But in 2023, the association itself supplied powerful evidence of the problem the report identified, when it became the first leading professional association of a mainstream academic discipline to endorse an academic boycott of Israel, a resolution approved by more than 70% of voting members. With its vote, the AAA didn’t merely take sides in a highly charged geopolitical conflict. It turned an organized political campaign into a disciplinary commitment.

That campaign is academic BDS, the effort to extend the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement against Israel into scholarly life. Its boycott demand is institutional, cutting off academic ties with Israeli universities and Israel-related academic activity, including research partnerships, conferences, journals, study abroad, speakers, and programs. Its anti-normalization demand is ideological, treating Israel, Zionism, and engagement with either as illegitimate within the academy. The first restricts the production and transmission of knowledge; the second replaces accurate scholarship with political denigration and indoctrination.

Academic BDS is important here not because Israel is the only subject politicized disciplines distort, but because it shows with unusual clarity what happens when politics is allowed to govern scholarship. Inquiry gives way to orthodoxy. Evidence is suppressed or filtered through political demands. Dissent is stigmatized and rejected. Students are taught a political verdict in place of disciplined understanding.

That is why the AAA’s indignation is so unconvincing. The Vanderbilt/WashU report warned that political criteria are overtaking scholarly ones. The AAA’s boycott vote was a perfect example of that process in action.

The AAA vote, however, did not create the problem. It simply ratified a politicization already visible inside anthropology departments themselves.

At Cornell University, two-thirds of anthropology faculty have publicly endorsed academic BDS, including the chair and the directors of graduate and undergraduate studies. At Brooklyn College, more than half the anthropology department has done so, including the chair. At Scripps College, all three anthropology faculty members are academic BDS supporters. At Columbia, Northwestern, University of Chicago, Brown, University of Minnesota, UC Santa Cruz, and Wesleyan, between one-quarter and one-half of anthropology faculty have endorsed academic BDS, with most of those departments also led by chairs who support the boycott.

Such concentrations are consequential because academic boycotters do not necessarily leave their politics outside the university. Studies have shown that faculty who endorse academic BDS are far more likely to bring boycott-aligned materials into the classroom, and that departments with higher concentrations of academic boycotters are more likely to give boycott-aligned voices a departmental platform. These findings underscore the risk that when academic boycotters are concentrated inside a department, political criteria will displace scholarly ones in the department’s academic activity.

Nor is the harm of politicization limited to the academic domain. Research has also found that schools with larger numbers of academic BDS-supporting faculty experience more incidents targeting Jewish and pro-Israel campus community members for harm. Here, too, the mechanism is plain. When boycott and anti-normalization are given academic legitimacy, ties to Israel, Zionism, or pro-Israel activity can themselves become grounds for suspicion. The result is a campus climate in which students and faculty associated with those ties are more easily excluded, harassed, or abused.

The Vanderbilt-WashU report is the clearest example of politicization within anthropology, a mainstream discipline, but academic BDS exposes the same problem in many other fields. Professional associations in American studies, Asian American studies, Women’s studies, Middle East studies, critical ethnic studies, Chicana/o studies, comparative literature, and related fields have also embraced the boycott and turned its demands into disciplinary obligations. And beyond formal association votes, nearly 5,000 individual faculty members in dozens of disciplines on campuses throughout the United States have publicly supported academic boycott campaigns, including many in academic leadership roles.

The issue is not what faculty believe as private citizens. It is whether academic authority may be used to make activist agendas the conditions under which students learn, scholars collaborate, and departments define legitimate knowledge.

THE PATHOGEN OF JEW-HATRED: DIAGNOSING AN AMERICAN MIND VIRUS

Universities cannot repair public trust in the humanities and humanistic social sciences while ignoring the faculty and departmental politicization that erodes the academic mission from within. Nor can they protect students with statements about tolerance while permitting academic structures to be used for political activism that gives license to exclusion, harassment, and abuse.

The line universities must draw is clear. Faculty may hold and express political views as individuals. But faculty and academic units may not use institutional authority to carry out boycott or anti-normalization commitments. The work of teaching, research, programming, mentoring, and scholarly exchange must be governed by scholarly and educational criteria, not by political campaigns.

Tammi Rossman-Benjamin is the director of the AMCHA Initiative, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to combating antisemitism at colleges and universities in the United States. She was a faculty member at the University of California for 20 years.