On academic associations and support for Palestine

A response to claims of academic complicity as "ad hominem attacks"

Hello everyone! While this has not been an explicitly political newsletter for a few months now, that is indeed how it started its life, and I suspect I will continue to get angry enough about things from time to time to exorcise my feelings into a Word document. Hence today’s essay, in which I talk about academics’ persistent refusal to understand what a structural critique is. I would hope for it to not be relatable at all—but, alas.

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As I write this, 186,000 Palestinians are dead or dying in Gaza. The Strip’s universities are in ruins; not a single student was able to graduate this past spring. There is no clear end in sight to the horrors Israel is perpetrating against the Palestinian people. And somehow we are still debating whether academic associations—whose principles Israeli scholasticide continues to violate and whose members face repression for pro-Palestinian solidarity across the Global North or death for simply existing in Gaza—need to speak up.

I am not a member of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), but I have read with interest a series of posts on ECPR’s blog The Loop that debate academic freedom in the context of Israel’s genocidal violence against Palestinians in Gaza. On one side stand those who argue for neutrality, while their opponents explain that claiming neutrality is itself a political act. The exact same discourse played out when police murdered George Floyd, and again (albeit with far less fanfare) when Russia invaded Ukraine. Around the tired old circle we go.

I have no desire to rehash the neutrality debate yet again. If someone doesn’t recognize our institutions as political actors by now, that ship has probably sailed. What I do think is worth engaging seriously is what it means to belong to a collective and how to exist with discomfort when that collective pushes you past positions you’ve taken before. I was, until recently, a member of the International Studies Association (ISA), a large interdisciplinary body for primarily academics working on international affairs in some capacity. Members organizing for Palestine engaged in several solidarity actions at ISA’s annual conference this past April in San Francisco, the most significant of which was an interruption of the association president’s keynote address to demand a stronger institutional response in support of Palestine.

ISA’s revised “response” was not to engage with pro-Palestine members or to set up a meeting about BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions), something members had been requesting for over a decade. Instead, the association’s leadership sent everyone an email about “misinformation” and made special note of statements about ISA leadership being complicit in genocide, which it called “ad hominem attacks” and “unacceptable.” I want to focus on the “ad hominem” portion of this in particular, as it reveals a) a privileging of personal discomfort over a reckoning with power relations, and b) a conflation of individuals with institutions. Together, these discursive maneuvers reflect widely-held and taken-for-granted understandings in academia about institutions and what they exist for. Their prevalence necessitates breaking them down. I’ll take each point in turn.

Personal discomfort vs. power relations

Let’s start with an adage everyone has probably heard, regardless of their politics: there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.

Depending on your beliefs, this statement is either silly, nihilistic, or anxiety-producing. Suppose you agree with it. What are your options? One is despair: if there can be no ethical consumption in a capitalist system, but you need to eat and drink and otherwise exist, then your actions will continually produce harm no matter how much you’d prefer they didn’t. (Kelly Hayes has really powerful stuff to say this week about this dynamic.) The sibling of nihilism is debauchery, and doing what you want because nothing matters might end up making sense. Another option is constant vigilance—in other words, how can I produce the least harm possible? In a mild form, this logic demands lifestyle changes that are potentially innocuous. Taken to the extreme, anxiety turns into militancy, projecting concerns onto everyone around you and yelling at strangers who don’t carry around a reusable metal straw. This is hardly a more useful state than hedonism.

But if you think more about what a system without unethical consumption actually implies, a much larger solution comes into focus: creation of an alternative. This is extremely difficult! It requires a massive, collective project with all kinds of people working to overhaul economic and social relations many of us take for granted on a day-to-day basis. It is achieved over lifetimes through consistent work, not overnight in one magnificent burst. And while the work goes on, everyone still has to eat and thus play into global supply chains and labor practices and regulatory frameworks that do harm. The rub is that actively working against complicity is not absolution. Yet it remains necessary even so, for the sake of the collective well-being of our fellow human beings and the planet—whatever the individual moral hand-wringing with which each of us must personally grapple.

To translate this logic back to Palestine: you are probably complicit in the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in some way. Your use of the HP printer in your office supports the profits of the company whose technology makes possible Israeli surveillance of Palestinians. The Democratic politician you voted for has themselves probably voted to send more weapons to Israel as it decimates Gaza. “Complicit” does not mean “personally responsible for”—this is important. It means “to be involved with others in an activity that is morally wrong.” Involvement need not be willing, nor even conscious (though consciousness is difficult to ignore once gained). Because complicity is a social condition, it is also not necessarily a personal indictment. Hearing it named should make us personally uncomfortable—there’s a genocide happening, after all. And we should absolutely spend some time sitting individually with our own choices and values. Ultimately, however, the problem is structures that enable and endorse genocide. Personal divestment from those structures only goes so far if those structures continue to exist. Again, the way forward becomes a collective project, because a large wall requires a large battering ram.

Which is to say: personal discomfort is real, and grappling with it is a process we each have to go through to varying degrees depending on our positionality. And, the impulse to manage discomfort cannot be allowed to slide into pure avoidance, nor should it be weaponized to advocate that those fighting genocide must behave “respectably” before their demands will be heard. There are power vectors present in any discussion of complicity: the chief financial officer at HP is far more powerful than the office worker trying to scan a document on an HP device, for example. If someone calls you complicit and your first reaction is to lash out, you have missed the point of their statement. The point is that we are all implicated in the structures of oppression around us, and resisting those structures requires more work than simply wishing they did not exist. In the case of academic associations, it requires acknowledging their role as deeply, inextricably political actors and their choice to either continue tacitly supporting existing modes of oppression or to become part of the battering ram.

