OPINION:
Academic freedom was meant to protect scholarship from politics. Instead, some of the nation’s most prominent academic organizations are invoking the phrase to shield their own political activism within the academy, even as the political campaigns they endorse undermine scholarship and threaten the academic freedom and educational opportunities of students and faculty.
Consider the Middle East Studies Association, whose Oct. 8 report, “Lessons in Repression,” documents nearly 200 incidents of alleged retaliation against university employees for pro-Palestinian speech and activism, mostly outside the classroom.
The report portrays the incidents as a threat to academic freedom and urges unions and faculty organizations to mobilize against alleged repression.
People were interested in these podcasts
How did an organization established to promote Middle East scholarship make defending political activism a major institutional project?
In 2017, the Middle East Studies Association removed “nonpolitical” from its mission statement and bylaws. By 2021, it proclaimed a “dual commitment to scholarship and advocacy.” Yet scholarship demands open inquiry, wherever the evidence leads, while political advocacy seeks to advance a predetermined objective.
What happens when these conflict?
The question was answered in 2022, when association members overwhelmingly endorsed the academic boycott of Israel promoted by the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. The campaign seeks to sever scholarly relationships with Israeli universities and, through its anti-normalization campaign, exclude academic activities that fail its political tests.
For an organization devoted to studying the Middle East, supporting a campaign that restricts the production and transmission of knowledge about Israel strikes at the heart of its scholarly mission. Advocacy had prevailed over scholarship.
Then, the Middle East Studies Association invoked academic freedom to defend the activism it had elevated. In 2024, it established an Academic Freedom Initiative. Its researcher, Lori Allen, wrote the Oct. 8 report, reviewed by Middle East Studies Association President Ussama Makdisi and task-force co-Chairs Lara Deeb and Darryl Li.
All four are academic boycott supporters who signed a petition pledging, “In the classroom and on campus,” to pressure institutions to implement boycott, divestment and sanctions demands, to support student activism and to challenge alleged violations of academic freedom. Consistent with that pledge, they helped produce the report that portrayed alleged retaliation against pro-Palestinian activism as an academic freedom crisis and urged organized resistance.
The association’s progression is revealing. The organization made advocacy part of its institutional mission, endorsed a boycott that undermines scholarship and invoked academic freedom to defend the political activism. The principle meant to protect scholarship from political interference became a shield for that interference.
The same pattern is far more troubling at the American Association of University Professors. For more than a century, the organization has helped establish and defend academic freedom standards across higher education.
Like the Middle East Studies Association, the professors group has made political advocacy an institutional priority despite its duty to defend academic freedom. After winning the group’s presidency in 2024 on a platform seeking expanded political power through alliances with student, climate and social-justice organizations, Todd Wolfson declared that the organization need not remain politically neutral.
The conflict is especially troubling given the identities of those who hold key academic-freedom posts at the professors organization. Mr. Wolfson, Rana Jaleel, chair of Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, and Isaac Kamola, director of the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, all publicly support the academic boycott campaign, which the professors group condemned in 2006 as inimical to academic freedom.
With these supporters in key positions, the professors group reversed its long-standing opposition to academic boycotts in August 2024, declaring them “not in themselves violations of academic freedom” and calling for protection from punishment for participants.
Now, the group’s support for academic boycott activism extends beyond policy. This week, the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom released a guide to fighting what it calls “weaponized” Title VI investigations, including those involving allegations of campus antisemitism, portraying them as attacks on academic freedom and free speech.
All but one of the faculty whose experiences inform the guide have supported the academic boycott campaign. More revealingly, the guide explicitly urges faculty to join Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, a network launched by the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel to mobilize support for the academic boycott campaign.
The professors group now directs faculty seeking academic freedom protection toward the political movement whose boycott demands the professors group once condemned as inimical to that freedom.
The Middle East Studies Association and the American Association of University Professors have done more than allow political advocacy to overtake their academic missions. By invoking academic freedom to defend the very activism undermining those missions, they have turned a safeguard against politicization into a shield for politicization itself.
In the process, they have fundamentally compromised their credibility as guardians of scholarship and academic freedom. Their pronouncements no longer deserve the deference their long-standing reputations have commanded.
• Tammi Rossman-Benjamin is director of the Amcha Initiative.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.