My new essay today at The Hill is about the AAUP’s recent statement on antisemitism and academic freedom, explaining how the Committee on Academic Freedom got it wrong.
Here is the gist:
University Professors’ Organization Misunderstands the Nature of Antisemitism
The opening section of the document is devoted to the committee’s rejection of a Florida statute that codifies the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, imposing financial penalties on school districts and institutions whose practices are found out of compliance.
It is vital for the AAUP to challenge such political interference in curriculum design concerning antisemitism or other subjects, especially when coupled with funding consequences. But the policy document goes further, disparaging the IHRA definition, and actually arguing that antisemitism should not be specifically covered in civil rights legislation.
The committee went on to mischaracterize the IHRA definition as equating “criticism of the policies of the state of Israel with antisemitism,” intended to protect Israel from “critical examination of [its] history and policies.” This is flatly untrue. Although curiously omitted from the committee’s appraisal, the IHRA unambiguously states that “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.”
More troubling is the AAUP committee’s gratuitous assertion that antisemitism should not be covered as a “special form of discrimination” in civil rights legislation but addressed only “as religious or race discrimination.” This claim betrays either stunning ignorance or callous disregard for the uniquely protean history of antisemitism, a conspiracy-based ideology that shape-shifts among religious, racial, ethnic, national, cultural, genetic and other hatreds, whichever is most destructive at any particular time.
Objections to “special” forms of discrimination have a sordid history. Until 2020, when the U.S. Supreme Court decided the Bostock case, gay and transgender people were not clearly covered by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Many liberal jurisdictions therefore passed legislation specifically protecting the LGBT+ community over the protests of those who claimed that gay people were demanding “special rights.”
Intellectual life at American universities would be unrecognizable without the AAUP’s efforts for over 100 years. Nonetheless, the Committee on Academic Freedom has unaccountably ventured far beyond its remit, damaging its own credibility and compromising the AAUP’s historic mission.
You can read the entire essay at The Hill.
Слава Україні! Glory to Ukraine on Independence Day.