A Conversation on Academic Freedom and Campus Antisemitism
In a higher education landscape increasingly fractured by campus protests and fraught debates over the limits of free speech, the University of Washington’s faculty-led initiative, Bridges for Change recently hosted a webinar to grapple with the issues of academic freedom now facing American universities. Co-sponsored by the Academic Engagement Network, the event featured Dr. Cary Nelson, a leading authority on issues of campus speech and academic freedom. Moderated by UW communications instructor and Bridges for Change member, Carol Schiller, the conversation explored a range of topics including faculty advocacy, departmental capture, and the nature of antizionism.
About Dr. Cary Nelson
Dr. Cary Nelson is the Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a senior research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP). He served as National President of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) from 2006 to 2012, where he advocated nationally for academic freedom and shared governance, and he currently chairs the Alliance for Academic Freedom. He is the author or editor of 39 books, including No University is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom (2010), Hate Speech and Academic Freedom: The Antisemitic Assault on Basic Principles (2024), and his newest release, Mindless: What Happened to Universities.
Note to readers: The following transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
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Opening Remarks: The Post-October 7 Campus
CN: This will not be a cheerful talk. I'm going to be talking about what's happened to universities since October 7, and not a lot of it is good. October 7, 2023, was a pogrom in the one place on earth it was supposed to be impossible: the world's only Jewish state. Then, while Hamas's murder sprees were still in progress, the second psychological blow landed: some throughout the world celebrated the massacre and blamed Israel for the slaughter of its men, women, and children.
What we've confronted since that day is the first worldwide antisemitic movement to have unfolded since the Nazis conquered Europe. That hatred in many US academic programs is now installed as departmental policy. It governs teaching, recruitment, program design, and personnel decisions, and is deeply embedded in several academic disciplines. In 2021, academic departments began declaring antizionist mission statements as their own, and in 2023, in the wake of October 7, the trend escalated with the formation of Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP).
Let's say what should be obvious: they will not reform themselves. I've now decided there is only one solution: academic receivership. In that scenario, a rogue department is put under external control, which means a department head from a different discipline on campus is placed in charge, supported by a new executive committee from multiple disciplines.
Q & A
CS: We have university administrators, faculty, alumni, and donors listening today. We’ve all heard terms like “academic freedom” and “freedom of speech” used as shields to defend behaviors that many find deeply destructive. I want to start with a core debate you address in your book. You quote Max Weber’s 1918 lecture, Science as a Vocation, where he says the primary task of a useful teacher is to teach students to recognize inconvenient facts, and that faculty should resist becoming "petty prophets" in their lecture rooms. You quote this approvingly but add a caveat that Weber is on target when advocacy “done poorly” is at issue. Was Weber warning that advocacy itself destroys the teacher's integrity? Is advocacy itself the problem?
“Was Weber warning that advocacy itself destroys the teacher’s integrity? …Is advocacy itself the problem?”
CN: We went through an elaborate debate about that issue in the AAUP. The 1940 statement on academic freedom says that any intrusion of political opinion not directly related to subject matter is inappropriate in the classroom. However, in 1970, the AAUP recognized there were moments when people simply had to break out of teaching chemistry or philosophy to address something dramatic that just happened in the country—like the attack on Pearl Harbor or the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King.
Later, the AAUP agreed that advocacy was okay in the classroom under certain conditions: that you try to model rational analysis, look at both sides of the question, point out where you come down, and encourage your students to express contrary opinions. It is unacceptable to impose opinions. When I was teaching undergraduates, I always said, "You'll get extra credit if you disagree with me. I'm not interested in parrots." Unfortunately, we've now got a lot of advocacy which really means faculty members telling students, "This is what you need to believe," and that's not acceptable.
CS: It sounds like there's been some shift in your thinking. In a 2013 essay, you defended "carefully reasoned political advocacy" in the classroom. But in your recent book, you conclude, "I realize now that [Kenneth] Marcus was right," admitting your previous view placed unwarranted faith in the character of academic disciplines. If the last decade has proven that at least some faculty have erased the line between education and partisan advocacy, what kind of standards could possibly restore that line? Or has advocacy itself become the problem?
