Universities Hide Anti-Israel Faculty Behind Shield of 'Academic Freedom'
When the University of Washington returned a $5 million gift intended to start an Israel Studies Department, the reason was simple: the professor tasked with running the department had no intention of teaching a balanced perspective on the history and current governance of the state of Israel. He was, instead, a staunch supporter of the pro-Palestinian movement – and the university put his anti-Israel viewpoints ahead of student education and donor intent.
The university’s decision caused a debate in some circles over donor intent versus academic freedom. Academic freedom is important, yet it is not a license to take money from a donor to teach something far different than what the donor intended. Nonetheless, some in the academic community want to use gifts like these as a blank check to teach whatever they want.
Many Israel Studies Departments have become departments that teach students to hate Israel, as part of a pervasive hostility towards the Jewish state. The U.S. Department of Education found that “over $6.6 billion” was given to higher educational institutions from “Qatar, China, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates,” a number that the department showed is almost certainly a vast undercount when Qatar’s $3.4 billion in donations to Arab nationalist Middle Eastern Studies programs is well-known, as is the anti-Israel perspective Qatar prefers. Yet there is little academic pushback against this foreign funding because there is no explicit call for a certain academic perspective. There does not need to be such a call, however, when far left-leaning professors who want to teach about Israel in a way that is consistent with what the Qatar government wants.
Academic integrity must be protected as much as academic freedom. The University of Washington story is instructive. As reported by Forbes in mid-April, “Last month, the University of Washington (UW) made headlines when it returned a gift of $5 million for a named chair in Israel Studies to donor Rebecca ‘Becky’ Benaroya.” The donation was for the purposes “of endowing a chair, whose holder ‘will demonstrate a strong commitment to studying, teaching, and disseminating knowledge about Jews and Judaism, as well as the modern State of Israel.’” Back in 2017, again as reported by Forbes, the professor in charge of the funded Benaroya Israel Studies Department at UW was a former head of the Israel/Palestine Studies Department at the University of Colorado. “Professor (Liora) Halperin expressed discomfort with her position as Benaroya Endowed Chair in Israel Studies, saying on a panel, ‘Many of us want to be in Middle East Studies ... I don’t like the fact that the money I have to give graduate students is called Israel Studies money.’”
Rebecca Benaroya, the donor, has given no indication that she would have retracted her funds if the professor in charge of the department and her program had offered a range of scholarly views on Israel. Benaroya’s change of mind is understandable in the context of her money being used to fund activism masquerading as academic pursuit. This is not to say Halperin’s scholarship is simply propaganda; quite the contrary, she is a serious historian, but her scholarship displays all of the features of ideological bias. Halperin, like many scholars in American universities and across the world, is no longer teaching or presenting the views of scholars who disagree with her, either in her classes or more broadly in the program. Scholarship gets turned into activism and even propaganda when only one view, the purportedly uncontestable correct view, is taught and all others are discarded as wrong, misguided, and/or evil.
The University of Washington/Benaroya spat is emblematic of the larger issue of Jewish Studies departments and Israel Studies programs increasingly teaching primarily or exclusively the perspectives of Palestinian and Arab nationalist scholars, essentially morphing the field into Palestine Studies. They are not teaching the views of genuinely excellent scholars across the political spectrum, and the real losers in this lack of balance are students who are never given the change to challenge the views they are taught. In this, many Israel Studies scholars have betrayed their academic responsibility and perverted the meaning of academic freedom.
Today academic freedom is weaponized by scholars as a shield against accusations of politicization. Academic freedom really means freedom from the state or other corporate powers to dictate what academics write. Academic freedom was never meant to protect faculty from their responsibility to engage in responsible scholarship, or prevent private donors from wanting their desires met.
Not all of this one-sided academic bias is because of anti-Israel beliefs; some of it is, even more disturbingly, out of fear of backlash. There have been cases in which academic presses have admitted that they won’t publish a well-researched, peer-reviewed book because they are fearful of the backlash were they to publish a book that does not paint Israel in a sinister light.
Sadly, most Israel Studies programs have become indistinguishable from the Qatari-funded Palestine Studies programs. Qatar, the largest financial supporter of U.S.-designated terrorist organization Hamas, may even find it useful to begin to donate to Israel Studies as now constituted in academia.
Scott A. Shay is co-founder and Chairman of Signature Bank of New York and is the author of Conspiracy U: A Case Study (Wicked Son, 2021)
