Earlier this month, the Rutgers American Association of University Professors- American Federation of Teachers Union (AAUP-AFT) and Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union voted to support a joint resolution calling on Rutgers University to divest from Israel and to “suspend its 2021 memorandum of agreement with Tel Aviv University.”

While it is an open question as to whether divestment campaigns, in general, are compatible with academic freedom, pressuring Rutgers to terminate the memorandum of agreement with Tel Aviv University poses an obvious threat.

In justifying the call to cut ties with Tel Aviv University, the joint resolution asserts that “Israeli universities play a key role in supporting Israel’s system of apartheid rule” and invokes the AAUP’s recent reversal of its longstanding principled objection to academic boycotts:

[...] the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has affirmed that academic boycotts “can be considered legitimate tactical responses to conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education.

The resolution highlights how the AAUP’s misguided change of heart on academic boycotts undermines academic freedom for Israeli scholars and those wishing to collaborate with them and how it has paved the way for boycotts of Israeli institutions to proceed with the AAUP’s blessing.

This resolution must be rejected by Rutgers University because academic freedom is supposed to protect scholars from having to yield to a campus orthodoxy, whether that orthodoxy is the result of government pressure, the campus administration, or pressure from faculty unions. After all, academic freedom subject to veto by a majority provides little protection.