CN: I think it's fair to say that advocacy has become the problem amongst many humanities and social science disciplines, but that's because advocacy has been corrupted and misused. People are too ready to believe that they are in possession of the absolute truth. If they believe themselves to be exemplary moral figures, and their opponents to be immoral, they lose touch with the need for debate and engage in indoctrination. I think at that point they should be subject to sanctions.
CS: I'm going to press you a little bit more on this topic. It does seem like we're fighting human nature here, right? We know that human nature is inherently to think that one's own opinion is right and the other person's opinion is wrong—and therefore, when I advocate, it's okay, but when you advocate, it's not. So aren't we just better off saying advocacy in the classroom was a mistake? Shouldn't we go back to the first principles Max Weber was talking about and say all advocacy in the classroom should be refrained from? Is that not really where we're at at this point?
CN: One reason I can't go there is really because of my own experience. I'm a literature teacher, and I regularly taught contemporary poetry. A great deal of contemporary poetry engages in advocacy for particular political points of view. Part of my job as a teacher of literature is to put myself inside the poems and speak in the voice of the poet—to embody their advocacy so as to make it clear to the students what they're actually advocating. So I can't get rid of advocacy, and even opinionated advocacy. I taught Holocaust poetry regularly, and what I had to do was embody the horror of the Holocaust. I was never teaching an alternative point of view. You could say that was advocacy—I was advocating for the right of 6 million Jews to have lived their lives rather than be annihilated.
CS: The 1915 AAUP declaration defined academic freedom as an instrument to achieve the social good of advancing the sum of human knowledge—not an end in and of itself. But your book exhaustively documents faculty who seem to be using academic freedom as a shield for falsehoods and conspiracy theories to shield them from scrutiny. For example, you cite Jasbir Puar at Rutgers, who claims without evidence that Israel stunts the growth of Palestinian children—a claim contradicted by WHO and UN health data. You also cite Rabab Abdulhadi, whom you describe as a zealot rather than a scholar, leaving students with no resources to critically evaluate the material. What purpose does academic freedom serve when it stops serving the truth?
CN: That's a pretty good question. I suppose the purpose it serves is that it gives people a degree of protection to voice falsehood, to pursue falsehood. I suppose that's what Jasbir Puar and Rabab Abdulhadi did. Jasbir Puar is unable to prove her claims when she claims that Israel deliberately stunted the growth of Palestinian children. All of the objective international reporting says that Palestinian children aren't stunted in their growth, that it's not a problem. In fact, the Palestinian Health Authority in the West Bank says stunting is not a problem. The Health Authority in Gaza, which ain't always committed to the truth, says stunting is not a problem. I interviewed the head of the Health Authority on the West Bank and a Palestinian authority from Gaza... and they personally validated the reports that their groups had made.
CS: In your book, you spend a lot of time analyzing the veracity of these claims to determine whether they are antisemitic. But some scholars are beginning to explore whether this whole focus on antisemitism is actually a strategic error—that by debating the bigotry of a faculty member, we get bogged down in subjective arguments about intent. Let me give you a concrete example from the University of Washington. An ecology professor here assigned an essay by an activist asserting that Israel steals Palestinian water. In a science class, no other information was shared about regional water sustainability or Israel's world-leading desalination technology. When a student repeated that claim in discussion, the professor did not correct the record with scientific data. The students are being sent into the world without the necessary data for their profession. In a case like that, isn't the primary offense professional incompetence? Shouldn't we hold people accountable for professional incompetence rather than getting bogged down discussing antisemitism?
