Cary Nelson (photo: Don LaVange)
One of the most prominent US voices against the academic boycott of Israel is Cary Nelson, professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. From 2006 to 2012, Nelson served as the president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the leading organization championing academic freedom and shared governance in US postsecondary schools.
In the name of academic freedom, the AAUP has spoken out against pro-Israel attempts at campus censorship, as in the high-profile cases of Norman Finkelstein, Joseph Massad, Nadia Abu El-Haj, and last year’s BDS talk at Brooklyn College. At the same time, the AAUP has taken a position against all academic boycotts, also citing academic freedom.
Nelson’s still-prominent role in the AAUP, along with his extensive writing and advocacy for academic freedom, has allowed him to speak authoritatively against the academic boycott of Israel in outlets such as Inside Higher Ed, Democracy Now!, and Aljazeera, while being quoted extensively elsewhere.
Until recently, his left-liberal activism and limited commentary on Palestine/Israel has distanced him from charges of bias toward Israel in his opposition to the boycott. It was in this context that I decided to examine his viewpoint further, initially believing that his was a stance based on a genuine commitment to academic freedom, and I wanted to explore those arguments.
What I found instead was a conception of academic freedom that was contradictory and self-serving. His defenses of Finkelstein, Massad, and Abu El-Haj were sprinkled with backhanded insults, passive aggressiveness, and condescension. His attempts at being neutral only slightly concealed his deference to Israel.
As this study demonstrates, Nelson wields his authority on academic freedom as a type of power with which he undermines those he disagrees, while pretending to defend their right to hold contrary viewpoints. In the process, I will also show that the AAUP itself, which has taken an absolutist position against academic boycotts, is not as principled or consistent on the issue as it may seem.
This study is broken into three parts and several sections, clickable below:
Part 1. Cary Nelson and the AAUP do boycotts
Boycotting universities for labor rights, but not for other human rights
South Africa divestment as “collateral” damage to academic freedom
The AAUP’s resolutions on South Africa: too little, too late
AAUP censure as a form of boycott
The AAUP singles out Iran
Nelson on the MLA: Yesterday it was “academic freedom”; today it’s “process”
Part 2. “Pro-Palestinian political correctness” vs. “pro-Israeli opinion”
Finkelstein, Massad, and Abu El-Haj: Academic freedom as charity
Benny Morris: Academic freedom as a bonus
Justifying Israeli closure of Palestinian schools
In support of the “politicized campus”
Part 3. After the ASA boycott
ASA boycott vote more legitimate than any AAUP election
Nelson abandons the academic freedom argument
From the AAUP to the Israel Action Network
Cary Nelson becomes unhinged
Conclusion: Academic freedom becomes a restraint for its biggest advocate
Part 1. Cary Nelson and the AAUP do boycotts
Boycotting universities for labor rights, but not for other human rights
Cary Nelson claims that his opposition to boycotting universities is based on the sanctity of free academic exchange. In a debate over the American Studies Association (ASA) boycott on Democracy Now!, he said,
[T]he AAUP has, for many years, opposed all academic boycotts, basically because we believe that what’s most desirable is to keep free exchange amongst academics worldwide and to do everything possible to facilitate all kinds of intellectual and cultural exchanges between academics. And we’re well aware that saying that you can simply boycott a university and not have an impact on its faculty members is really a false kind of reasoning.
However in April 2006, as the incoming president of the AAUP, Nelson called for a boycott of New York University (NYU):
Nelson said that he was planning a “personal boycott” of NYU and that he would soon be encouraging other faculty members nationally to consider steps similar to those he will take, such as refusing to serve on NYU tenure review or publication review committees, refusing to speak on the campus, advising students against enrolling at graduate school or seeking employment there, and generally having “no active relationship” with the university.
Cary Nelson (second row, left) with outgoing AAUP president Jane Buck blocking a street at the NYU graduate assistants’ strike, April 27, 2006.
At the time, graduate teaching and research assistants at NYU had gone on strike, demanding that the university recognize their union. On April 27, 2006, Nelson was arrested along with fifty-six other protesters as they blocked a street near the NYU administration offices. Also arrested was Jane Buck, the outgoing AAUP president and an ostensible opponent of university boycotts. Nelson and Buck issued a joint statement proudly declaring:
Never before in its 91-year history have the officers of the American Association of University Professors heard the call to be arrested in the line of duty.
NYU spokesperson John Beckman responded to Nelson’s boycott call with the classic “What about China?” misdirection:
Beckman wondered whether Nelson and others would apply any boycotts to all private universities, since they share NYU’s position on graduate student unions. (Nelson said in an interview after he was released by authorities that NYU was “the center of the struggle” and was an appropriate focus because its graduate students had voted for a union.)
Either that, or Cary Nelson doesn’t support NYU’s right to exist. Nelson is not averse to using Beckman’s misdirection fallacy to counter criticism of Israel, as we’ll see later.
