New AAUP Statement on Academic Boycotts

The AAUP has released a new Statement on Academic Boycotts, which was written and unanimously approved by Committee A on Academic Freedom and adopted by the AAUP’s governing Council on August 9. 

The new statement reconsiders the AAUP's prior categorical opposition to academic boycotts set forth in the 2006 report On Academic Boycotts. The AAUP's revised policy maintains that academic boycotts are not in themselves violations of academic freedom and can instead be legitimate tactical responses to conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education. The statement recognizes that when faculty members choose to support academic boycotts, they can legitimately seek to protect and advance academic freedom and the fundamental rights of colleagues and students who are living and working under circumstances that violate academic freedom and one or more of those rights. In such contexts, academic boycotts are not in themselves violations of academic freedom. 

The freedom to produce and exchange knowledge depends upon the guarantee of other basic freedoms and human rights, among them the rights to life, liberty, security of person, freedom from arbitrary arrest or detention, and the rights to liberty of movement and freedom to choose one’s residence. The statement concludes that individual faculty members and students should be free to weigh, assess, and debate the specific circumstances giving rise to calls for systematic academic boycotts and to make their own choices regarding their participation in them. Further, it holds that a faculty member’s choice to support or oppose academic boycotts should not itself be the basis of formal reprisal. 

The statement reiterates that academic boycotts should neither involve any political or religious litmus tests nor target individual scholars and teachers engaged in ordinary academic practices, such as publishing scholarship, delivering lectures and conference presentations, or participating in research collaborations. Academic boycotts should target only institutions of higher education that themselves violate academic freedom or the fundamental rights upon which academic freedom depends.

The full statement can be found here.