CN: I have no interest in trying to figure out what is in people's hearts, because in many ways, you just don't know, and largely, it's irrelevant. The issue is the impact on students, and the impact of your story is that students are misinformed. They're incorrectly educated. They're being deceived by an argument that isn't being countered by factual testing. I don't know whether the faculty member is an antisemite, and I really don't care. All I know is that they promote arguments that have no proof, and there is counter-evidence showing they are promoting false concepts. My solution to that is relatively simple: the department head and the executive committee explain to that faculty member that if they continue to represent those falsehoods, they won't be assigned that course anymore. They can teach something else, but they can't teach that subject matter if they're going to teach it in a fundamentally false way. You're taking them out of the situation that gives them the power to represent falsehood to their students.
CS: How would that actually work? If you're in a science class and the topic you've been assigned to teach has been used as a platform to bring in outside topics, what are you going to be assigned to teach instead?
CN: In literature, of course, the ultimate sanction is you get assigned to teach freshman rhetoric. In the sciences, you can teach a basic subject rather than a specialized one. We had a case at Illinois in political science where someone proved so impossible over the years, and people didn't want to take his tenure away. So in the end, he was assigned to perform services in the library. He didn't teach at all anymore.
CS: Let's talk a little bit about institutional neutrality. That has come up in several different ways, and many are pointing to the University of Chicago’s stance on institutional neutrality as a potential model. From the outside, it does look like a powerful shift, but the question is: how does that address the issue of a monoculture within departments that continue to control hiring and grading? For universities that are considering the move to institutional neutrality, help us understand what would be the benefits of adopting that even with no other changes made.
CN: Well, institutional neutrality can never be absolute. There are times when a university president has to voice the sentiment of the campus, or a university president has to point out the absolute falsehood of arguments that a faculty member is making. So I don't believe it can be absolute; however, the institution should, to the degree possible, avoid making political statements except when it has an educational responsibility to issue a position. So I think it's a good thing, but it's unwise to think it's absolute.
In response to your question, since writing the book that you're quoting from, I've decided that departments that have been totally captured by antizionism are the most serious problem that the university confronts in dealing with antisemitism. Those departments are the source of major hostility on campus. They're often the source of brainwashing that turns students into relentless anti-Zionists. They are departments that have basically lost their soul. Institutional neutrality ain't going to help that.
“[Antizionism is] a distinctive political movement of its own, and it needs to be understood as that, but it's also a version of antisemitism.”
CS: Sociologist Shaul Kelner recently wrote an article in Sources called "American Antizionism." In that article, he argues that it's a mistake to ask, "Is antizionism antisemitism?" He posits that we should view antizionism as a distinct phenomenon in its own right—a mass movement with its own history rooted in Soviet propaganda, its own social base in the professional elite, and crucially, its own "praxis," meaning it is defined by actions like boycotts, encampments, and exclusion, rather than just ideas. At the same time, another scholar, anthropologist Adam Lewis-Klein, uses a slightly different argument but comes to a similar conclusion: that antizionism is itself a hate movement in its own right, one with its own defining characteristics, including harassment, exclusion, and demonization.
If Kelner and Klein are right, and antizionism is actually a political mass movement premised on Jew-hatred from the left, rather than just a viewpoint... how can this be compatible with academic freedom at all? If departments are functioning as a base for a political movement where the exclusion of other scholars is a core tenet of the praxis, isn't antizionism fundamentally incompatible with academic freedom?
CN: Kelner's article is really quite good, and Adam Lewis-Klein has written a number of provocative things that are full of interesting insights. I think both are perfectly correct that antizionism is a specialized form of antisemitism that has its own arguments, its own rules, its own demands and claims, and its own deceptions. It is a distinctive political movement of its own, and it needs to be understood as that, but it's also a version of antisemitism.
How do you disentangle it? If "death to Jews" is one of the slogans, or "by any means necessary" (which means the means that they used on October 7—a despicable and horrific thing for students and faculty to be saying), then that anti-Zionist movement is antisemitic. I think that contemporary antizionism on campus seeks to renew the impulse of the Nazis to make the campus Zionist-free. When they broadcast the menacing message "Zionists are not welcome here," they aren't kidding. They're not bluffing. They want to prove themselves right. And I think that's the level of aggression that we are responding to: the will to erase our presence on campus. That form of antizionism is unacceptable on campus.
