PHILADELPHIA – At the January meeting of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in Chicago this year, a resolution was proposed that would censure Israel for applying visa restrictions to four academics whom it regarded as a security threat, promoted by some radical MLA members who claimed to be motivated by their passionate support for the free exchange of ideas. The anti-Israel measure barely passed the MLA’s Delegate Assembly, eking out only a narrow 60-53 margin.
Now the resolution goes out to be considered by the MLA’s 28,000 members, who began voting with on-line balloting set to conclude on June 1.
In response to what was perceived by some MLA members as anti-Israel attitudes wiothin the organization, a group within the MLA, MLA Members for Scholars’ Rights, spoke out against the draft Resolution 2014-1 during the MLA’s recent convention and has since launched a petition and information resource site at http://www.scholarsrights.com.
The group includes, among others, professors Cary Nelson, Russell Berman, and Martin Shichtman, who clearly explain their opposition by stating that it is poorly framed and was introduced with very weak supporting material. The resolution, they contend, pulls the MLA into a highly charged political field in a one-sided way. They also believe that it will divide the membership and weaken the MLA’s capacity to address the urgent matters that faced in higher education today.
Cary Nelson, former president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), was critical both of the MLA’s intention and process in promoting the anti-Israel resolution.
“Everything about the MLA process has been biased in favor of the BDS agenda and against Israel,” Professor Nelson said. That bias has proceeded relentlessly to the present day, beginning with the scheduling of a blatantly anti-Israel panel through the passage of an uninformed resolution to the staff now trying to intimidate MLA MEMBERS FOR SCHOLARS’ RIGHTS over its scrupulous use of members’ emails—voluntarily provided for member-to-member communication—to provide a side of the case the leadership and staff have suppressed. Along the way we endured an online member conversation sprinkled with both overt and implicit anti-Semitism.”
And Russell Berman, a past MLA president, told JNS.org in an email that it is “important to focus on the real issue here: how academic boycotts poison academic life.” Further, he said, “Scholars as citizens have a right to engage in politics, but much less so in the classroom . . . However, in the case at hand, the issue is not whether scholars should engage in civic life at all but rather the specifically bad quality of BDS politics. BDS is the problem, not civic engagement. One has to be willing to make qualitative distinctions like this.”
“Criticism of Israeli policies or Zionism is not necessarily anti-Semitic, “Berman concluded, “but the mere fact that one has anti-Zionist views does not prove that one is not anti-Semitic.”
As academics, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East strongly supports the principle of unencumbered scholarly travel. Unfortunately, the MLA’s Resolution 2014-1 engages this topic in a lopsided way, focusing exclusively on Israel. Critiquing only Israel among all the nations on earth—many countries where academics are denied even the ability to study, attend classes, or travel—is both counter-productive and disingenuous, since Israel guarantees individual and human rights of its own citizens and visitors.
Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) commends it colleagues within the MLA for standing up for true exchange of ideas and legitimate public discourse, hopes that these voices will prevail, and is pleased that there are positive trends in academia where scholars are willing to stand up for academic integrity and true academic discourse.