In September 2006, five months after his NYU arrest, Nelson joined a strike at Eastern Michigan University (EMU), where faculty members of the AAUP union chapter were fighting over contract negotiations. The strike lasted nearly two weeks, disrupting the start of the school year. EMU president John A. Fallon claimed the strike was illegal and called on the faculty to get back to academia:
Our students expect their professors to be in the classroom, and not out on an illegal strike … We have every hope that the AAUP will terminate the strike and work toward a resolution without further injury to the University and our students.
At the picket line, Nelson, helped to coordinate the “turning away [of] delivery trucks” from the university:
On one occasion I persuaded a Teamster member delivering hamburger buns to call his office, which agreed to cancel the rest of the week’s deliveries. At a major university construction site, the concrete trucks had nonunion drivers. A cell phone call reached the concrete supplier, whose union loaders agreed not to load more concrete trucks.
Cary Nelson (left) disrupting academic exchange at Eastern Michigan University, along with former AAUP general secretary Ernst Benjamin, who is also a vocal opponent of the ASA boycott.
In these actions, Nelson was definitely intent on disrupting the everyday interactions of the university and therefore obstructing “free exchange” in academia by:
Encouraging faculty and/or graduate assistants to not work.
Preventing supplies from reaching the university.
Calling for a boycott that entails having “no active relationship” with the university.
These were strikes, but the tactics employed encompassed those used in a boycott. In fact, the tactics practiced and supported by Nelson went beyond what has been called for in the ASA boycott resolution.
Nelson has since written at length about the virtues of cutting off a target campus from the outside world. In his book, No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom, Nelson suggests useful tactics to disrupt business as usual in academia:
It is certainly easiest to prevent deliveries to a self-contained campus with its own clearly defined boundaries and with a limited number of entrances. An urban campus such as NYU, with buildings owned by multiple businesses in the same area, presents much greater difficulties, but it is still possible to map major delivery sites, loading docks, and other points where pickets can inhibit deliveries.
Nelson approvingly cites a case in which cutting off the university’s supply line placed “long-term experiments … on the verge of collapsing”:
Decades ago, a strike at the University of Wisconsin was won in part because conservative faculty pressured the administration to settle when food deliveries to animal labs were prevented and long-term experiments were on the verge of collapsing.
He also encourages secondary boycotts to ramp up the pressure against universities by bringing a wider “zone of impact … to a halt”:
Strikers and their allies should also consider boycotting all local businesses, or at least those that refuse to support the strike, so that business owners have reason to pressure an administration to settle. That will also increase the amount of publicity a strike can generate. In a large city, it will be necessary to define a zone of impact, since one cannot expect to bring New York City or Washington, DC, to a halt. But denial of patronage can still be part of a successful strategy, especially if it is honored by all campus workers and their friends.
Disruptions must be wide-reaching and relentless:
[Y]ou have to make daily life unmanageable … [G]ive key administrators no peace. Place chanting pickets outside their homes. Disrupt every meeting they attend with sardonic or inspiring public theater. Arrange building occupations and street demonstrations every week. The goal is protest without end.
And notice here that Nelson is less interested in academic freedom when it might cut into fair wages for teachers and graduate assistants. In such cases, it is no longer “academic freedom,” but “gratuitous pet projects”:
Deny administrators the right to fund gratuitous pet projects at the expense of a principled campus salary schedule. If administrators refuse to comply, sit in their offices, sit in front of their cars, block campus streets, block access to buildings, picket their houses. Use nonviolent civil disobedience to force change.
Such actions and endorsements—expressed while Nelson was the president of the AAUP—completely invalidate his charge that boycotting a university crosses a red line. It also demonstrates that academic freedom has a limit at which point other needs take priority.
One might argue that in the examples Nelson provides, it is necessary to temporarily limit academic freedom in order to promote greater academic freedom in the long run. If so, then it only reinforces the same claims being made in support of the ASA boycott.
However, this argument has already been rejected by current AAUP first vice-president Henry Reichman, who wrote that
the whole idea of boycotting academic institutions in order to defend academic freedom is utterly wrongheaded. Violations of academic freedom can be found anywhere.
Still, some may argue that securing labor rights in the university is necessary to uphold academic freedom. It is true that certain aspects of campus labor disputes are intertwined with academic freedom, such as issues of job security (when it may be susceptible to political pressure) and shared governance. However, these are not always the disputes that compel a university strike. In the case of Eastern Michigan University, the dispute focused on a proposed pay package and unacceptable out-of-pocket health insurance expenses.
Under such circumstances, evoking academic freedom does a disservice to the many other workers who are fighting for labor rights outside of academia. They are just as deserving of fair wages and benefits but cannot stake a claim to the supposedly higher calling of academic freedom. To say otherwise is to sell them down the river in the interests of securing one’s own profession.