Audience Q&A
CS: We have some questions here in the chat, which we will now address. “What is the line between educational value and no educational value when issuing statements potentially violating institutional neutrality is basically impossible to mediate. How do you define what's within scope and beyond the pale of what's within the purview of the university?”
CN: Well, there's no automatic dividing line. There's no good principle that will give you certainty in dealing with every occurrence of such issues. But I think when a movement on campus says "Zionists not welcome," the President needs to bloody well get up there and say, "Zionists are very welcome," and then the President should say, "We are looking to institute two more research programs with Israeli universities. We want to open a new exchange program for students and faculty with Israeli universities." In response to the outrageous insistence that Zionists are not welcome, you're going to demonstrate that they are welcome. In other words, in response to statements like that, which are unacceptable, real action has to take place to prove those people wrong and to prove that their demands are futile. That's a case serious enough where the president should speak out, where neutrality just doesn't work. Neutrality is unacceptable in response to the promulgation of hatred.
CS: Another question: “Do academic boycotts of Israeli institutions align with the core principles of academic freedom in the US, or do they fundamentally contradict them?”
CN: They are in absolute contradiction. The AAUP articulated its policy opposing all academic boycotts in any circumstances—and they included the example of Israel—in 2005, and then they distributed it nationally the following year in 2006. Until 2024, that was AAUP black letter law: all boycotts unacceptable. Because the organization has become more anti-Zionist, they basically reversed that policy in 2024 and treated boycotts just as a tactic that could be acceptable. Well, they're not a tactic. First of all, they either deny or seriously criminalize faculty research projects with Israel, they castigate people for initiating them, and they seek to close down student exchange programs. That means that they are denying students and faculty their academic freedom to pursue research and educational opportunities anywhere in the world. Institutions should be free to create shared projects with other nation-states. That's how academic freedom is supposed to work. It either works that way, or it won't work at all.
CS: The next question ask about antizionist mission statements issued by university departments. “Can you give some examples when you refer to antizionist statements? What are you referring to?”
CN: They started to issue those in 2021, and in 2023 there was a much more widespread movement amongst departments to issue those statements. Women's studies programs unfortunately took the lead in encouraging that in 2021, and then it spread everywhere in 2023. Typically, what those statements do—they're not all the same, of course, because many of them were issued by individual departments, so they vary a great deal—but the most common things that they say are, first of all, Israel's long oppression of the Palestinians means that it was really responsible for what Hamas did on October 7. Hamas was just reacting to unfair treatment by Israel, and so Hamas should not be held responsible. They also may go on to say that Israel is morally unredeemable, that Israel is committing genocide. And when we think a country is committing genocide, we typically feel the country can't be saved. It's like Nazi Germany. It's guilty of genocide; we have to do away with the regime completely. So those are typical things that department statements say. Some of them go on to say, "We commit ourselves to using the classroom to help promulgate these views and to educate students about the perfidy of the Israeli state". There are some department statements that specifically claim that they will devote their instructional time to teaching students the error of their ways if they believe the Jewish state has a right to exist. My program in Latina and Latino studies on the Urbana campus is one of the statements that made that claim about its teaching. They were eventually convinced by the administration to take the statement down, which was certainly very good. But having made that statement, one worries about what their teaching is like. Obviously, they had complete department agreement behind the public claim that they were going to teach as antizionist in a radical way to eliminate their state.
CS: The last question: “The vast majority of academic institutions did nothing to stop anti-Israel hatred. However, private groups of students with lawyers sued and won many judgments which have caused a lot of pain and money to the institutions since university administrators have been so inept. Would you support these kinds of lawsuits more broadly?”
CN: Absolutely. I've helped work on some of those. So you know, I'm guilty of participating in them, and I think that legal remedies are one of the things we have to resort to. I am involved at the very moment—I don't want to be more specific, but I'm involved in making a case to the Supreme Court about a particular lawsuit against a university, so I'm an activist in that regard. I believe that that's an absolutely necessary recourse.
