The NYT Gets It Right — and, Even More Amazing, We Have an Open Letter For You to Sign!

The New York Times is out today with a strong condemnation of the NYS anti-boycott bill:

The New York bill is an ill-considered response to the American Studies Association resolution and would trample on academic freedoms and chill free speech and dissent. Academics are rightly concerned that it will impose a political test on faculty members seeking university support for research meetings and travel. According to the American Association of University Professors, which opposes the association boycott and the retaliatory legislation, there is already a backlash, including in Georgia where a Jewish group compiled a “political blacklist” of professors and graduate students who supported the boycott.

Even more amazing, the Times manages to describe correctly a point of about the ASA boycott that has been particularly contentious:

The group said it would refuse formal collaborations with Israeli academic institutions or with scholars who represent those institutions or the Israeli government until “Israel ceases to violate human rights and international law.” The boycott does not apply to individual Israeli scholars engaged in ordinary exchanges.

Thank you, New York Times! We’ve been trying to make this point about the institutional nature of the boycott for months now. At last the mainstream media has acknowledged it.

In other news, as a few outlets have reported, we seem to have stopped the bill from advancing—for now. Yesterday, the chair of the Assembly’s Higher Education committee of the Assembly, Deborah Glick, took the bill off her committee’s agenda, which effectively prevents it from moving forward. She has said, however, that she plans to resubmit it. So it’s not over, not by any stretch. But very good work by all of you who emailed and made phone calls over the weekend.

Henry Farrell and I have written an open letter about these state bills over at Crooked Timber. The purpose of the letter is to serve as a rallying cry for academics and citizens—on both sides of the academic boycott debate—across the country. Because the New York and Maryland bills may only be the first of many, we want to give people a template, with all the relevant links, to oppose this type of legislation wherever it may arise. Again, whether they are pro- or anti-boycott.

Some critical sections of our statement:

We write as two academics who disagree on the question of the ASA boycott. One of us is a firm supporter of the boycott who believes that, as part of the larger BDS movement, it has put the Israel-Palestine conflict back on the front burner, offering much needed strategic leverage to those who want to see the conflict justly settled. The other is highly skeptical that the ASA boycott is meaningful or effective, and views it as a tactically foolish and entirely symbolic gesture of questionable strategic and moral value.

This disagreement is real, but is not the issue that faces us today. The fundamental question we confront is whether legislatures should punish academic organizations for taking politically unpopular stands. The answer is no. The rights of academics to partake of and participate in public debate are well established. Boycotts are a long recognized and legally protected mode of political speech. The purpose of these bills, as some of their drafters admit, is to prevent organizations like the ASA from engaging in this kind of speech and to punish those organizations if they do—merely because the state disapproves of the content of that speech. For these and other reasons, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the New York Civil Liberties Union have declared their opposition to these bills.

Please go to the Crooked Timber site, sign your name in the comments section, and then share the letter on FB, Twitter, and among your friends, family, and colleagues.