Indeed, as Nelson makes the case for labor justice, academic freedom is not in the bigger picture:
No employee group, it must be clear, acts simply out of self-interest in such struggles … The issue is the worldwide exploitation of workers in all industries. The call is to rise up and take possession of economic justice … a campus that exploits its labor force educates all its students in the logic of exploitation and sends them forth to practice it with untroubled consciences.
Nelson also assigns an important role to academia that is so pointed that others may find it inconsistent with academic freedom:
How higher education does or does not perform its commitment to human decency, how it does or does not enact community responsibility, now has the power to shape worldwide standards in all industries. Collective action is the one and only way we can guarantee that the academy’s impact will be salutary, rather than malicious.
To be sure, the AAUP, while rejecting academic boycotts, does permit strikes against universities. From its 2005 report, “On Academic Boycotts”:
Under AAUP policy, chapters that engage in collective bargaining can participate in a strike. Moreover, while AAUP policy states that strikes and other such actions are “not desirable for the resolution of conflicts within institutions of higher education,” it also states that in certain cases “resort to economic pressure through strikes or other work actions may be a necessary and unavoidable means of dispute resolution.”
However, the report acknowledges that the tactics involved in a labor strike are not limited to “economic pressure” and may interfere with academic freedom:
A strike is an economic boycott … but it often involves pressures that are not exclusively economic, such as the local faculty union’s asking outside speakers not to come to a campus during a strike or the refusal of faculty elsewhere to attend conferences held on a campus where a strike is in process. So, while the AAUP insists on action that conforms to its principles, practical issues sometimes produce dilemmas that must be addressed…
The AAUP report’s way of addressing these “dilemmas” is reductive: It labels AAUP-endorsed actions, such as strikes, as “economic boycotts” because they primarily mean to hurt a target economically. In the course of a strike, academic freedom may be inconvenienced, but that’s just a side effect and not an aim.
This is a self-serving argument. A strike is meant to disrupt business as usual, not just cause economic damage. Nelson said so himself:
It’s time to interrupt business as usual on these campuses across the country.
Any economic damage caused by NYU grad students going on strike would have been negligible. As Nelson wrote,
the withdrawal of teaching labor never wields sufficient force to bring an administration to the bargaining table.
The goal in blocking the street was to draw attention to their cause. At the University of Wisconsin strike, halting “food deliveries to animal labs” was intended to interfere with long-term experiments.
As we shall see, the AAUP report’s equivocation is a retroactive attempt to bring in line its support for labor organizing and South African divestment with its pious portrayal of academic freedom.
South African divestment as “collateral” damage to academic freedom
In No University Is an Island, Cary Nelson attempts to square the AAUP’s opposition to an academic boycott of Israel with its history of supporting South African divestment:
In 2005, the AAUP issued a statement condemning all academic boycotts, which essentially formalized what had long been the organization’s practice. The AAUP had endorsed a general economic boycott of South Africa years earlier, a boycott that had collateral effects on higher education, but consistently rejected boycotts singling out universities.
Nelson, in justifying the AAUP’s support for “a general economic boycott of South Africa” during apartheid, admits that such a move “had collateral effects on higher education”—a muted acknowledgment that the economic boycott obstructed academic freedom in South Africa.
Divestment efforts against apartheid, such as the kind that the AAUP supported, compelled foreign businesses to cease transactions with South Africa. One such company that complied was University Microfilms International (UMI).
In early 1987, UMI was “the only available microfilm service to [South African] universities” when it announced that it would cease doing business with South Africa. This was described in the press as
the most drastic development to date in the growing international boycott of South African faculties …
Shocked lecturers at Johannesburg’s multiracial Witwatersrand University warned that they would have difficulty keeping abreast of research done abroad and that even their status as academics could eventually be called into question by the international research community.
University librarians and academics said the microfilm service was the only information conduit from the US on unpublished dissertations and doctoral theses. (Irish Times, Feb. 4, 1987)
The 2005 AAUP report rejects the UMI action as part of the academic boycott campaign against South Africa, which the AAUP never supported, as opposed to the “economic boycott” campaign, which the AAUP did support.
However, that distinction is not accurate. UMI was a subsidiary of Bell & Howell (now known as ProQuest). In a letter addressed to South African customers, UMI president Joseph J. Fitzsimmons wrote,
[I]t is the policy of our parent corporation, Bell & Howell Company, to discontinue selling to or buying from the government of South Africa or any South African businesses or institutions. As a Bell & Howell subsidiary, we must comply with this policy completely.
UMI never signed on to the academic boycott, but its contribution to the academic boycott was a consequence of its economic withdrawal from South Africa. It is therefore frivolous to claim that an “economic boycott” is preferable to an academic boycott by claiming that the goal of the former is not to obstruct academic freedom, even though it may have that consequence. Because ultimately, both forms of boycott shared the same goal.
UMI letter to South African customers
The reason why the AAUP classifies the UMI action as an academic boycott rather than an economic boycott is to isolate divestment advocacy from the consequences of that advocacy.
