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Academic Boycotts Are Bad for the Academy

(Brown University Daily Herald) Jared Samilow - Last week, Brown's Middle East Studies program held a "critical conversation" on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and promoted a newly-published collection of essays supporting the boycott of Israeli universities. What makes academic boycotts so pernicious is that they establish one standard of pedagogy for teaching Israel, and another standard for teaching all other countries. Those who would join the boycott indulge in a rather dangerous solipsism, where the task of education is sacrificed for the moral gratification of the educator. There are those who would say that the circumstances justify the selective treatment, but that's an argument about politics, not pedagogy. Academic boycotts philosophically undermine a liberal education and deprive students of the opportunity to consider all views equally and decide which they prefer. Four of nine "critical conversations" hosted by the Middle East Studies program have been about Israel. At one of the conversations, a student expressed concern that the panel was so lopsided. The director of the program replied that because his approach to the conflict is perhaps the academic consensus, he did not feel obliged to include views that diverged from it. When an entire program routinely puts on activities with people who advocate boycotts of Israel - and almost never sees fit to present a contrary view - the pro-boycott position effectively ossifies into an unofficial policy. And that's when "critical conversations" become critical only in the sense that they criticize Israel. The writer is a member of Brown Students for Israel and a fellow at CAMERA.
2018-03-20 00:00:00
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