The 373rd Commencement Exercises at Harvard University, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, May 23, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has issued a statement in support of academic boycotts, a seismic decision which reverses decades of policy and clears the way for scholar activists to escalate their efforts to purge the university of Zionism and educational partnerships with Israel.

“We … recognize that the committee’s position opposing academic boycotts has been controversial, contested, and used to compromise academic freedom,” the organization said in a statement issued on Monday. “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 are living and working under circumstances that violate that freedom and one or more of those rights. In such contexts, 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.”

Coming amid a bitter debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on college campuses and Israel’s war to eradicate Hamas from the Gaza Strip, the statement does not mention the Jewish State specifically. However, its countenancing the anti-Israel boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement — whose proponents believe that expelling Zionism from major cultural institutions is a first step toward Israel’s destruction — is clear, higher education watchdog AMCHA Initiative said on Monday.

“The AAUP’s decision to green-light academic BDS and reverse a decades-long policy opposing it is not just a catastrophe for Jewish students and faculty, but for the future of higher education in America,” it said. “By giving license to an academic boycott that encourages faculty to replace genuine scholarship with political activism whose express goal is to destroy the Jewish state and rid US campuses of Zionism and Zionists, the organization that has been setting the standards on academic freedom since 1915 just made a mockery of every single one of its own standards and is unleashing a tsunami of academic antisemitism that will echo the darkest chapters of Jewish history.”

Another higher education group, Faculty Against Antisemitism Movement (FAAM) described the AAUP’s decision as “wrong,” arguing that “academic boycotts contradict core principles of our higher education system — open inquiry, unfettered intellectual exchange, and academic freedom. And they are a core tactic of the BDS movement.”

Founded in 1915 by John Dewey and Arthur Oncken Lovejoy, the AAUP comprises over 370,000 members from higher education institutions across the US. Once regarded as a guardrail preventing the politicization of higher education, it has in recent years been disparaged — by nonprofits such as the National Association of Scholars (NAS), for example —  for allegedly becoming a partisan advocacy group for the far left.

Following Hamas’ massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, two and a half weeks passed before the AAUP commented on the ensuing conflict between Israel and Hamas, and when it did, the group said nothing about the Palestinian terrorist group’s atrocities, instead discussing the importance of academic freedom. At the time, dozens of professors were denounced for cheering Hamas’ violence and encouraging extreme anti-Zionist demonstrations in which masses of students and faculty called for the elimination of the Jewish state “from the river to the sea,” which is widely considered a call for genocide.

On Tuesday, Peter Wood, author and president of the National Association of Scholars, told The Algemeiner that it was once “indisputably true” that the AAUP was a “leading champion of academic freedom.” However, he added, with its latest statement the organization “finally crossed the line into outright political action — action that reversed one of the AAUP’s long-standing commitments to academic freedom in favor of academic coercion.”

He continued, “The AAUP’s ‘Statement on Academic Boycotts’ should be seen as another benchmark in the progress of academic antisemitism. The AAUP appears to be ready to abandon more than a hundred years of advocating for principled neutrality among faculty to lurch into support for academic boycotts. It is, however, a sly statement and employs finesse to advance its dubious cause … The campus is a special place, set aside for free intellectual inquiry, and in no way suited to the dynamics of mass conformity. By opening the door to academic boycotts, the AAUP undermines academic freedom. And by opening that door right now, it offers cover to the antisemites who are using BDS as one of their covers for their campaign to destroy Israel.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.