On April 15, members of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) will vote on a resolution to boycott Israeli universities, institutions, libraries, and scholarly journals. Richard Shweder describes the meeting last November where the resolution was approved by a preliminary vote and submitted to the AAA’s members. Even if the resolution is ultimately voted down, he writes, the BDS movement has already won this particular battle:

What I had not anticipated was the bullying that went on during the debate over [the boycott resolution]. Dissidents who were lined up and waiting to voice their views were suddenly denied access to the microphone by the president of the association and effectively silenced. Shortly before they were cut off, one young scholar did manage [a] memorable (and chilling) remark, anxiously . . . saying that she was well aware that in speaking against the boycott she would probably never get a job in an anthropology department. I wondered whether I could honestly tell her she was wrong.

These are agonistic times in anthropology. The BDS movement has been divisive, causing many members of the profession to remain silent rather than jeopardize valued relationships with friends and colleagues. . . . We are witnessing the subordination [of the ideals of the modern academy] to a political agenda. . . .

Two months ago I received an e-mail from a member of the AAA who wrote me that he was interested in inviting an Israeli colleague to his university for a semester and was “advised” that he had better check around to see what his colleagues thought of such an invitation “given the general pro-BDS atmosphere” in his department. That is one of the insidious ways this whole thing is playing out. Soon it will be time to vote. It remains to be seen whether the members of the AAA have the courage (and the wisdom) to say “no.”

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.