The Backlash Grows in Brooklyn

The New York Daily News had a question yesterday about the coming anti-Israel hatefest in the city: “Why
is Brooklyn College’s political science department officially sponsoring a
one-sided event that calls for divestment, boycotts and sanctions against
Israel?” As they have done on other campuses, anti-Israel activists talk
colleges into sponsoring events featuring rabid Israel haters (in this case Omar Barghouti and Judith Butler), then scurry to
raise an academic freedom defense, while allowing no speakers at all who
disagree.

Harvard Law Professor (and Brooklyn College
graduate) Alan Dershowitz called
it “shocking” and “wrong” that an academic department at a public
university could sponsor such an event. Dershowitz challenged the “academic
freedom” defense, arguing that “academic freedom simply does not include the
power to proselytize and propagandize captive students whose grades and futures
depend on faculty evaluations.” And he wondered whether the political science
Department would be willing to officially endorse “a radical, pro-settler,
Israeli extremist to propagandize their students.” (Wonder no more–it woudn’t.)

The department’s chairman refused to
respond to questions from the News and
Dershowitz on the extent of the department’s support for the event. But it does
appear that at least one question they posed can be answered.

On Facebook, before the “no comment”
policy took hold, political science professor Corey Robin said that
the department formally voted to sponsor the anti-Israel event. In so doing he
indicated that a majority of the department supports a boycott, including a
boycott against fellow professors, solely on the basis of nationality. Still
left unclear from Robin’s posting is whether the department authorized use of
any taxpayer funds to bring the anti-Israel speakers to campus, a move that
likely would violate New York law.

It
appears unlikely, however, that the administration will rebuke the political
science department. In the end, the college would have been better served by
following the guidance of the AAUP–which,
despite its usually tenacious defense of the academic status quo, made clear
that boycotting Israeli academics (much less Israeli businesses and society as
a whole) violates the basic premise of academic freedom. “The Association
believes that the boycott of academic institutions serves only to curtail the
most basic academic freedom, the free exchange of ideas. It calls upon those
who have endorsed this boycott to end their support and to work with the entire
academic world to enhance the free exchange of scholarship and ideas. It is only
through such exchanges that the means to resolve the world’s awful conflicts
can emerge.”