dismissed as an “academic boycott.” That framing is disingenuous. The objection is not to individual scholars or viewpoints, but to institutional policies that confer legitimacy, resources and reputational benefit on a state facing credible findings of genocide and other grave violations of international law. For Dartmouth, declining to participate in such programs is not censorship; it is moral boundary-setting.
Appeals to dialogue and academic freedom bypass this reality. Government professor and associate dean of social sciences Benjamin Valentino said in a recent interview with The Dartmouth, “Especially in situations when there are differences of opinion, I favor more communication rather than less.” While understandable at face value, this assumes a parity that does not remotely exist. When one side is being systematically deprived of the ability to speak, teach, travel and survive as an intellectual community, expanding a one-sided academic exchange does not foster dialogue — it entrenches asymmetry.
Critically reexamining the role of Kalaniyot and Israel-specific professorships would neither silence ideas nor restrict inquiry. It would acknowledge that selectively expanding academic channels for one nation is an inherently political act. Doing so when that nation faces credible accusations of having committed humanity’s gravest crimes cannot be justified. Academic freedom does not require universities to provide platforms or partnerships that function as reputational laundering for state violence.
Dartmouth is under no obligation to maintain country-specific academic pipelines. Exercising restraint would reflect institutional judgment, not censorship. In contrast, continuing preferential academic exchange with Israel in the shadow of genocide is not neutrality. It is an endorsement.
Peter Cooch is a member of the Class of 2007 and Dartmouth Alumni for Palestine. Guest columns represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
