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Antisemitism Now Has ‘Academic Mandate,’ Leading Expert on Academic Freedom Tells Indiana Conference on Jew-Hatred

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Interview

An Israeli ‘Apartheid Wall’ at Duke University in 2019. Photo: Amy Rosenthal

The latest wave of anti-Zionism now sweeping through some academic departments at US universities is having a chilling effect on how scholarship on Zionism, Jewish history and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is being conducted, the former head of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) argues.

In a lengthy interview with The Algemeiner, Cary Nelson — the Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts & Sciences Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who is a former president of the AAUP and current chair of the Alliance for Academic Freedom — said that he had personally been approached by pro-Israel faculty members concerned about their jobs.

“I already have a few emails from pro-Israel people asking things like, ‘what’s gonna happen to me? My department is now formally opposed to my beliefs,'” Nelson disclosed. “They’ll ask, ‘will I get sabbatical support? Do I get to teach my courses?'”

The author and editor of 35 books, including 2019’s “Israel Denial: Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism and the Faculty Campaign Against the Jewish State,” Nelson is a well-known veteran of the political conflict over the academic boycott of Israeli universities. What was different about the present situation, he explained, was the formal adoption of anti-Zionist positions by teaching departments, and not only professional academic bodies like the American Anthropological Association and the National Association of Women’s Studies, both of which endorsed the boycott of Israel in 2019.

“Once a department and its administrator embrace political convictions, the academic freedom of those who disagree is compromised,” Nelson told a Monday morning panel on educational theory at the ongoing conference on antisemitism in the US convened by the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism at Indiana University, Bloomington.

“Students who hold other views can face the bullying power of their professors. Dissenters  — faculty, staff, and students — who remain in perfectly good standing as scholars and teachers are branded outlaws,” he stated.

What Nelson described as a “huge change in terms of academic freedom” took place in May of this year, during the renewed clashes between Israel and the Hamas terrorist organization in Gaza. At the height of the fighting, more than 100 women’s and gender studies departments endorsed an anti-Israel statement that, as Nelson put it, “formally committed them to an anti-Zionist departmental policy.”

“That had never happened before,” he emphasized.

The adoption of a formally anti-Zionist policy that, in its wording, depicts Israel as an “apartheid state” and bitterly rejects the “‘both sides’ rhetoric that erases the military, economic, media, and global power that Israel has over Palestine,” will have “ramifications for everything those departments do,” Nelson warned.

“Why should their faculty want to represent diverse opinions in the classroom if their department opposes the legitimacy of Israel?” he asked.

The “vulnerability” of students with dissenting views is arguably of greater concern to Nelson, who paints a bleak picture of what lies ahead for them.

“I think the need to honor divergent student opinion is disappearing from those programs already,” Nelson said. “If you look at the syllabi, there’s not a single pro-Zionist reading, or if there is one, it’s just there as a target for condemnation. So if you’re a student and you want to express a different opinion, you have to refer to a text or texts that the other students have not read; you’re voicing an opinion that the other students see no evidence for.”

Nelson added that the AAUP’s guidance to treat students “with respect” is taken less and less seriously. “Those faculty members who don’t want to treat Zionist students with respect will feel, ‘I just got a free pass,'” Nelson said.

A related problem identified by Nelson concerns the use of social media by anti-Zionist faculty. Changes to AAUP rules mean that their declarations on social media platforms, no matter how venomously expressed, are considered to be protected.

“Academic freedom plays out differently in different professional areas,” Nelson said. “One area is what you can say on social media, even though the idea that there is a difference between what you say on campus and in the real world has pretty much been erased.”

According to Nelson, “the AAUP for years took the position that when you make statements on social media within your area of expertise, these are not protected from review.” For example, a professor of European history who posted statements denying the Holocaust would, under this system, have their fitness to teach challenged. However, this approach changed in 2015. “Now anything a faculty member says on social media is considered public, not professional,” Nelson said.

One of the triggers for this shift was the Twitter feed of a virulently anti-Zionist academic, Steven Salaita, whose outbursts cost him a planned tenured position at the University of Illinois in 2014. Nelson said that anti-Zionist members of the AAUP’s “Committee A,” which deals with academic freedom, were determined to protect Salaita from criticism for postings that attacked Israel in graphic, intemperate tones.

“Their hostility to Israel led them to make a bad decision about Salaita’s excessive anti-Zionist tweets despite him teaching the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Nelson remarked. “They decided that all faculty social media opinion has to be protected by academic freedom regardless of whether it’s rational or irrational. They ditched the whole notion of responsibility.”

In his paper to the ISCA gathering, Nelson observed that the net effect of the campus wars over Zionism had been to further legitimize expressions of antisemitism.

“We are entering a world in which antisemitism has an academic mandate,” Nelson argued.

“Efforts to delegitimate Holocaust memory, to declare Israel the world’s worst human rights violator, to invoke an absurd fantasy of limitless Jewish lobbying power, all these demonic tropes are threats to higher education,” he said.

He warned that antisemitism had been turned into “a social good within anti-Zionism’s alternative universe.”

“Disciplinary consensus is no longer a sound basis for academic freedom protections,” he concluded. “Countering disciplinary politicization requires that all disciplines confront it.”

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