Without a doubt, the movement for boycotts, divestment and sanctions against
Israel has gained a foothold in the United States. Not only has the
first labor union endorsed BDS – with many rank-and-file members taking
part in the Block the Boat action
on the West Coast, which prevented a ship from Israeli company Zim from
docking all along that wide expanse on the Pacific – but the chilly
reception that talk of academic boycotts previously received has thawed perceptibly.
Nevertheless, despite the increased momentum
the BDS movement has enjoyed, there remain two concerns that stand in
the way of more endorsements of the academic boycott of Israel: the
possible effect boycotts have on academic freedom and on the mission of
academic organizations. Many still ask, how does this boycott affect our
sense of how we as academics are part of a common enterprise, or what
the Modern Language Association, a huge academic organization with more
than 24,000 members, just addressed at its last convention in Vancouver –
the idea of a commons? Don’t politics like this take us away from that?
Isn’t our business restricted to researching and teaching our academic
fields, and not on taking potentially divisive political stances?
Academic freedom is often understood as the
protection academics in higher education enjoy against censorship. The
type of censorship we are most familiar with is the type that
institutions visit upon those whose exercise of academic freedom seems
threatening. But there is another, perhaps even more pernicious type of
censorship, and that is self-censorship, as it occurs in
individuals, and in organizations. Self-censorship announces the
successful internalization of all the controls institutions now have no
need to exercise from without; those mechanisms are now safely in place
within individuals and within organizations. Self-censorship’s relation
to the idea of a “commons” is that it effectively removes us from that
space; we withdraw into the safety of received opinion and give up the
democratic rights and responsibilities which members of an academic
commons hold.
Self-censorship finds form in our reluctance
not just to speak out, but sometimes even to think carefully and
deliberately about certain subjects. It is as if we somehow understand
that actually knowing about a controversial issue will then oblige us to
act, and we anticipate that action will create discomfort. So we simply
stop short of finding out all the facts; that is to say, we stop being
academics. This then provides us with an alibi: How can I take a
position when I don’t have all the facts?
Indeed, self-censorship most often finds an
alibi in lack of expert status. While I am not cavalier about charging
off half-cocked, there is a difference between researching something
responsibly and in an open-minded fashion, reaching a conclusion and
taking a position, and feeling that until one can pass a Ph.D. exam in
the subject, one just should not speak out.
When this kind of thinking takes root – and I
mean particularly in safely tenured faculty – then let me be blunt: We
academics have basically given up our academic freedom. It is lying
there on our bookshelves with the books from our freshman year in
college that we gaze upon fondly from time to time, but whose actual
contents we have absolutely no recollection of.
Now what about academic organizations? One
argument has been that academic organizations should not take political
stances because in opening debate we cause divisiveness and discomfort.
But then we must decide whether the price we pay for that placid
environment has not been too great. Like individuals who use lack of
expert status as an alibi not to exercise their academic freedom,
academic organizations that avoid debating difficult issues squander
their bully pulpit and in effect end up betraying their mission to
protect and advance their cause.
Let me end on a more personal note – why have
I, as an individual, become so involved in this issue? That’s easy.
Along with the quite legitimate and certainly urgent nature of what is
going on in Israel-Palestine, for the longest time I have been struck by
the fact that no other subject is so quickly shut down as a discussion
point on campus.
It is absolutely eerie to me that this is the
one topic that causes this much silencing of debate. No one has
silenced discussion of Chinese violations of human rights, or the
egregious violations in Sudan, or just about any other topic. One would
have to go back to the outrage and silencing that surrounded the
teaching of evolution to find any such debate. This to me sends out a
red flag. And bears scrutiny. What is so sacrosanct that the idea of
raising the issue and perhaps taking a stance results in
self-censorship? What knowledge is on the one hand so absolute, and on
the other hand so unable to accommodate debate?
There is no other profession I know of that
has anything resembling academic freedom. It is there for a reason. It
is pointless if it is not used. It is not a matter of personal
betterment or reward; it is a matter of us holding true to the
educational mission of the academy and to the vocation whose call we
have answered. We are in fact deeply privileged, but also we are
entrusted with this privilege to do something with it, and not to let it
lie, taken for granted, jealously held close to us, but not used so as
to extend it to others. If we do not make that gesture of generosity, we
see how narrow and self-interested a “commons” can be.
by David Palumbo-Liu from here
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