The Squeaky Wheel of the Boycott Israel Movement
The great advantage of a conspiracy theory is that everything counts as proof. Even the absence of evidence only shows that a secret cabal is lying in wait, while seemingly mundane events can be stitched together into a forbidding web of oppressive intrigue. This is never more true than for the claims of the BDS (boycott, divest, sanctions) movement against Israel, as recently seen in a Chronicle of Higher Education article by University of Michigan professor Silke-Maria Weineck, misleadingly titled “When University Marketing Suppresses Academic Freedom.” The incident Weineck describes involves no suppression of anyone’s academic freedom, but it does provide a good example of how baseless suspicions can consume even well-educated and otherwise reasonable people among the Israel boycotters, reinforcing fantasies of their own persecution.
The essay details Weineck’s difficulty getting her school’s marketing department to produce accurate promotional materials for an endowed lecture by Palestine Legal’s Dima Khalidi, titled “A New McCarthyism: Academic Freedom and Palestine.” I do not question the broad outline of Weineck’s story, including the “many hours” it took her to convince the university’s social media team to prominently feature the full title of the lecture on a poster and in tweets, with “Palestine” in an appropriately large font. But her conspiracy-mindedness surfaces in her characterization of an extended exchange – essentially a disagreement over graphic design – as an attempted “erasure” of Palestine and an effort to depress attendance at the event. Weineck is apparently unaware of the principle of Hanlon’s Razor, which has a special application to university functionaries: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.”
To demonstrate a pattern of anti-Palestinian prejudice, Weineck begins her essay by claiming that the University of Michigan “sanctioned the professor John Cheney-Lippold for refusing to write a letter of recommendation for a student seeking to study in Israel. To no avail, Cheney-Lippold invoked his allegiance to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.” Her account of this 2018 incident is seriously incomplete, bordering on fallacious.
Cheney-Lippold was actually sanctioned because he misled one of his students, promising her a recommendation that he never intended to provide, thus delaying her from seeking a willing recommender. Then he disingenuously claimed that he had not realized she planned to study at Tel Aviv University, when he was really waiting to pull the plug until after his impending tenure vote. He subsequently used class time to expound his political opinions to students, explaining his adherence to the BDS movement, which was a misuse of his authority as a faculty member. Cheney-Lippold told the dean that he devoted only fifteen minutes to his personal politics, but she determined it to have amounted to nearly a full session in two classes.
Weineck ominously refers to the “people who organized the successful smear campaign against Cheney-Lippold” and warns that their “machine is always well-oiled, and its switch is easily flipped.” Far from a smear, however, the objections to Cheney-Lippold’s conduct were entirely justified and painfully true. Henry Reichman, then chair of the American Association of University Professors’ Committee on Academic Freedom, wrote in the Academe Blog that Cheney-Lippold had violated his obligations of “professional ethics and responsibility.” (I agree with Reichman and the AAUP that the penalties were too harsh for a first offense, and some were later reversed, but this does not mean that the complaints against Cheney-Lippold were a smear.)
Weineck’s concept of academic freedom is evidently limited to people with whom she agrees. She insists that a delay of a few hours in producing a satisfactory poster was a grievous violation of her own rights, yet impeding a student’s participation in a university-sponsored program (another detail she omitted) was apparently fine. As was Cheney-Lippold’s exploiting a captive audience – students enrolled in his courses unrelated to Israel/Palestine – to justify his politically motivated actions.
Such a lament is all too common among BDS advocates, who seldom miss an opportunity to assert victimhood. In this case, Weineck’s hassle amounted to nothing more than a half-day’s inconvenience: she exchanged poster mock-ups with some clueless social media professionals who explained their objective, perhaps misguidedly, as appealing to people “beyond the U-M campus” by emphasizing the Michigan brand.
Although no administrator objected to, much less suppressed, either the “New McCarthyism” lecture or the speaker, Weineck jumps to the conclusion that Michigan’s social media team was surreptitiously attempting to blunt Palestinian voices in the guise of digital aesthetics, presumably under the baleful influence of you-know-who’s well-oiled machine. And indeed, the “soft tyranny” of the marketing department, as she put it, did succeed in changing the poster’s background from politically allusive red and black to Michigan’s iconic maize and blue.
As a professor of comparative literature, Weineck ought to appreciate the irony inherent in supporting a blanket academic boycott of Israel – to be imposed even at the expense of unwilling students – while simultaneously insisting that her own academic freedom requires frictionless acceptance of even her graphic design choices. It is still more ironic that she bemoans the “new McCarthyism” – evoking an era when alleged Communists were imagined everywhere – even as she imagines sinister forces of erasure lurking behind every digital door.
