Against Academic Boycotts

...others imply approval of an institution or individual...

...Economic boycotts may contain a symbolic element, but their primary purpose is to have an economic impact...

...For a world in which there was a boycott of all U.S., Indian, and Israeli scholars, and no doubt many others as well, let us say those of China, South Korea, Saudi Arabia (on grounds of sexism), and Pakistan (on the same grounds, though there has been a bit of progress lately) would be quite different from the world in which only scholars from one small nation were being boycotted, and this difference seems relevant to the choice of principles...

...Some modes of interaction are part of the give and take of daily scholarly business...

...These scholars have not been forming national policy (to say the least), and most of them would not even get a chance to publish their views on the op-ed page of a major newspaper, as we know from our own situation in the United States...

...The proponents of the boycott movement hold that serious wrongs have been committed by the Israeli government...

...There are institutional types of funding that reward unusu32 n DISSENT / Summer 2007 ally meritorious programs, and it has been pointed out, in some of the writing about Israel, that one might in some cases of competition for merit grants, refuse to reward Israel, without endorsing a boycott...

...I ET ME COMMENT on one very alarming rationale that has been offered in this 1 context...

...There are limits to this, where the individual in question commits some crime—for example, assault or sexual harassment...

...The failure-to-reward tactic can also be applied to academic institutions...

...After four years, he started going to the university again, and things slowly changed...

...and Indian governments, actions most members of these institutions may strongly deplore...

...After a very difficult eighteen months, they prevailed with the school board, and the false narrative was withdrawn...

...Often, people who commit wrongs shade the truth in their public statements, and one thing that it is extremely important for scholars to do is to combat falsehoods and incomplete truths...

...Before we can go further, however, we need to distinguish two different types of boycotts— the economic and the symbolic...

...the failure of a large number of the world's nations, including many, though not all, Arab nations, to take effective action in defense of women's bodily integrity and human equality...

...Because Congress at the same time passed a resolution of condemnation, sponsored by Representatives John Conyers and Joseph Pitts, this attempt proved successful...

...But it also violates a core principle of academic freedom, which is that the positions taken by scholars about political matters are not relevant to their academic employment...

...If a group of people believe that some Israeli universities have violated the civil rights of Arab students or engaged in some other questionable form of conduct, then it seems right to protest that specific wrongdoing...

...At that time, he was a professor of history at the institution, and a dean...

...Censure takes various forms, but the usual form is some sort of widely disseminated public statement that the institution in question has engaged in such and such wrongful action...

...I have mentioned this history because it suggests that boycotts of academic individuals deeply compromise the core values of a university, and that the current state of India's universities can be measured by the extent to which this boycott directed against an unpopular individual has gradually become unsustainable...

...Thus, many scholars concerned about the Gujarat genocide put aside their other engagements and went to help the victims find shelter, take down their eyewitness testimony, help them file complaints, and so on...

...The customers themselves can then choose whether to buy from the retail chain or not...

...I would like to single out Michael Witzel of Harvard for special praise in this regard...

...What they propose to do, however, is not to take direct action against the government or its members (as happened in the case of Governor Narendra Modi), but, instead, to target academic institutions and the individuals in them...

...The third reason why I shall speak abACADEMIC BOYCOTTS stractly is that I am not a Middle East expert...

...I was recently in India, at Jamia I Milia Islamia, the one national Muslim university...

...Moreover, being a good chemist or classicist does not entail being a good writer of op-ed articles...

...After the election of 2004, those textbooks were withdrawn, and the field of combat shifted to the United States, where the Hindu diaspora community is very involved with the Hindu right...

...Scholars who have strong views about the Israeli government would be well advised, I think, to focus on the tactic of organized (nonviolent and nondisruptive) public protest, directed at the government and its key actors...

...Others occupied themselves in defending scholars who had been threatened with violence by the Hindu right, publicizing their situation and protesting it...

...We all know what happened in the McCarthy era, when scholars were fired for political positions that a dominant group didn't like...

...Second, I am made uneasy by the singleminded focus on Israel...

...the case of Heidegger, who did not have criminal liability for what the Nazis did, would have been best served by allowing him to speak and encouraging people to inform themselves...

...Let us discuss boycotts, which are very blunt instruments...

