MIT campus. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Despite the efforts of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement to isolate Israeli academia, prestigious American universities continue to consider the Jewish state “a preferred collaboration partner for US researchers,” a newly released report revealed.

According to “US-Israel Academic Collaboration” — a project of the Samuel Neaman Institute for National Policy Research and the Israel on Campus Coalition — nearly 5,000 joint publications were produced between 2006 and 2015, with the highest quantity of works coming from the medical and STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) communities.

MIT topped the list, with 1,835 publications written with authors affiliated with Tel Aviv University, the Hebrew University, the Technion, the Weizmann Institute and Ben-Gurion University.

UC Berkeley ranked second, with 1,697 publications, followed by Columbia, with 1,596.

Other top-tier universities noted for their work with Israeli academics in the last decade include Harvard, Stanford, University of Pennsylvania, UC Irvine, Yale, Ohio State University and California Institute of Technology.

The report also found a spike in the number of joint publications in the social sciences, though the field remains an area in which there is infrequent scholarly collaboration with Israel.

The findings of the report come on the heels of another blow to BDS in academia, when, as The Algemeiner reported, NYU President Andrew Hamilton slammed the movement as “an affront to academic freedom.”