‘Scholasticide’ Is Creating Divisions, Not Solving Them

With the Jewish community still reeling from the recent violent assaults on Jewish individuals in Washington, DC, and Boulder, Colorado, it is deeply troubling to see ongoing efforts by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) to partner and forge coalitions with the very groups who have been fueling a broader climate of incitement against Jews and Israel.

As Jewish educational professionals who have worked in academia, we are deeply disturbed by the AAUP’s decision to not only embrace anti-Israel groups, but to give them a seat at the table — to the exclusion of Jewish voices.

The latest development on this front is the AAUP’s launch of its “Organize Every Campus” campaign, including a Summer Institute at Morehouse College in Atlanta in July. While details remain vague, the exclusionary tone of earlier events, such as the April 17 “National Day of Action,” which promoted a disturbing range of anti-Israel activity, raises doubts that these programs will be welcoming to Jewish members.

At over 200+ campuses nationwide, the AAUP has turned protests against what it described as government overreach into events that marginalized its own Jewish members, many of whom view their connection to Israel as very important.

In the name of protecting academic freedom, the AAUP has partnered with organizations whose rhetoric and activism drives Jewish and pro-Israel faculty and students to the margins.

How exclusion is being built into AAUP’s machinery

Exclusion is being manifested in AAUP’s structure in several ways. First, the organization made a formal retreat from its decades-long taboo on academic boycotts.

Last summer, the AAUP abandoned its categorical opposition to boycotting academic institutions and scholars — an about-face that implicitly validated embargoes on Israeli academics and on anyone unwilling to denounce Israel. The reversal risks eroding intellectual exchange across higher education and further exacerbates the shunning of Israeli scholars.

Second, the group has presented one-sided programming that demonizes Israel. On March 6, the association promoted a webinar titled “Scholasticide in Palestine,” charging that Israel aims to eradicate Palestinian education.

Five mainstream Jewish and academic bodies — ADL, AEN, AJC, Hillel, and JFNA — wrote to the AAUP leadership, urging them to host a balanced follow-up program and to train staff on antisemitism. Ten weeks later, there has not even been a courtesy acknowledgment of the letter’s receipt.

Third, AAUP is partnering with groups — including JVP, the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, and Faculty for Justice in Palestine — whose record is openly hateful to Israelis and their supporters. In its recent campus campaign, the AAUP has demonstrated that it is only interested in engaging with virulently anti-Israel groups that, ironically, work against the very academic principles of open inquiry and academic freedom that the AAUP and its “National Day of Action” claims to champion.

AAUP placed its own logo beside these anti-Israel groups’ logos on every flyer, giving them and their stances legitimacy. The downloadable toolkit from the campaign’s website urged professors to chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” stage “die-ins,” and “target any senator” deemed friendly to Israel.

Faculty who believe in Israel’s right to exist — or who simply oppose its demonization and delegitimization — were told, implicitly but unmistakably, to stay away. What’s coming this summer and fall could be even more divisive if the AAUP refuses to heed these concerns and continues down a path that sidelines Jewish voices rather than includes them.

Why this matters for scholarship

In our experience engaging with many faculty and staff members on US campuses, we have debated ideas that we strongly disliked — it was this intellectual exchange, not boycott, that has sharpened our thinking.

Israeli academics — drawn from a country of roughly 10 million people in a Middle East–North Africa region of about 500 million, barely two percent of the area’s population — contribute indispensably to physics labs, philosophy colloquia, and medical breakthroughs. Silencing their voices and preventing US-based academics from working and exchanging ideas with them impoverishes us all.

The AAUP once stood sentinel against such suppression. Today it risks becoming just another ideological guild, one that blesses intellectual embargoes as long as the target is Israel.

A constructive way forward for the AAUP would be to:

• Acknowledge the growing alienation of its Jewish and Zionist members and respond publicly to the March 6 coalition letter.
• Revisit its recent policy change regarding academic boycotts and provide opportunities for its many members who oppose these tactics to highlight how academic boycotts violate the freedom, intellectual exchange, and open inquiry that the AAUP was founded to defend.
• Better vet and screen potential coalition partners: no group that equates Zionists with Nazis or calls for Israel’s destruction should be featured alongside the AAUP masthead.
• Offer robust antisemitism education for staff and chapter officers.

Academic freedom can never truly be advanced when one community is forced to check its identity at the door to participate.

If the AAUP truly stands for intellectual freedom, it must stop enabling the ideological silencing of Jewish and Zionist faculty.

Andrew Goretsky is the Regional Director of the Anti-Defamation League – Philadelphia. Raeefa Z. Shams is the Director of Communications and Programming at the Academic Engagement Network.

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