In both South Africa and Israel, economic boycotts and academic boycotts are tactics, not principles. Boycotts are the means to an end, not an end to itself. The goal is neither to destroy an economy nor academia, but rather to enact the forms of popular pressure readily available, which may cause a regime to take notice that its actions are unsustainable in a globalized setting.
To the extent that we entertain a distinction, economic and academic boycotts work toward the same goal and complement each other rather than compete with each other.
Thus claiming that an economic boycott created “collateral” damage to academic freedom in South Africa is essentially saying that an economic boycott of South Africa was—dare I say—an academic boycott “in effect, if not in intent.”
One could even make the case that the economic boycott of South Africa—including Bell & Howell’s withdrawal from South Africa—had a greater potential impact on academic freedom on the whole of South African academia than the “formal” academic boycott.
The AAUP’s resolutions on South Africa: too little, too late
Along those lines, we should question whether the AAUP really “endorsed a general economic boycott of South Africa,” as Nelson claims.
The AAUP’s first move against South Africa was in June 1985, when it passed a resolution calling on “colleges and universities to decline to hold securities in banks which provide loans to the government of South Africa.” By that time, thirty major US banks already had policies prohibiting loans to the South African government. And less than two months later, Chase Manhattan even ceased issuing loans to private firms in South Africa.
The same AAUP resolution called on “colleges and universities to endorse the Sullivan principles,” a corporate-sponsored scheme that promoted better working conditions as an alternative to corporate withdrawal from apartheid South Africa. By then, however, fifty-three US colleges and universities had already partially divested, and four months later Columbia University’s board of trustees agreed to a full divestment.
In June 1988 a second AAUP resolution called on TIAA-CREF to divest from companies doing business in South Africa. By then, the Sullivan Principles had already expired, Secretary of State George Schultz had already announced that “constructive engagement” was a failure, Congress had already overridden Ronald Reagan’s veto of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, and TIAA-CREF was itself calling for a complete withdrawal of US companies from South Africa.
At that time, the Ivory Tower’s guardian of professional values was trailing behind General Motors, Ford, Dow Chemical, IBM, Barclays, and the State of California, all of which were already cutting financial ties with South Africa. By August 1988, 155 US colleges and universities had at least partially divested, and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions reported that some 188 companies had divested from South Africa.
On South African apartheid, the AAUP was neither taking principled stands nor leading the way; it was playing catch-up.
AAUP censure as a form of boycott
Let’s look at another at another AAUP non-boycott that could just as well be considered a boycott.
The AAUP maintains a list of institutions that it has “censured” for violating standards of academic freedom and tenure. There are currently fifty-two institutions on the AAUP’s censure list. Grove City College has remained on the list since 1963.
When an institution is censured by the AAUP, it is essentially a non-binding call for a boycott against that institution. AAUP first vice-president Henry Reichman, in criticizing the ASA boycott, insists that the AAUP censure list is not a boycott or a blacklist:
that list is not a boycott list. We do not and will not ask our colleagues to boycott institutions that violate academic freedom or that support policies we abhor. Instead we call on people to organize and struggle to effect change in such institutions, both from inside and out.
But the official wording, as published in every issue of the AAUP’s Academe magazine, says otherwise:
Members of the Association have often considered it to be their duty, in order to indicate their support of the principles violated, to refrain from accepting appointment to an institution so long as it remains on the censure list. Since circumstances differ widely from case to case, the Association does not assert that such an unqualified obligation exists for its members; it does urge that, before accepting appointments, they seek information on present conditions of academic freedom and tenure from the Association’s Washington office and prospective departmental colleagues. The Association leaves it to the discretion of the individual, possessed of the facts, to make the proper decision.
That is, the AAUP “leaves it to the discretion of the individual” to decide whether to follow the “considered … duty” of AAUP members and reject appointment at a censured institution in order “to indicate their support of the principles violated.”
This language has been in place since 1965. According to a history of AAUP’s censure list, the language was meant to “hint … that the list of censured administration is a list of institutions that faculty members should shun.”
Originally, faculty at censured institutions were not even allowed to join the AAUP. This was overturned in 1943 because it “might imply that the AAUP was advocating, albeit indirectly, the boycott of an institution.” In other words, the AAUP was making a distinction between targeting an institution along with its faculty, which would imply a boycott—and targeting the institution but not its faculty, which would somehow not imply a boycott.
Compare the AAUP’s censure to the ASA’s boycott: both are non-binding, and both are directed at institutions, not individuals. Perhaps if the ASA were to call theirs a “censure” instead of a boycott, the AAUP might be more amenable to it.
To give another AAUP boycott example, in October 1977 the AAUP National Council approved a motion to boycott states that “have not yet ratified the Equal Rights Amendment” by withholding organizational meetings from those states. It was approved despite concerns that “the motion penalized institutions rather than state legislatures,” and a move to reconsider the ongoing boycott was rejected in 1978.
