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The Academic Advisory Council of Jewish Voice for Peace
March 9, 2015
The Academic Advisory Council of Jewish Voice for Peace expresses grave concern in connection with the decision on Friday, February 27th of the University of North Carolina Board of Governors to close three University of North Carolina system academic centers: Chapel Hill’s Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity ,
N.C. Central University’s Institute for Civic Engagement and Social Change and East Carolina University’s Center for Biodiversity.
We regard the closings of these Centers as pait of an escalating trend toward the politicization of the academy and of the research and teaching that takes place in the university context. At stake are threats to fundamental principles of academic freedom and the integrity of academic inquiry more generally. The closings of these impo1tant centers in No1th Carolina reflect larger nation-wide effo1ts to suppress political viewpoints deemed unacceptable or offensive to the administrative leadership of our universities. They mirror a growing trend toward the imposition of political or ideological litmus tests on certain matters of legitimate scholarly inquiry.
In our view, the decision of the No1th Carolina Board of Governors reflects a fundamental corruption of the governance of U.S. universities by partisan political capture. Governing boards of U.S. colleges and universities have become politicized through appointments to those boards by persons who have little experience in academic governance, do not share a commitment to the idea of the university as a site for the production of knowledge and learning removed from the pressures of politics and the market, and are not committed to the principle of academic freedom.
Instead, university governance has become the project of partisan, political influence both a public and a private nature.
Jewish Voice for Peace’s Academic Advisory Council, a 550 member network of academics, was created to bring together academics who shared a commitment to robust academic freedom related to the study and teaching of Israel/Palestine. The Council was formed out of a concern that a broad range of views on questions of ju stice, belonging, and dispossession in the Israeli/Palestinian context were being censored and that academics and students who voiced views critical of Israeli state policy suffered censorship, censure, or termination.
The experience of Professor Steven Salaita at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign was a salient example. His appointment to UIUC’s Indian Studies Program was termi nated by the UI Board of Governors after it received pressure from outside donors who disagreed with his views expressed on social media about the Israeli siege on Gaza in the summer of 2014. On other campuses, departments and centers have been defunded or threatened therewith, faculty have been denied tenure, and student groups have been dece1tified on account of the viewpoints they voice that violate an ideologically narrow perspective on the history and nature of claims lo justice in Israel/Palestine.
Given our core mission – to defend academic freedom in connection with the study of Israel/Palesti ne – we understand the threat to academic freedom at stake in the closing of the three UNC centers as our issue as well. The principles we defend are impotiant for a broad range of social and political justice programs. Our core va lues have been threatened by the closings of these UNC centers and we stand with our colleagues in North Carolina who have opposed these closings and are working to reverse them.