Posted on 07/13/2002 4:48:09 PM PDT by aculeus
'There is nothing so enjoyable," Thomas Sterne once wrote, "as a good old-fashioned excommunication." And in the call for a boycott of cultural and research contacts with Israel a number of British academics have recently tried to give us one. Some 200 British dons joined in the sentence of ostracism, and in April it was promulgated with full bell, book and candle on the academic parish notice board, the letters page of the Guardian newspaper.
Like many excommunications of old, it was probably not expected to have any real effect. But that did not diminish the pleasures of pontification. Of course, now that things have gone so horribly wrong, many of the signatories are shifting uneasily in their cloisters. They never expected, they protest, that their colleague, Professor Mona Baker the Egyptian-born Director of the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology's Centre for Inter-Cultural Studies, would act upon their injunction and actually sack two Israeli scholars from academic boards. One early signatory, Professor Richard Dawkins - the Darwinist for whom rectitude, like man, is in a continuous state of evolution - has now changed his mind and withdrawn his support for the boycott. Other dons are also reported to be having second thoughts.
These attempts by erstwhile signatories to distance themselves from the consequences of their boycott call are hardly edifying. Much as one may deplore Professor Baker's decision to dismiss her Israeli colleagues, she at least has had the courage of her convictions, and will have to live with the consequences.
The same cannot be said for the boycott-supporters who now claim that Prof Baker's actions are something they could never have foreseen. This is disingenuous. The penalties of the boycott were clearly intended to fall on Israeli scholars who aspired to contacts with British and European cultural institutions. Prof Baker's action is within the spirit, if not the letter, of the original boycott call. For all the belated hand-wringing it was inevitable that these moves against Israel should punish the innocent, not the guilty.
Yet even boycott-supporters as clever as Cambridge's Professor Patrick Bateson or Oxford's Professor Colin Blakemore - both of them Fellows of the Royal Society - can be excused for failing to anticipate quite how innocent their unintended victims would be. For it now emerges that Professor Miriam Shlesinger, one of the two scholars sacked for being Israeli by Prof Baker, is something of a heroine of the Israeli peace movement.
A senior member of the Israeli Section of Amnesty International, which has repeatedly denounced her own government's abuses of human rights, she has long campaigned on the Left of Israeli politics to promote conciliation between Jews and Palestinians. And all this in spite of the fact that her own son-in-law was murdered - shot in the face at point-blank range - by Hamas terrorists, leaving her granddaughter fatherless at the age of one. One almost feels sorry for the boycott-supporters: self-righteous own goals seldom come more egregious than this one.
Even more embarrassing, it seems, for British academia in general is the belated and almost fortuitous way that the sackings came to public attention. True, the Manchester dismissals were reported in the Times Higher Education Supplement; but without any perceptible ripple of concern on the academic pond.
It took a distinguished Harvard scholar and president of the board of the prestigious Modern Language Association of America, Professor Stephen Greenblatt, to voice the first public opposition to the objectives and consequences of the British boycott of academic contacts with Israel. And even this transatlantic initiative might have gone unreported but for the sheer chance that, via one of Greenblatt's London friends, a copy of his outraged letter to Professor Baker found its way to the editor of this newspaper.
Behind the dispute is a straightforward matter of politics. It is no secret that a liberal-Left minority has long been disproportionately influential within the academy - perhaps far more than in any other section of British society.
Its righteousness might well have something to be said for it - were it not that donnish indignation tends to be so selectively and partially aroused. Where, for example, was the chorus of academic censure when the Oxford historian, Christopher Hill, publicly eulogised Stalin - a tyrant every bit as vile as Hitler - on the dictator's death in 1953 as one of the greatest benefactors of mankind? Where, too, were delicate liberal consciences more recently, when the Oxford English don, Tom Paulin, advocated that Jewish settlers in the contested territories "should be shot dead"?
On the other hand, the conclusion (fashionable in some quarters) that British academe is in thrall to a Left-wing conspiracy is equally unfounded. The modern don is far more likely to be a cynic than an ideologue. The suggestion that the lecture hall might be used for party-political proselytising would strike most academics (and, still more, most contemporary undergraudates) as patently absurd.
At the heart of the problem lies an issue of academic freedom. Since 1945, the university world has been subservient to state financing, and, increasingly, to state control. Alone now in the long list of failed or failing post-war state enterprises - from British Coal to British Steel - British Learning remains a nationalised industry.
If there is a striking indifference within British academia, it is the apparent willingness with which most dons acquiesce to the fetters of state control. British dons have accepted, mostly without protest, the long-term decline of their own profession - so obvious in economic terms and arguably in intellectual terms as well. British academia has not yet begun to assert its own freedom. Until then, we should hardly be surprised if it is often deaf to questions of academic freedom elsewhere. It has grown rather to like the reassuring clank of its own chains.
Dr John Adamson is a fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge Information appearing on Electronic Telegraph is the copyright of Telegraph Group Limited and must not be reproduced in any medium without licence. For the full copyright statement see Copyright
Sounds like the sympathy my ex mother-in-law would have felt for my early demise.
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