Israel/Palestine and the paradoxes of academic freedom

Judith Butler

In the last few years, two separate debates on academic freedom have emerged in the United States, and both of them have Israel/Palestine at their centre. The first has to do with arguments against the academic boycott of Israeli institutions on grounds of academic freedom, and the second has to do with the new Academic Bill of Rights, sponsored by David Horowitz, which maintains that the classroom should present balancing points of view on political issues and that the faculty should represent a balanced spectrum of such points of view.1

        I shall consider both of these debates. In the case of the boycott, a clear paradox emerged in which ‘academic freedom’ became the principle under which many people opposed the boycott, arguing that academic freedom involves the free circulation of ideas and scholars across national boundaries and without discriminating on the basis of nationality. The fear that some Israelis who strongly oppose the Occupation might be exempted from the boycott produced the response that there would be ‘lists’ distinguishing good and bad Israelis. These conjectured ‘lists’ clearly constituted, in the minds of some, discrimination on the basis of political viewpoints. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) published their objection in the spring of this year, arguing that the resolutions originally passed by the British Association of University Teachers (AUT) ‘damage academic freedom’. As will be remembered, those resolutions called for a boycott against two specific institutions of higher learning, Haifa University and Bar Ilan University. The AAUP noted that the boycott excluded ‘conscientious Israeli academics and intellectuals opposed to their state’s colonial and racist policies’, and on the basis of what appeared to be an ideological litmus test the AAUP concluded that the exclusion, and the standard of judgement it implied, ‘deepens the injury to academic freedom rather than mitigates it’.

We can see in the AAUP’s first point that boycotts based on an ideological or political viewpoint are considered abrogations of academic freedom, and that the positive principle at stake is that academic exchange ought to be freely conducted without instating standards of inclusion and exclusion on the basis of political viewpoints. Yet the AAUP, in a second paragraph, makes an­other point, and this is one that underwrites First Amend­ment jurisprudence in the United States. They write,

since its founding in 1915, the AAUP has been committed to preserving and advancing the free exchange of ideas among academics irrespective of governmental policies and however unpalatable those policies may be viewed. We reject proposals that curtail the freedom of teachers and researchers to engage in work with academic colleagues, and we reaffirm the paramount importance of the freest possible international movement of scholars and ideas. The AAUP urges the AUT to support the right of all in the academic community to communicate freely with other academics on matters of professional interest.

Here we find a substantive notion of freedom at work, one in which academics are (a) free to exchange ideas, (b) free to move across national boundaries or, at least, have ideas that are free to move across national borders, and, finally, (c) free to communicate with other academics on shared matters of professional concern.

Whether the AAUP was right to oppose the boycott is not my concern here. There are intelligent positions on both sides, and I am less interested in settling the question than in thinking about the different conceptions of academic freedom at work in the debate itself. I will begin with two relatively narrow questions and then move in the course of my reflections to the broader politics involved. First, then, what version of academic freedom is at stake here and, more particularly, how are freedom of movement and communication circumscribed and defined by a particular conception of academic freedom? Second, do debates on academic freedom constitute something of a displacement of political analysis away from both focus on the devastation of Palestinian educational institutions and, in the US and UK, the heightened regulatory powers of the state as well as non-state institutions, such as the Ford and Rockefeller foundations.

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