...In my opinion, this boycott was successful...

...I suspect in the case of Israel it would not be easy to find a single account of the reasons behind the boycott that would command the agreement of its participants...

...Eminent thinkers alleged that the case of South Africa was unique because a segment of the population was systematically unequal under the law, a situation that of course was, and still is, that of women in a large number of countries...

...If an individual member of an academic institution has committed reprehensible acts, then those acts should be publicized and criticized by anyone who wants to criticize them, and one might also oppose rewarding such an individual with an honorary degree...

...It is not clear what the reason for the boycott is, and indeed each individual may join the boycott for different reasons...

...The case also shows that deliberation and discussion about the purposes of the academy have led the students of Jamia Milia to a ringing affirmation of both academic freedom and the integrity of an individual who stood up for that principle—even though, even today, most of them would still differ strongly with him about Rushdie...

...because Hasan himself decided that he did not want to ruin these young men's lives, denying them government jobs forever...

...But for a group to say that journals and academic conferences have a litmus test, namely a particular position on the actions of the government of Israel, is infinitely more threatening than if it simply boycotted all Israeli scholars alike...

...I have argued that any more negative action, such as firing the individual, should be undertaken only in a narrow range of timehonored cases, such as criminal acts or sexual harassment...

...By conferring an honorary degree, a university makes a strong statement about its own values...

...In India, where the media are much more interested in academics, it ACADEMIC BOYCOTTS was quite easy for scholars to write something about Gujarat that would get published in a major newspaper, and many did so...

...In some of the defenses of the boycotts, the wrongdoing alleged is failure to dismiss scholars who take political positions that the group of boycotters does not like...

...Thus, when the IndianAmerican Hotel Owners Association invited Narendra Modi, governor of the state of Gujarat, to address a meeting in Florida, scholars concerned about Modi's leading role in orchestrating the violence against Muslims in that state wrote a letter of protest to the State Department asking that Modi be refused a diplomatic visa...

...Censure is the public condemnation of an institution, usually by another institution...

...In 1989, when the fatwa against Salman Rushdie was announced and his book The Satanic Verses banned in India, Hasan wrote in defense of Rushdie, urging that the book not be banned and insisting that we need to protect the principle of the free exchange of ideas in a democratic society...

...If an academic institution in Israel has committed a specific reprehensible act, then censure is an appropriate tactic...

...Organized public protest also has a superior clarity, because each group involved issues its own public statements, signed by its own officers or representatives, and so we know both who is speaking and what they are saying...

...In defense of the boycott, people say that scholars in Israel have not condemned the government as much as they might have...

...Censure seems appropriate when the professional organization can reach a consensus about the badness of the actions in question and when it desires to place blame squarely on the institutions, whether academic or governmental, that perpetrated the wrongs, rather than to include all the individuals in those institutions...

...I would not favor an academic boycott in any of these cases, but I think that they ought to be considered together, and together with yet other cases in which governments are doing morally questionable things...

...This boycott clearly had a strong symbolic aspect, especially the part of it devoted to divestiture of university stock holdings...

...Usually, when wrong has been done, some people have suffered, and one response would be to focus on helping those who have been harmed...

...He also refused to resign...

...This seems to me a particularly useless policy...

...Here again, the case of the Hindu right is instructive...

...Here, the aim is not to have any tangible effect on people's lives, although there may of course be such effects...

...Israeli scholars may well just be doing what they are good at doing...

...Harshness to the poor and the ruin of the national medical system, not to mention then-Prime Minister Thatcher's assault on basic scientific research, were values that the Oxford faculty believed that it could not endorse...

...Its current vice chancellor, or DISSENT / Summer 2007 • 3 5 ACADEMIC BOYCOTTS president, is the eminent historical scholar Mushirul Hasan...

...Thus, movement members will try to circulate documents to customers of the retail outlets where objects made by child labor are being sold and will try to make customers aware of the behavior of the corporation in question...

...Thus, for example, a professional association might censure an academic institution that violates the rights of scholars...

...Instead, the purpose is to make a public statement about the wrongfulness of what a given institution has done, by encouraging people to shun not only the institution but all its members...

...Scholars from all over the United States devoted large amounts of time to fighting this, often despite threats of violence and much public vilification...

