CUNY and NYS hypocrisy on academic freedom: okay to boycott North Carolina and Mississippi, but not Israel
The graduate students at CUNY voted today to support the call for an academic boycott of Israel. Good for them.
The vote was greeted with unsurprising opposition from the CUNY Graduate Center administration and from CUNY Chancellor James Milliken.
The Graduate Center stressed in a public statement that the vote is “not a resolution supported by the GC nor the university as a whole” and that the center is “opposed to academic boycotts which “directly violate academic freedom.”
“We are disappointed by this vote from one student group,” a statement from CUNY’s Chancellor James B. Milliken read, “but it will not change CUNY’s position.”
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In the lead up to the vote, Milliken already made clear that he opposed the doctoral students’ endorsement of BDS.
“Other CUNY leaders and I have consistently and publicly opposed a boycott of Israel institutions of higher education,” Milliken wrote in a letter to the Forward.
Milliken also suggested that the student government’s endorsement would not have bearing on CUNY policy.
“At the end of the day,” he wrote, this is a call to action, but “a decision on this matter is the province of the CUNY Board of Trustees.”
Unsurprising, yet not without irony.
For in the very week that the Graduate Center and the chancellor were making these august pronouncements on behalf of academic freedom, Chancellor Milliken’s top lawyer was sending out a memo to all college presidents (including the president of the Graduate Center), provosts (including the provost of the Graduate Center) and other related financial officials, announcing that CUNY would be strictly enforcing Governor Cuomo’s ban on all non-essential travel of New York State employees to North Carolina and Mississippi. This ban is in response to both states’ passage of laws allowing discrimination against gays, lesbians, and transgender individuals.
If you think this ban has no impact on academic exchange, on our ability to interact with scholars in North Carolina and Mississippi, or indeed scholars from across the nation, or our ability to carry on our basic research, think again.
Should I, as a CUNY professor, wish to attend a conference or in North Carolina or do research in Mississippi, I would not be eligible to use any university funds to do so. Nor would I be allowed to use external or union grants to pay for these trips if—as is almost always the case with university faculty and such grants—these grants are administered through CUNY.
As any professor will tell you, without the university funding these trips or with the university preventing us from using our grants to fund these trips, we simply can’t do them.
CUNY’s announcement of this travel ban also reveals how empty Milliken’s claim is about how boycott decisions are “the province” of the Board of Trustees. As we can see here, the governor proposes and the governor disposes.
For the record, I have no problem with either this travel ban or CUNY’s decision to enforce it. I think it is a salutary use of state power and I hope it brings about the desired change.
But I wish people like Chancellor Milliken—and all the opponents of BDS at CUNY and elsewhere—would get off their high horse about the grave threat to academic freedom that would come from an academic boycott of Israel—which would not, unlike these North Carolina and Mississippi boycotts, be enforced through the state but would instead be entirely voluntary, the actions of both individuals and voluntarily associated collectives of individuals—and instead acknowledge that these are all legitimate ways of promoting the human rights and dignity, and indeed the academic freedom, of oppressed minorities and subjugated populations everywhere.