The AAUP singles out Iran
AAUP president Rudy Fichtenbaum, first vice-president Henry Reichman, and past president Cary Nelson are three of the highest-ranking AAUP officers.
On December 12, Reichman wrote an article in which he faulted the ASA for singling out Israel while ignoring
Iran, China, North Korea, Singapore, Zimbabwe, the former Soviet republics in Central Asia, and Russia, to mention but a few examples.
Yet a week earlier, Reichman and Fichtenbaum together issued an open letter to the ASA in which they implied that the AAUP was morally superior because, unlike the ASA, it did not concern itself with foreign affairs:
As the principal and oldest organization of American college and university faculty defending academic freedom, we understand that we do not have the organizational capacity to monitor academic freedom at institutions in other countries, nor are we in a position to pick and choose which countries we, as an organization, might judge.
Returning to No University Is an Island, Cary Nelson suggests that the mere mention of Israel demands that one name-drop random third-world countries:
[I]n singling out universities, comparisons between institutions in different countries become critical. Israeli universities have unquestionable problems, but none rises to the level of what takes place at both Arab and non-Arab institutions in other countries in the Middle East. Syria is a police state; the complete absence of academic freedom there compares with conditions in North Korea, Myanmar, and Zimbabwe … in Egypt the security presence at universities is pervasive … In Morocco … no one can dispute Islamic doctrine or criticize the king.
Nelson does not explain why, when discussing an academic boycott of Israel, it is “critical” to talk about Syria, North Korea, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Egypt and Morocco—other than for reasons of deflection. (Elsewhere, the mention of Israel causes Nelson to blurt out “Tibet.”) At no point does he suggest that civil society in any of those countries is proposing a global BDS campaign to address their particular issues.
It is particularly strange for Nelson to follow up his geography lesson with a statement saying it doesn’t matter anyway:
The AAUP meanwhile generally cannot take up individual cases abroad in the absence of involvement with American students or faculty or potential impact on U.S. practices or policies.
If Nelson or Reichman want to argue that one cannot go after “The Not–Worst Country in the World” until one goes after “The Worst Country in the World,” they certainly can’t turn around and claim any right for the AAUP to single out academic freedom in the United States.
Though I found little mention of Myanmar, North Korea, or the Republic of Kiribati in AAUP archives, I did find multiple criticisms of Iran under Nelson’s term as AAUP president—a few of which had tenuous connections to US academia, and some had little connection to academia at all:
May 2006: AAUP general secretary Roger Bowen issues a letter to Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei to protest the high-profile jailing of Iranian academic Ramin Jahanbegloo.
October 2006: Bowen writes another letter to Khamanei expressing concern over reports that the Iranian government might institute a purge of liberal and secular academics from its universities.
May 2007: AAUP executive director Ernst Benjamin writes a letter to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to protest the jailing of Haleh Esfandiari, the Iranian-American director of the Wilson Center’s Middle East program.
June 2007: At the AAUP annual meeting, a resolution is passed calling on Iran to release Esfandiari along with three other detainees with academic ties.
June 2008: At the AAUP annual meeting, a resolution is passed criticizing Iran for discriminatory acts against its “religious or ethnic minorities,” and in particular, the Iranian Baha’i community. Although the resolution mentions of access to education, it is primarily a general call for equality.
October 2008: AAUP president Cary Nelson issues a letter to Iranian officials expressing concern over the jailing of California State University grad student Esha Momeni.
June 2009: During Iran’s “Green Revolution,” Nelson issues a statement expressing
grave[] concern about state sponsored or state encouraged violence in Iran. In particular, the AAUP fears that such violence has the potential to undermine further the already fragile status of academic freedom in Iranian universities.
All these actions are commendable—and I concur with Nelson that violence can be bad for academic freedom. But I could find no other foreign country in recent years targeted for AAUP criticism the way Iran has been, and it undermines the assertion that the AAUP is not “in a position to pick and choose which countries we, as an organization, might judge.”
There are a couple of other interesting forays into foreign affairs:
July 2006: the AAUP issues a joint statement with the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) to “express continuing concern about the dangers facing academic life in Iraq today.” And contradicting the recent claim that the AAUP does not “have the organizational capacity to monitor academic freedom at institutions in other countries,” the statement declared:
we also pledge our collective determination to take steps, together and with sister organizations, to promote programs and policies in Iraq and on behalf of the international community of scholars and researchers that will positively address this disturbing situation.
January 2008: AAUP president Cary Nelson writes a letter to Turkey’s justice minister expressing concern over the case of Atilla Yayla, a Turkish professor who received a suspended jail sentence after he violated a 1951 law that prohibited insults against Atatürk.
But it’s when the AAUP considered the issue of Palestine/Israel that things got a little funky:
In November 2006, the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure expressed “great concern” over the IDF’s banning of Palestinian students from Israeli universities.
Then in May 2008, US media reported that the State Department had revoked Fulbright grants for seven Palestinian students who could not attend university in the US because Israel had been prohibited them from leaving Gaza.
