{"id":5531,"date":"2014-10-03T04:08:22","date_gmt":"2014-10-03T08:08:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.martinkramer.org\/sandbox\/?p=5531"},"modified":"2014-10-03T04:08:22","modified_gmt":"2014-10-03T08:08:22","slug":"columbias-slippery-boycotters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/2014\/10\/columbias-slippery-boycotters\/","title":{"rendered":"Columbia’s slippery boycotters"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post first\u00a0appeared<\/a>\u00a0on the <\/em>Commentary blog on October 2.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Columbia,In a\u00a0post<\/a>\u00a0in late August, I asked whether Columbia University\u2019s federally-funded Middle East Institute was boycotting Israeli institutions of higher education. Why? Its director, anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod, has signed a\u00a0pledge<\/a>\u00a0by some Middle East studies academics \u201cnot to collaborate on projects and events involving Israeli academic institutions.\u201d Did that personal pledge extend to the Middle East Institute, a Title VI National Research Center under her direction?<\/p>\n

I posed the question to David Stone, executive vice-president for communications at Columbia, and received this reply from him:<\/p>\n

If an individual faculty member chooses not to participate in events involving Israel, that is a personal choice that has no effect on the programs of the Middle East Institute or the rest of the University. The Institute itself is home to a broad range of teaching and research including a number of fellowships and grants that support faculty and student research and study in Israel; and its faculty members are engaged in a variety of projects with Israeli scholars.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Alan Luxenberg<\/a>, president of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, posed the same question directly to Abu-Lughod, and received this reply:<\/p>\n

My decision does not affect the Middle East Institute where we welcome distinguished scholars and students from all over the world, fund language training for students in all Middle Eastern languages, support study abroad in all the region\u2019s universities, and support, modestly, summer research for students in all the countries of the region, including Israel.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Middle East Institute serves the Columbia community. It does not have any institutional partnerships with other universities, whether in the US or abroad.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019m not surprised (or persuaded) by these answers. I think it\u2019s telling that Abu-Lughod has not issued a public statement of her position, which might be deemed an unacceptable compromise by the BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) cult. After all, if you really believe that Israel is South Africa (or worse), why not demonstrably abjure any administrative role in academe that compels you to treat it equally? What\u2019s the worth of a boycott if it doesn\u2019t mean sacrificing your access to\u00a0something<\/i>\u00a0to advance a cause\u2014whether it\u2019s a\u00a0home soda maker<\/a>\u00a0or the coveted\u00a0directorship<\/a>\u00a0of a Middle East center?<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s neither here nor there. The taxpaying public has the right to expect that every signatory of the boycott pledge who runs a Title VI National Research Center issue an assurance that the boycott doesn\u2019t apply during working hours. And the public has the right to expect an equal assurance from a university\u2019s higher administration. Anything less than that should be automatically suspect, because it\u2019s the bare minimum, and because it\u2019s obvious that even these assurances don\u2019t mean that there isn\u2019t a stealth boycott underway.<\/p>\n

A Title VI federally-funded National Research Center is committed\u00a0by law<\/a>\u00a0to making sure that its programming will reflect \u201cdiverse perspectives and a wide range of views and generate debate on world regions.\u201d Unfortunately, the U.S. Department of Education, which administers the program, has\u00a0failed<\/a>\u00a0even to define what this means. Consider this test case. On September 19, Columbia\u2019s Middle East Institute co-sponsored (with the university\u2019s Center for Palestine Studies) a\u00a0panel<\/a>\u00a0entitled \u201cThe War on Gaza: Military Strategy and Historical Horizons.\u201d (Notice the title, as though there wasn\u2019t a war on Israel too.) It included three Palestinian-American boycotters: Columbia professor Rashid Khalidi, Barnard professor Nadia Abu El-Haj, and legal activist Noura Erakat. And that\u2019s it. Read the\u00a0live tweets<\/a>\u00a0from the session, and judge the tenor of the proceedings yourself. Did this event offer \u201cdiverse perspectives and a wide range of views,\u201d and\u00a0was it structured to \u201cgenerate debate\u201d? No. So just what must the Middle East Institute do now to assure that it meets its obligation?<\/p>\n

My own view is that there\u2019s nothing that a bureaucrat in Washington can do to assure that it does. No Department of Education\u00a0official<\/a>\u00a0is going to detect a stealth boycott or do any serious follow-up on whether taxpayer dollars are going to political activists in academic guise. That means that the reform of Title VI, a creaking holdover from the Cold War, is impossible. If you think that Title VI, on balance, does more good than harm, you\u2019re just going to have to accept that some of your tax dollars will go to agitprop for Hamas. If you think that\u2019s totally unacceptable, you should favor the total elimination<\/a>\u00a0of Title VI from the Higher Education Act, now up for reauthorization. There is no middle ground.<\/p>\n

Go\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0to discuss this post via Facebook.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The boycott of Israel at Columbia is a personal affair\u2014so they claim. Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1167,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[101279,15067,101350,101213],"class_list":["post-5531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-academic-boycott","tag-columbia","tag-lila-abu-lughod","tag-middle-eastern-studies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1167"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5531"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5531\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}