Back in 2002, Harvard President Lawrence Summers cautioned that “profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities. Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent.” At the time, left-wing professors sharply criticized Summers for those comments. But the recent actions of two prominent faculty unions suggest that he was, if anything, too restrained in analyzing how extreme anti-Israel attitudes have permeated the academy.
Last year the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)–the nation’s oldest professors union–took a strong stand against anti-Semitism when it condemned efforts by a British teachers union to boycott two Israeli universities. But earlier this year, controversy erupted when the AAUP scheduled a conference to examine the validity of academic boycotts, then ultimately canceled the meeting after circulating, as pre-conference reading material, an anti-Semitic article from a journal that had published work denying the Holocaust.
Some within the AAUP were not pleased with the conference’s cancellation. The strongest response came from the Institute for Advanced Study’s Joan Scott, a former chair of the committee charged with censuring universities that fail to comply with the AAUP’s academic freedom principles and procedures. On February 9, Scott described critics of the conference as “lobbyists on behalf of the current Israeli regime (or fellow travellers [sic] of those lobbyists)” who believe “that any representation of a point of view other than theirs is ananthema [sic].” She criticized professors who “did not protest quietly, but alerted entire list serves of lobbyists who began to campaign for closing down the conference.” She also charged them with believing that “academic freedom is the freedom to listen only to those who agree with them.”
Scott’s statement was absurd. Imagine if, in the 1980s, when the nuclear freeze movement enjoyed strong support on college campuses, an AAUP official had described professors who endorsed a nuclear freeze as “fellow travelers” of the Soviet Union–and then accused them of undermining academic freedom by speaking out.
Still, her attacks were mild when compared to the bizarre behavior of CUNY’s faculty union, the 18,000-member Professional Staff Congress, of which I am a member. The union’s preference for eschewing serious negotiations in favor of childish pranks, such as picketing outside the chancellor’s house or verbally disrupting Board of Trustees meetings, left CUNY professors without a contract for three-and-a-half years. But the PSC has developed a novel explanation for its difficulties. In February, a statement from the union’s “International Committee” attributed the PSC’s problems to the “imperialist war on labor.” And this “war” on professors is somehow linked to–surprise!–Israel, as well a number of other perennial left-wing causes. Here is what the committee wrote:
We want to connect the dots, seeing how economic attacks like those we face in contract bargaining (wages, workload, discipline, health benefits, pensions) are connected to political attacks on labor (Taylor Law, mayor & governor and media’s vilifying the TWU, NYU’s use of NLRB anti-labor rulings), and to wars like Iraq (or threats to Iran, Syria, and Venezuela, and massive military aid to the Israeli and Egyptian regimes and the Uribe regime in Colombia).
Most people would see no connection between U.S. foreign policy and what local governments spend on professors’ salaries. But PSC President Barbara Bowen contends that a union’s effectiveness depends on its demonstrated support for “a progressive agenda for social change.”
As she explained last year, “What critics call political activism contributes to the strength of the union and has enabled us to make significant advances in salary, benefits, and legislation affecting our members.” Responding to criticism of her approach to Israel, she wrote this to members of the PSC’s delegate assembly: “To foster the innuendo that the current leadership is anti-Semitic or ‘anti-Israel’ is simply malicious. It’s also a familiar technique of those who wish to stifle free speech and suggest that any discussion of the policies of the current Israeli government is out of bounds.”
Bowen’s faction currently controls the local branches on 17 of CUNY’s 19 individual campuses. Since 2000, as part of its activist agenda, the PSC has frequently intersected with anti-Israel elements of New York’s radical left. Bowen was one of a handful of “principal officers” of New York City Labor Against the War (NYCLAW), a group created to oppose military action against the Taliban. Soon after September 11, Bowen signed a public letter demanding that Washington stay out of Afghanistan, citing the pernicious effects of previous U.S. involvement around the world. After all, the letter declared, “the United States and its allies have already inflicted widespread suffering on innocent people in such places as Iraq, Sudan, Israel and the Occupied Territories, the former Yugoslavia, and Latin America.” In 2004, NYCLAW co-founded Labor for Palestine, which has urged all academic unions to divest from Israel. Bowen has said that by this point she no longer had a formal association with NYCLAW. Still, before Labor for Palestine was formed, Bowen conferred upon NYCLAW the PSC’s most prestigious honor, a “Friend of CUNY” award.
Such a record from leaders of academic unions affirms what TNR Contributing Editor Cass Sunstein has described as the “law of group polarization”–a pattern in which deliberation moves groups “toward a more extreme point in the direction indicated by their own predeliberation judgments.” The “predeliberation judgments” in most higher education unions reflect, if in exaggerated fashion, the more general anti-Israel sentiments commonplace among the contemporary professoriate. Since few academics enter the profession to become labor activists, those who gravitate toward union service are more likely to fall on the fringes of a faculty that already is ideologically one-sided.
The effects of group polarization only multiplied when Bowen’s PSC and Scott’s AAUP joined forces. In April 2002, Mohamed Yousry, an adjunct at CUNY’s York College, was indicted, along with attorney Lynne Stewart, of conspiring to relay messages from Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, the imprisoned blind cleric who organized the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. When Yousry understandably was not rehired as an adjunct after his contract expired, the PSC made the case a cause célèbre. PSC executive committee member Sandi Cooper claimed that Yousry “has had his intellectual rights violated no matter what legalistic cover CUNY can hide under.” Scott’s AAUP committee decried CUNY’s action, and the AAUP leadership duly ratified its report. Eventually, an arbitrator dismissed the PSC’s formal grievance, and Yousry himself was convicted on all charges.
An environment in which union leaders detect links between military aid to Israel and low faculty salaries is clearly not a healthy one. Still, Joan Scott and Barbara Bowen have pulled off an impressive feat of sorts: They have managed to make Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s paranoid musings about the “Israel Lobby” look moderate.
Robert David Johnson is a professor of history at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center.