In response, the AAUP issued a statement expressing “great concern” over the grant withdrawals. However, unlike other AAUP letters, statements, and resolutions, the tone of this statement was strangely conciliatory, almost apologetic.
The statement, addressed to no one and signed by no one, noted that some Israeli officials “are reported as criticizing Israel’s action.” It stressed that the AAUP opposed academic boycotts against Israel. And then it portrayed the statement as one which the AAUP regretfully had to issue due to circumstances beyond its control:
The AAUP has repeatedly opposed efforts to impede the free flow of knowledge, as, for example, with regard to academic boycotts directed against Israel. The same concern about the need to protect the free exchange of ideas and the opportunity for scholarly study and collaboration require us to call upon the Israeli government to lift the travel restrictions it has imposed on these and other Palestinian students who seek to study abroad. [emphasis mine]
In contrast, the American Anthropological Association and the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) joined with Human Rights Watch to issue a more forceful letter to the State Department on the same subject. This letter expressed skepticism over the State Department’s account of events and urged the State Department to
call on Israel to allow all students in Gaza, except where there are legitimate security concerns specific to particular individuals, to exercise their right to freedom of movement and access to education. At a minimum, the United States should clearly and publicly disassociate itself from Israel’s policy of collective punishment as it affects students seeking to study abroad.
Two weeks later, at the same 2008 annual meeting in which the AAUP passed a resolution calling for Baha’i equality in Iran, a separate resolution calling on Israel to allow Gaza students to study abroad failed to pass because it “proved too controversial”:
[C]ritics questioned why Israel was being singled out when there are many countries in the world that do not have open borders, and that there are many countries where higher education is denied, for example, to women, but which the AAUP has not condemned. Amid talk of amending the resolution to be more general, removing all references to Israel and Gaza, a motion passed referring the entire matter back to the AAUP committee for review.
In other words, it was easier for the AAUP to pass a resolution calling for equality in Iran than to pass a resolution calling for Israel to allow Fulbright grant recipients from Gaza to attend university in the United States.
23-year-old software engineering instructor Hadeel Abukwaik (standing) initially lost her Fulbright grant because Israel refused her exit from Gaza.
Nelson on the MLA: Yesterday it was “academic freedom”; today it’s “process”
Keeping the AAUP pronouncements on Iran in mind, let’s look at how Nelson dealt with the recent Modern Language Association (MLA) resolution on Israel. In its original wording, the resolution
urges the US Department of State to contest Israel’s arbitrary denials of entry to Gaza and the West Bank by US academics who have been invited to teach, confer, or do research at Palestinian universities.
This resolution appeared to promote academic freedom, so one would assume that Cary Nelson supported it. Instead, he was so opposed to it that he wrote an article in opposition—this time on the grounds that the process for passing the resolution was wrong:
The process the MLA uses is not adequate to the task of establishing the facts. It is fatally flawed…
When did MLA conduct site visits to Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank? When did the MLA give Israelis an opportunity to respond, a procedure the MLA’s rules would seem to require? Where is the consensus report evaluating arguments pro and con and giving MLA members a disinterested basis on which to vote? If the Delegate Assembly votes to approve the resolution after this flawed process proceeds, it will have undermined the credibility of the organization and gone a long way toward transforming it from a scholarly to a political one. It does not augur well for the group’s future as a widely endorsed advocacy vehicle for the humanities…
[The] MLA’s ill-informed resolution and inadequate procedures have no role to play in the process. In an era of continuing adjunct abuse and politicians declaring the humanities of no economic use, the MLA should concentrate instead on saving a profession endangered in its own country.
None of Nelson’s proposed steps were taken when the AAUP under Nelson’s presidency passed resolutions on Iran—one of which simply called for equality—and issued several letters, including one that expressed concern over state violence in Iran.
Ironically, Nelson called on the MLA to look to the AAUP’s procedures as a guide.
Later, after attacking the process and claiming that that the MLA needed to “conduct site visits,” “give Israelis an opportunity to respond,” and “concentrate instead on … its own country,” Nelson changed rationales yet again at the MLA convention on January 11, this time claiming that
I would strongly support a resolution looking into refusal of visas for all countries … This is a biased resolution.
Part 2. “Pro-Palestinian political correctness” versus “pro-Israeli opinion”
The fourth chapter of Cary Nelson’s No University Is an Island is entitled “Barefoot in New Zealand: Political Correctness on Campus.” In introducing the chapter, Nelson explains that two opposing forces are at play on campus: “pro-Palestinian political correctness and pro-Israeli opinion.”
Thus, before the chapter even begins, Nelson plays the role of wise and dispassionate observer, while expressing more contempt for those who would assert Palestinian rights.
In the chapter, Nelson laments the “reactive rejection of moderate, independent views” in Middle Eastern studies:
As major fractions of the Left have grown increasingly hostile and unforgiving toward Israel … The only socially and politically acceptable stance for some people in academia is that Israel has no right to exist, has no moral or political legitimacy, and must be dissolved into a larger regional nation-state. The grave risk to Israeli Jews in a one-state solution should not be an unacceptable topic of discussion.
