Best Boycott Ever

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Many readers will know that the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recently rescinded a job offer it had made to anti-Israel professor Steven Salaita, after Salaita, among other things, condoned the kidnapping of Israeli teens. This episode, which has left both Salaita and his spouse out of a job, is sad, but the aftermath has not been without its share of comic relief.

Predictably, Salaita and his allies claim that his case is just one of many examples in which “external pressure” is used to “silence faculty and students on campuses across the country for speaking in support of Palestinian human rights.” Salaita has not only written of his silencing in the Chicago Tribune but also spoken of it at, among other places, the University of Chicago, Northwestern, De Paul, the University of Rochester, and Syracuse University. In November, he has eight gigs at California universities, including UC-Berkeley and UCLA. Memo to all-powerful Israel Lobby: I am available for silencing.

But the award for inadvertent comedy goes to the graduate student planning committee for the UIUC History Department’s annual Women and Gender History Symposium. In solidarity with other academics who have pledged to boycott the University of Illinois until it hires Professor Salaita, the committee has canceled the 2015 symposium. The symposium was to be organized “around the theme of Dissent and Empire as a means to critique our university’s historical investment in empire, particularly in its refusal to eradicate ‘Chief Illiniwek’ from this campus.” The university parted ways with its mascot in 2007, but the university has failed to suppress students and alumni who want to keep the chief’s image alive. This failure, along with the Salaita affair, proves the “university’s stake in the project of settler colonialism.”

So the planning committee is punishing UIUC by refusing to hold a conference condemning it. They cannot “in good faith hold an event which would endorse, tacitly or otherwise, our university’s position.” Moreover, they “cannot and will not contribute to the university’s profits, which the trustees have proven is for them paramount above all things.” Not just paramount, mind, but paramount above all things. No doubt the trustees are feverishly trying to figure out what new cash cow they can turn to, now that the Women and Gender History Symposium, that Bruce Springsteen concert of academic symposiums, has been denied them.

In fairness, the graduate students on the planning committee are merely following in the footsteps of their elders, like Columbia professor Bruce Robbins, who refused to bring his anti-Israel road show to the University of Illinois, to strike a blow against the University’s alleged caving in to pro-Israel donors.

Vive le boycott.

Best Boycott Ever

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AUTHOR

Jonathan Marks

Jonathan Marks is a Professor of Politics at Ursinus College and publishes in modern and contemporary political philosophy in journals like the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics, the Journal of American Political Science, and the Review of Politics. He is the author of Perfection and Disharmony in the Thought of Jean Jacques Rousseau.

Marks also has written on higher education for InsideHigherEd, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Weekly Standard, and the Wall Street Journal. He blogs occasionally at Commentary Magazine.


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