FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

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Schools such as Columbia and Berkeley employ severalfaculty members who publicly espouse anti-Semitic propaganda and use their affiliation with their academic institutions to obtain legitimacy for their offensive views and garner a broader audience.

The schools are wholly responsible for whom they choose to employ. These “respected academics” would be deemed bigoted crackpots and ignored were it not for their teaching posts at this prestigious university. These schools legitimize these people’s views and ensure they are heard by a wide audience due to their affiliation. 

Students can boycott universities by refusing to apply and enroll. Consumers can refuse to purchase goods from firms that employ Columbia graduates. AIJ’s boycott calls for employers and business owners to refuse to hire Columbia graduates. Hopefully, our efforts will persuade potential applicants to exercise their conscience and apply elsewhere.

No. Schools of higher learning, by their very nature, have established a standard for what constitutes valid intellectual pursuits. Academic freedom is the freedom to engage in pursuits that expand knowledge, even if the premise is controversial. However, it is grossly intellectually dishonest to suggest that advancing assertions of racial inferiority and promoting antisemitic propaganda are valid academic pursuits. People are free to espouse bigoted and hateful expressions that are not likely to incite violence but to insist that such expressions fall under academic freedom because a professor utters them is absurd and undermines the function of universities and the pursuit of knowledge. 

No. We support the First Amendment right to free speech, and we defend the right of these professors and other awful people to espouse their ignorant, hateful ideas. Faculty should continue to have this legal right whether or not a school employs them. However, if a school wants to endorse the bigoted beliefs of some of its faculty and create an entire school devoted to spreading vicious and ugly lies about Jews, we have the right to speak out and take action.

While we would hope that schools’ admission process would do a better job of selecting students who don’t embrace bigotry, students are not employed by schools, and the relationship is not the same. Employees, on the other hand, are a reflection of their employer, and it is entirely appropriate for an employer to request that their employees adhere to certain standards.

Boycotts work. They have been used for both worthy and despicable goals and were employed in Nazi Germany to intimidate people who wanted to purchase goods from Jewish merchants. The BDS movement perversely resurrected this tactic with the same nefarious intent. AIJ is turning the tables by calling for a boycott of institutions supporting those who promote bigotry and hate. Unfortunately, merely speaking up is insufficient and ineffective. Without drastic actions that lead to real-life consequences for these institutions, nothing will change.