It is odd for the champion of academic freedom to call for more “moderate views” in a field that he does not teach and especially since the term “moderate” has no independent meaning. Its virtue is as a rhetorical trick casting all contrary views as “extreme.”
Nelson stoops lower as he attempts to dismiss the relevance of history in Middle Eastern politics:
[H]istory does not often warrant unqualified moral legitimacy for any major nation-state. Both the founding of the United States and the country’s subsequent expansion were, after all, grounded in the genocide of Native Americans, and imperialist episodes have repeatedly marked American history. Power and international agreements have more relevance to the matter than a blameless or morally unblemished national history, the latter being difficult to find or certify.
Here he attempts to defend Israel’s “moral legitimacy” without mentioning Israel. According to Nelson, the mass crimes in history that paved the way for the creation of the United States do not invalidate that country’s “moral legitimacy.” Then again, it also doesn’t make the case for an existence of a thing called “moral legitimacy”—such a concept having been conceived by apologists for Israel rather than by political scientists who employ the same term in a very different context.
That Nelson would even introduce as unquestioned such contrived and self-affirming concepts into Middle Eastern studies evokes the creationist injection of “intelligent design” into the academic freedom debate into the sciences. After all, intelligent design is a framework formulated to cast an unacademic concept, creationism, into one that must be debated academically but on its own terms. And so it is with the terms of debate that Nelson draws upon (“moral legitimacy,” “right to exist”). Even the reference to a “grave risk to Israeli Jews in a one-state solution” is an allusion to the racist “demographic threat” canard.
I am not saying that such terms are beyond debate—only that they must be recognized as self-affirming arguments designed to uphold a specific political position. And as with creationists, those who employ such terms cannot pretend to do so dispassionately or in the name of greater academic exchange.
Ironically, after the ASA boycott resolution passed, Nelson accused boycott supporters of dismissing history in the manner that he had previously encouraged:
They appear to think either that history is irrelevant and only present-day power differentials matter, or that only one group’s history counts.
Nelson spends the bulk of “Barefoot in New Zealand” discussing the campus wars over Palestine and Israel. His focus is on what he considers wrong with Middle Eastern studies, as perpetrated by those he considers too critical of Israel.
However, with the exception of a single vague anecdote which I describe later, every example relating to Palestine/Israel that Nelson documents is a case of the campus being attacked by “pro-Israel” forces, namely:
The attack against Norman Finkelstein’s tenure process
The attack against Nadia Abu El-Haj’s tenure process
The attack against Joseph Massad by the David Project
The attack against Rashid Khalidi’s appointment at Columbia University
The attack against the University of Michigan Press for distributing Overcoming Zionism by Joel Kovel
None of these attacks can be described as instances of “pro-Palestinian political correctness,” and calling it “pro-Israeli opinion” would understate the organized and at times well-financed nature of the attacks. Nevertheless, Nelson claims the problem is that “American universities harbor significant anti-Israeli constituencies.”
Finkelstein, Massad, and Abu El-Haj: Academic freedom as charity
While making the case against an academic boycott of Israel, Nelson reminds readers that the AAUP stood up for professors Norman Finkelstein, Sami al-Arian, and David Robinson—all of whom were accused of being too critical of Israel.
What I demonstrate here, though, is that even when Nelson defends the academic freedom of critics of Israel, he is unable to refrain from engaging in baseless accusations and underhanded, passive-aggressive attacks against them, thus exploiting his power as the president of the AAUP to serve another agenda.
In “Barefoot in New Zealand,” Nelson frequently evokes the cases of Finkelstein, Massad, and Abu El-Haj—whose rights to academic freedom he defends.
He points out that “[f]alse, inexcusable characterizations of their work were widely distributed and endorsed.” Yet Nelson indulges in unwarranted accusations against them himself:
For Barnard professor Nadia Abu El-Haj, Columbia professor Joseph Massad, former DePaul professor Norman Finkelstein, and some of their advocates, the pro-Israeli lobby is all powerful; there is no other force of consequence.
Nelson does not qualify this statement and cannot because it isn’t true. Both Massad and Finkelstein have written at length against the concept of an all-powerful Israel lobby and against the idea that the Israel lobby is the sole “force of consequence.” Abu El-Haj may not have done so, but she is not known to write about the “pro-Israeli lobby” either way.
Later on, Nelson writes:
I might disagree at many points with El-Haj, Finkelstein, or Massad, but as I said earlier, I would support their tenure. Would they do the same for me? I have no idea.
Again, this is a backhanded dig. Nelson, at the time the president of the AAUP and arbiter of academic freedom in the US, “graciously” defends the three professors, despite the possibility that they might not do the same if the roles were reversed. However:
1. The roles were not reversed. As the president of the AAUP, Nelson held the power, while the three professors were the ones under fierce attack for their alleged beliefs.
