A Question of Academic Freedom

"This understanding of academic freedom has some straightforward implications for how to argue in favor of BDS. We can, and should, oppose the discrimination and physical oppression that denies Palestinians access to higher learning, but we should do so without projecting a naive fantasy of what academic freedom under non-oppressive conditions looks like.

Further, we should not allow Zionists to claim that an academic boycott departs from the usual norms of supposedly free scholarly exchange. On the contrary: BDS aligns with academic freedom in the traditional sense because it represents the autonomous, self-regulating activity of the academy.

Universities’ meritocratic ideology insists that intellectual attainment determines acceptance and exclusion: your paper gets rejected from a conference because it’s not good enough, not because someone doesn’t like your politics. But academics routinely restrict scholarly exchange for political reasons."