Perhaps this is pie-in-the-sky thinking, and certainly I am not suggesting that academic associations have the capacity to be our most important (or even marginally effective) allies. And, if complicity is widespread, everyone has some role to play. Rarely is “you are complicit” a personal attack. Rather, it is an invitation to think structurally and then collectively. But academics tend to struggle with this invitation, which brings me to my second point.

Individuals vs. institutions

There’s a line in my university’s social media policy for staff that posts that “could bring the university into disrepute” are verboten. This logic permeates traditional academia: your institution, which does not and cannot love you, nevertheless demands your utmost loyalty. Junior scholars are encouraged to “find their people” through professional associations and specialized workshops, where “their people” means “people in your discipline who research the same topic you do using similar methods and theories of knowledge.” At the end of the day, though, the “community” scholars are expected to defend is the college or university that employs them.

On so many levels, this is bizarre. Ask an academic to name academics working in other departments at their institutions to whom they are not married and see them struggle to count beyond one hand. Ask whether they know the names of PhD students in their own department beyond the ones they personally supervise. I will never forget encountering a departmental director of graduate studies, who shall remain nameless but not genderless, who told a room full of PhD students that it was not his responsibility to know about controversies happening on campus. Yet these same academics, who in their day-to-day could not seem to care less about most of the people who make up their institutions, are quick to call those who criticize their employers publicly “unprofessional.”

Which is to say: academics absolutely do understand that the “institution” is not synonymous with every individual that comprises it. Yet, when given the opportunity to be accountable to people, they choose to identify with a university bureaucracy they otherwise disavow at every opportunity.

Calling a critique of an academic association’s complicity in genocide an “ad hominem attack” is to choose power relations—hierarchies of deference, credentials as hall passes—as one’s intellectual home. It is a conscious decision to take a job title and turn it into an entire self. Critical race theorists remind us that even if individual racists were removed from institutions, racism would persist because the institutions themselves are the problem. White supremacy is structural—that’s the point. Practices and policies outlive their creators, and the best of intentions cannot dismantle infrastructures that require the oppression of others in order to function. By reading institutional critiques as personal, academic leaders take their feelings and place them at the center of an entire matrix of harm. Paradoxically, they reveal how little they indeed understand about the institutions with which they engage in a piecemeal manner at best yet which they feel they must, nevertheless, protect.

I can hear objections echoing. Imagine that you are the person who makes major budgetary decisions for your department or association. You may be rightly assessed as partly culpable if one of those decisions ends badly. But imagine, instead, an institution in which discussing those budgetary decisions with a group of peers was the norm. Imagine that there was time and space built intentionally into processes that sought ideas and opinions from everyone implicated. (I cannot tell you how many decisions are made at universities affecting students without any input from students themselves.) I am not a purist here: there are times when decisions must be made quickly. And, the trust necessary for quick decisions to work is only fostered when regular open discussion creates more widespread knowledge of people’s needs and preferences—and a precedent for taking them seriously. Someone else might push me to imagine, alternatively, a situation where people are so thoroughly organized that closed-door, single-minded decisions are never necessary. This is the collective work: stretching our imaginations together.

Back to Palestine. We are not our institutions, and how deeply identified with them we choose to be is indeed a choice. Taking an institutional critique as personal says more about ourselves and the work we still have to do to unlearn white supremacy (circling back to the first point about privileging personal discomfort) than about our day-to-day job functions. It’s easier to prioritize something resembling accountability to a faceless deputy vice chancellor you’ve never met but who may nod approvingly at you from afar. A student you encounter every day may disagree with you, and you may have to hear about it. Discomfort, again, reigns supreme.

But I cannot conceive of a world in which the opinion of a university leader matters more to me than the safety and support of students I have taught, young people for whom I have some responsibility, who face enough challenges just surviving in the world but still put their precious energy into justice and liberation. Our communities in academia are not predetermined. We can choose whether our relation to colonial institutions, specialist working groups, other academic workers, our students, or some other constellation of people matters most to us in professional settings. And if we are told we must never say a critical word about our employers, we can recognize that as an act of disciplining and choose to create a professional practice otherwise.

What our institutions are for

Are we complicit in the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Western academia? In many cases, yes. Is that fact a personal indictment of you, dear reader? Only you can decide that. Only you can wrangle with what you’re unlearning, what liberation will demand of you, and what sacrifices you’re willing to make. But I would wager that the person critiquing our collective complicity is not coming for your own internal thoughts. Those are irrelevant to the collective project we face in the here and now: how are we, together, going to aid Palestinians in building a world in which they (we) are all free?

But I will speak directly to academic association leaders for a moment, and I mean this as a personal rather than institutional question. What does enacting the values of the institution you represent in your professional life mean to you? Do you conceive of those values within narrow scripts, where “collegiality” means privileging the veneer of friendliness over the difficult work of making our institutions better collectively? Do you see them only applying in situations where near-universal public consensus exists and there is little risk of people in power criticizing your actions? Or are you willing to accept an invitation to rethink together what actions our values should produce?

As political actors representing members from or with loved ones in Gaza, whose members have been killed in Israel’s genocide, whose members work directly with defense contractors keeping the wheels of Palestinian annihilation turning, and whose missions elevate study and learning against a backdrop of scholasticide, associations must speak up. Their failure to do so reveals what, and who, they are actually for. And that is a construction of community that fits all too well within the bounds of what many academics imagine “community” to be.

May we imagine otherwise. A free Palestine in our lifetimes.