...This is an ad hominem argument for readers on the left, but the principled argument is that nobody should be fired for a political position, left or 34 n DISSENT / Summer 2007 right, short of threats, assault, sexual harassment— the legitimate reasons for dismissal from a faculty position...

...Censure makes a clear statement of exactly who has done what wrong to whom, and it is also voted on by a group, in the typical case, so it is also very clear who supports it...

...As a rationale for doing harm to them, this is both implausible and deeply repugnant to the core values of academic life...

...Professors and students at the University of Chicago Law School have designed a product label that will give consumers clear information about how the pigs and chickens are raised, leaving the choice to them, but hoping, obviously, that the informed consumer will make an ethical choice...

...Organized public protest is useful, then, in a range of cases, but particularly so when a movement is trying to get the wider public more involved and when the attempt is to target the institution and not its workers...

...3. Organized Public Condemnation of an Individual or Individuals...

...IT IS DIFFICULT to see what is accomplished by a symbolic boycott that cannot be more effectively accomplished by one of the alternatives, such as censure or organized public protest...

...This approach seems good partly because it is crucial to demonstrate that many consumers support decent treatment for animals, not just a small, highly organized group, as might be the case with a boycott...

...1. Censure...

...The debate resulting in Margaret Thatcher's being denied an honorary degree from Oxford University fits in this category...

...and many other cases...

...Indeed, I note that gross indifference to the lives and health of women has never been seriously considered as a reason for any boycott, a failure of impartiality that struck me even in the days of the South Africa boycott...

...In general, I think that we can only debate this question in a philosophically respectable way if we first offer a principled account of the responsibility of scholars to engage in public debate...

...Trying to organize this boycott at Harvard in 1980, I discovered that Del Monte, which made most of the sauces and ketchups used in Harvard's dorms, was a subsidiary of Nestle...

...Revoking a visa seems appropriate in this case, because Modi orchestrated crimes against humanity...

...But censure and/or organized public protest would seem the means most appropriate to that goal...

...Some Distinctions When people believe that a serious wrong has been done by some organization and its agents, there are a number of options open to those who want to express strong condemnation...

...Thus, if Martin Heidegger had been invited to the University of Chicago, I would have been one of the ones conducting a public protest of his appearance and trying to inform other people about his record of collaboration with the Nazi regime...

...Surely the institutions in question should protect these people, unless they do something that counts as hate speech targeted at individuals or some other form of criminal conduct...

...6. Being Vigilant on Behalf of the Truth...

...Sometimes organized movements carry on campaigns to alert the public to the wrongful actions of an institution...

...Above all, however, I shall be looking for general and defensible principles...

...We cannot easily tell whether our principles are good ones by looking at a single case only, without inquiring as to whether the principles we propose could be applied to all similar cases...

...Boycotts are not the only option...

...By failing to consider all the possible applications of our principles, if we applied them impartially, we are failing to deliberate well about the choice of principles...

...Meanwhile, all involved should focus on stating the facts to the general public, and making good arguments about those facts...

...However, one can imagine scholars whom one would oppose—Heidegger, for example, or Mircea Eliade, for whom an endowed chair has been named...

...Boycotts have neither type of clarity...

...When they put this version of history into textbooks for public schools in India, there was a tremendous outpouring of scholarship showing exactly what was and is wrong with it...

...This sort of public condemnation is very different from a boycott of the retail outlets, because it allows the individual consumer to choose and does not directly threaten the livelihood of workers...

...They suggest that all members of the institution deserve condemnation...

...so our plan of getting the dorms to boycott Nestle cocoa and a few other products with the Nestle name left large numbers of actual Nestle products untouched...

...Most of the international consumer protest movement against the apparel industry has taken this form...

...But its primary rationale was economic, and that was how it intended to accomplish the goal of social change—by getting businesses that had not yet adopted the Sullivan principles [for corporate social responsibility] to change their actions...

...The fact that a public university receives government funding does not confer complicity for DISSENT / Summer 2007 n 33 ACADEMIC BOYCOTTS all decisions of the government...

...Economic boycotts are occasionally valuable...

...Thus, the public universities of India and the United States cannot be held accountable for particular actions of the U.S...