2. As the one with the power, Nelson has the ability to insult and misrepresent the three professors, and yet they must still be grateful for the powerful assistance provided by Nelson in doing his job.
3. Nelson doesn’t know that the three professors would not defend his academic freedom if the roles were reversed, but he can float that possibility, thus positioning himself as morally superior regardless.
4. Nelson doesn’t describe where he “might disagree” with the three professors. After all, how much does he know about Abu El-Haj’s work on the sociological consequences of Israeli archeology? He just floats the idea that the three professors may be wrong about something and that their detractors might be right, without having to prove his case.
5. And while he rhetorically states that he “ha[s] no idea” whether they would support his academic freedom, he somehow knows that they believe in an all-powerful Israel lobby.
Benny Morris: Academic freedom as a bonus
Let’s turn now to the one instance in “Barefoot in New Zealand” in which Nelson details an attack against an academic supporter of Israeli actions:
On yet another major research university campus, a faculty member was severely chastised and financially penalized for arguing on behalf of Israeli scholar (and admittedly polemical public intellectual) Benny Morris for a position in a Middle East studies department and against the less widely published pro-Palestinian scholar whom the search committee had recommended.
The story is potentially alarming, though Nelson provides no details with which to judge the incident. How could someone be “financially penalized” for simply supporting Benny Morris? Were there legitimate factors that made the alleged “pro-Palestinian scholar” a better candidate? Did the AAUP investigate this case and issue a finding?
We know neither the name of the campus nor the names of any of the parties other than Morris. Thus the most we can say is: Once upon a time, there was Benny Morris, and then this thing happened at this place, and then he got passed over by this other person, and then someone who liked him got in trouble and lost money. Therefore, “pro-Palestinian political correctness.”
How can this possibly compare to the extensively documented cases (both for and against) of Finkelstein, Massad, and Abu El-Haj? As I shall demonstrate later with another of Nelson’s anecdotes, his stories cannot be trusted without verification.
Historian/sleuth Benny Morris has deciphered the Arab Muslim mind using ordinary household objects and Israeli police statistics.
For the moment, however, I will focus on two sentences that were appended to the version of “Barefoot in New Zealand” that appears in No University Is an Island, for they do not appear in the original article from which the chapter was adapted:
While Morris’s increasing conservatism is not in doubt (Morris), neither is his status as a major historian in question (Gorenberg). His appointment would be a coup for any university.
Between the original 2008 publication of the article and its 2010 reproduction in No University Is an Island, Nelson added these two sentences as an endorsement of Benny Morris, while providing no further details of the alleged incident involving him.
What Nelson considers to be Morris’s “increasing conservatism” could better be described as overt racism and unabashed support for ethnic cleansing. In his infamous 2004 interview in Haaretz, Morris spoke of the Israeli expulsion of Palestinians as such:
[I]n certain conditions, expulsion is not a war crime. I don’t think that the expulsions of 1948 were war crimes. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. You have to dirty your hands…
There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing. I know that this term is completely negative in the discourse of the 21st century, but when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide—the annihilation of your people—I prefer ethnic cleansing.
Lest anyone believe that Morris only supports ethnic cleansing in order to avert genocide (and legally speaking, genocide may encompass ethnic cleansing), Morris made it clear:
Yes, even the great American democracy couldn’t come to be without the forced extinction of Indians. There are times the overall, final good justifies terrible, cruel deeds.
And to justify “terrible, cruel deeds,” Morris bestowed upon his preferred targets the same attributes previously assigned to Native Americans:
[Palestinian society] is a very sick society. It should be treated the way we treat individuals who are serial killers… Something like a cage has to be built for them. I know that sounds terrible. It is really cruel. But there is no choice. There is a wild animal there that has to be locked up in one way or another…
There is a deep problem in Islam. It’s a world whose values are different. A world in which human life doesn’t have the same value as it does in the West, in which freedom, democracy, openness and creativity are alien … Revenge plays a central part in the Arab tribal culture. Therefore, the people we are fighting and the society that sends them have no moral inhibitions.
I think the [Muslim] values I mentioned earlier are values of barbarians—the attitude toward democracy, freedom, openness; the attitude toward human life. In that sense they are barbarians. The Arab world as it is today is barbarian.
These are instances of what Nelson refers to as “increasing conservatism.” Such sentiments were not confined to the 2004 interview. Morris reiterates them, with endnotes, in his most recent book, One State, Two States, where he obsesses over the supposed “alien” nature of the “Muslim Arab mindset.”
In one passage, Morris derides Palestinian calls for “democracy, majority will, and one man, one vote,” because such “catchphrases and norms … in fact, were completely alien to their history and social and political ethos and mindset.”
In another passage, Morris writes,
The idea of sharing Palestine is alien to the Muslim Arab mindset.
Three sentences later, he repeats himself:
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