Digital Library
Bringing BDS Into the Classroom
Topic:
Antisemitism & Antizionism, Israel & Regional Politics
Principal Investigators:
Leila Beckwith and Tammi Rossman-Benjamin
Study Date:
2020
Source:
AMCHA
Key Findings:
This study seeks to expand understanding of how faculty boycotters use academic programming and their faculty positions to implement an academic boycott of Israel. It focuses on the extent to which individual faculty boycotters bring their anti-Israel biases into the classroom.
The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) and its American counterpart, USACBI, coordinate the implementation of the academic boycott of Israel (academic BDS) in the U.S. and throughout the world. PACBI and USACBI are both components of the larger anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.
The findings confirmed the researchers’ hypothesis. The two groups of instructors showed themselves to be qualitatively distinct from one another with respect to the selection of course readings:
- Academic BDS-supporting instructors had an average quantity of 78% of their course readings authored by BDS supporters; the same average quantity from non-BDS-supporting instructors was 17%.
- All of the academic BDS-supporting instructors had a majority of their readings authored by BDS supporters, whereas only 2 of the 35 syllabi of non-BDS-supporting instructors had a majority of their course readings authored by BDS supporters, and none more than 60%.
These data demonstrate that the large quantitative difference between the groups is not just the result of a few outliers, but represents a qualitative difference between these two groups of instructors in terms of how they select course readings.
This research strongly suggests that faculty who support an academic boycott of Israel engage in politically-motivated efforts to implement the anti-normalization component of the boycott in their classrooms. The results leave little doubt that instructors who support academic BDS make a calculated choice to densely populate their courses with readings authored by BDS supporters. By doing so, they expose students to an overwhelming dominance of content portraying Israel as an illegitimate country unworthy of normalization.
Methodology:
The syllabi of 50 courses at 40 US colleges and universities focusing on the Palestinian-Israeli or Arab-Israeli conflict were examined.
Courses whose titles or descriptions contained one or more of the keywords “Israel,” “Israeli,” “Palestine,” “Palestinian,” “Zionism,” and “Zionist” were searched for within Fall 2008 to Spring 2019 course catalogues. Those that included a section on the Palestinian-Israeli or Arab-Israeli conflict but did not primarily focus on the topic were not included.
Two categories of course instructors were selected for study: those determined to support an academic boycott of Israel, and those determined not to support academic boycott of Israel or BDS more generally. Moreover, syllabi were only included in the study if the instructors belonged to one of these two categories. This decision was taken in order to isolate the impact of support for academic BDS (and its explicit call for the anti-normalization of Israel in the academy) on the actual design of a course.
Authors and faculty were ascertained to support academic boycott of Israel if they had signed a publicly accessible petition, letter or statement endorsing or promoting it, or made other public statements supporting it in traditional or social media.
A list was compiled of the title and author(s) of each course’s required weekly reading assignments. The number of readings per syllabus included in this study ranged from a low of 8 required readings to a high of 82 required readings, with a mean of 40 required readings per course. If a reading had multiple authors, it was considered BDS-authored if one or more of its authors was a BDS supporter.