...I think that we should behave like today's Jamia Milia, and not like the Jamia of the Hasan boycott, showing respect for those whose positions are different from our own or even repugnant to us...

...5. Helping the Harmed...

...It has its own cherished but quite false view of ancient and medieval history, according to which Hindus are always peaceful and Muslims are always villains...

...The rationale for targeting academic institutions is, first, that these are public institutions, thus arms of government, and second, that some of them have engaged in questionable actions themselves...

...South Korea's lamentable sexism and indifference to widespread female infanticide and feticide...

...The second rationale is something else...

...I would have been similarly opposed to many potential candidates for honorary degrees at my own institution—but for the convenient fact that Chicago never gives honorary degrees to politicians...

...Now, let me turn to the main force of the boycott, namely the boycotting of individual members of the academic institutions...

...As someone whose hiring, along with that of other "leftists," has been criticized on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal (in a way that my dean, at least, took as tantamount to a McCarthyite call for my firing), I believe that if this principle is once breached, it will hurt most those whose positions go most against the dominant currents of governmental power: feminists, advocates of gay rights, whatever...

...Without going so far as to censure the institution or individual, people might decide (whether singly or in some organized way) that this individual does not deserve special honors...

...The most famous example of the economic boycott is that of South Africa...

...Quite a few others have been used effectively in comparable cases...

...An economic boycott is rarely a clear-cut proposition symbolically, and yet it can still have a serious economic impact, as this one did...

...Professional associations have also censured governments, or government policies, such as the Iraq War...

...Typically, they target all the members of an institution, as well as the instiACADEMIC BOYCOTTS tution itself...

...This is incredibly naïve, because it assumes that all scholars, young and old, no matter what their field, could publish something in the press if they tried to, a clearly false assumption...

...Organized public condemnation can lead to tangible results...

...I am not sure that there is anything to be said in favor of a boycott of This article is adapted from a talk originally presented at the meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in December 2006...

...Again, in the approach I am considering, there would have been no attempt to prevent people from going to hear Heidegger: the emphasis would have DISSENT / Summer 2007 3 1 ACADEMIC BOYCOTTS been on informing, persuading, and promoting personal choice...

...The false history was written into textbooks proposed for children in California...

...When it is believed that certain individuals bear particular culpability for the wrongs in question, then it is possible to work for the condemnation of those individuals...

...As for the academic boycott, it is a poor choice of strategies, and some of the justifications offered for it are downright alarming...

...Nor is it clear who is doing it: in this case there are journals, professional associations, and individuals, all forming a loosely linked movement, and nothing as crisp as a voted-on resolution of censure...

...And yet, the boycott can do very serious damage to the careers of young scholars especially...

...The boycott against Nestle, begun in the late 1970s, was aimed at getting Nestle to alter its policies about the marketing of infant formula in developing countries, which was clearly deleterious to child health, because it discouraged breast-feeding...

...The hope is, presumably, to persuade people of the wrongfulness of what has happened: if enough people join the boycott movement, others will see that the international community has a certain view, and they will then be encouraged to investigate the case and come to their own conclusions...

...For example, one might consider possible responses to the genocide of Muslim civilians in the Indian state of Gujarat in the year 2002, a pogrom organized by the state government, carried out by its agents, and given aid and comfort by the national government of that time (no longer in power...

...Symbolic boycotts, I believe, are rarely valuable by comparison with the alternatives I have mentioned, and the boycott in this case seems to me very weakly grounded...

...2. Organized Public Condemnation...

...I have recently completed a book on the Gujarat genocide in India, after studying that incident and its history and context for five years, so I think I am equipped to speak about that case, and I propose to do so occasionally, because it sheds light on some of the issues before us...

...But what disturbs me about the proponents of the boycott is that they lack such an account, and certainly do not comment on the actions of scholars in the United States vis-à-vis U.S...

...Boycotts We now have five nonboycott alternatives before us...

...First, I believe that philosophers should be pursuing philosophical principles—defensible general principles that can be applied to a wide range of cases...

...Usually, one aspect of being powerless is that one's voice is not heard in the corridors of power, and I would think that (a) lots of Israeli scholars do have critical views but these views just don't appear in the news and (b) that many are deterred from trying to write for newspapers for the same reasons that few Americans write for newspapers, namely, that one almost never gets accepted there, and so it is a waste of time...

