BDS-supporting faculties bring politics to class - AMCHA discovers

The report, titled “Bringing BDS into the Classroom,” looked at 50 syllabi at 40 public and private colleges and universities over an 11-year period.

By ILANIT CHERNICK
An anti-Israeli protest inspired by BDS (photo credit: REUTERS)
An anti-Israeli protest inspired by BDS
(photo credit: REUTERS)
University faculties that support the boycott movement are using their classrooms to promote a political agenda, a study by the AMCHA Initiative suggests.
“Academic Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions-supporting instructors had an average of 78% of their course readings authored by BDS supporters, whereas non-BDS-supporting instructors had an average of 17% of their course readings authored by BDS supporters,” the AMCHA Initiative, a watchdog that seeks to investigate, document, educate and combat antisemitism on US university campuses, said on Wednesday
The report, titled “Bringing BDS into the Classroom,” looked at 50 syllabi at 40 public and private colleges and universities over an 11-year period.
The lead authors of the research are Leila Beckwith, a professor emeritus at UCLA and the co-founder of the AMCHA Initiative; and AMCHA Initiative director and co-founder Tammi Rossman-Benjamin.
Another important finding that the authors of the research made was that the two groups of instructors were found to be “qualitatively distinct from one another with respect to the selection of course readings, with almost no overlap of the groups.”
“We hypothesized that the syllabi of those instructors who had expressed public support for academic BDS would show significantly higher percentages of readings with pro-BDS authors than the syllabi of instructors who had not expressed public support for any form of BDS,” the study said, adding that this hypothesis was later confirmed by the findings.
“All of the academic BDS-supporting instructors had a majority of their readings authored by BDS supporters, whereas only two of the 35 syllabi of non-BDS-supporting instructors had a majority of their course readings authored by BDS supporters, and none more than 60%,” AMCHA said in a statement. “The data demonstrates that the large quantitative difference between the groups is not just the result of a few outliers, but represents a qualitative difference between these two groups of instructors in terms of how they select course readings.”
According to the study, the 50 syllabi that were looked at were courses that focused on the Palestinian-Israeli or Arab-Israeli conflict and “were taught at public and private colleges and universities across the country over an 11-year period by instructors who had either expressed public support for the academic boycott of Israel or had not expressed public support for either academic BDS or BDS more generally.”
The study compared the percentages of course readings with pro-BDS authors in these two groups of instructors.
These courses were offered in a number of primary departments at the universities and colleges. This included 18 history departments, 12 political science, eight Middle East or Near East studies departments and four international studies departments.
The study also pointed out that 48 of the syllabi were from courses taught by tenure-track faculty or visiting professors, while two of the syllabi were from courses taught by undergraduates under the supervision of tenure-track faculty members.
The authors of the report acknowledged and stressed that “freedom of speech protects faculty’s right to sign petitions and make extramural statements in support of academic BDS, and academic freedom generally protects their right to develop and teach courses as they see fit.” But, they said, this also raised serious and undeniably harmful consequences of “politically motivated faculty weaponizing their course curricula.”
They made it clear that “distorting and blocking the flow of knowledge” is a violation of “the norms and standards of scholarly inquiry” and undermines “the university’s academic mission.”
The researchers also noted that “faculty who use their classrooms to give academic legitimacy to a wholly one-sided, anti-Israel perspective, in compliance with the guidelines of academic BDS, can engender among their students hostility not only toward Israel, but toward Israel’s on-campus supporters, sentiments that can easily lead to acts targeting Jewish and pro-Israel students for harm.”
“Signing a petition in your own name on your personal time is one thing, but substituting personal politics for sound pedagogy from a lectern in a university classroom is something altogether very different,” Rossman-Benjamin said.
“Professors have a responsibility to educate, not indoctrinate their students,” she told The Jerusalem Post. “Pushing a personal political agenda of any kind in the classroom to young minds is reprehensible and flies in the face of the entire academic mission of any respectable institution of higher education.”
Rossman-Benjamin urged university leaders “to weigh in here, just as the University of Michigan recently did, and make clear to their faculty that their job requires them to educate their students, not promote their own partisan political views on the job.”
“Promote politics on your own time and dime, but doing it from the lectern of a university classroom is dishonorable, despicable and dangerous,” she said.
The report suggested establishing “policies against using the classroom for political advocacy,” and that faculties should be urged by university administrators “to establish their own safeguards against the politicization” of academics.
The authors said in the report it was ultimately up to academic departments and faculty senates to determine whether the promotion of one-sided “highly politicized course content is deemed a legitimate use of academic freedom, or an abuse of it.”
“However, given the clear and present harm that such politicization can cause to our schools, our students and society, it is time for tuition and taxpayers, as well as state and federal legislators, to demand that faculty address this question forthrightly, and to hold them accountable for their answer,” the report said.