...Here the principle of academic freedom becomes relevant in the most urgent manner...

...MARTHA NUSSBAUM is Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, appointed in the Philosophy Department, Law School, and Divinity School...

...So, for four years, boycotted and denied access to his own classrooms, he stayed at home and wrote books...

...foreign policy, or the actions of Indian scholars vis-àvis Hindu-Muslim relations in India, or the actions of South Korean or Pakistani scholars vis-à-vis the alarming levels of violence against women in those nations—and yet, lacking an account that they would be prepared to defend and apply impartially, they wish to impose damages on Israeli scholars...

...This strategy was combined with organized public opposition, but the boycott was significant, because organizers believed that only an economic impact would cause Nestle to change policies...

...An even more ominous suggestion on the part of the proponents of the boycotts is that scholars will be exempted from the boycott if they take public positions that the supporters of the boycotts approve...

...The aim was to affect the company's profits...

...Very different is the purely symbolic boycott...

...4. Failure to Reward...

...Whatever one says about this, I think one must, in all consistency, apply the same criticisms to scholars in the United States, who do not express their opinions much in public...

...Another similar case, in which I am involved, is a movement to make food consumers aware of the conditions in which the animals they purchase for food have been raised...

...One might consider, for example, the Chinese government's record on human rights...

...36 n DISSENT / Summer 2007...

...It doesn't make practical sense to boycott scholars, typically among the most powerless of society's members, and it also doesn't make symbolic sense...

...I would say that the first rationale is weak...

...Hasan consistently refused to change his position...

...Fortunately, academic freedom protects us feminists—although, I should add, it does not protect university administrators, who do not have tenure, and my university's president, the one who hired all those left wingers and feminists, was ultimately, in effect, the sacrificial lamb whose forced resignation (inspired by various factors, but among them this one) gratified the proponents of faculty firing or non-hiring...

...Let me now turn to the case before us, though without arguing its specific facts...

...I have heard not a whisper about boycotting Indian academic institutions and individuals, and I have also, more surprisingly, heard nothing about the case in favor of an international boycott of U.S...

...The students didn't stop there: in fact, a group of them assaulted him on his way to class, and the criminal charges that resulted from the serious injuries he suffered were only dropped in December 2006, about fifteen years later (justice is slow in India...

...If we have such an account, we can at least say who is violating it, in a principled and impartial way...

...Boycotts are supposed to be a weapon of the weak against the powerful, and that is how economic boycotts have their success—by showing the powerful that a large number of people, weak in isolation, can make a difference to their business...

...Now, when he addresses student groups, students stand and cheer...

...1 ET ME MENTION a case that bears this out...

...Modi was denied a diplomatic visa, and his tourist visa was revoked...

...Nor should we fail to investigate relevantly comparable cases concerning other nations...

...This boycott proved difficult to administer, as it turned out that Nestle had a large number of subsidiaries that bore other names, and some of these manufactured products that were ubiquitous...

...30 n DISSENT / Summer 2007 Israeli scholars and institutions that could not be said, and possibly with stronger justification, for similar actions toward the United States and especially India and/or the state of Gujarat...

...Surely it is unseemly for Americans to discuss boycotts of another country on the other side of the world without posing related questions about American policies and actions that are not above moral scrutiny...

...The students of the university immediately announced a boycott of him and his classes, and this boycott was joined by a substantial number of faculty...

...I am disturbed by the world's failure to consider such relevantly similar cases...

...In her wonderful last book, on responsibility for global ills, Iris Marion Young studied the protest movement against the apparel industry, concluding that this approach was very fruitful, because it asks the individual consumer to act, thus promoting a sense of shared responsibility...

...After the pluralist government took over in the election of 2004, he was appointed to head the university that had once boycotted him...

...If one has objections to the government of Israel, how could one suppose that it could be swayed in any way by imposing publication disabilities on some powerless young scholars...

...Censure does nothing to diminish the academic freedom or access of individuals: professors teaching at censured universities are actually helped in their attempt to secure their rights, and, in the case of governmentdirected censure, academics and citizens generally are not affected at all...