Scott, et. al., Go Out in Style

A five-person AAUP committee headed by Joan Scott has announced the cancellation of the AAUP's much-criticized"academic boycotts" conference, which was postponed after conference organizers distributed, as pre-conference reading material, an item from a journal known for publishing material denying the Holocaust. (Scott, you might recall, was last heard from deeming faculty who spoke out against the conference"fellow travelers" of the Israeli"regime" who were violating AAUP procedures.)

The cancellation letter typifies the AAUP's high-handed and tone-deaf handling of this issue from the start. Scott, et al, lament the lost conference as"a fruitful opportunity to address issues of academic freedom that are at the center of AAUP concern." (Blacklisting Israeli faculty, promoting academic freedom--the connection is obvious.)

An alternative to cancellation, the Scott letter conceded, was"to hold the conference with a significantly revised set of participants, as critics suggest." But such a course"would unfairly exclude some previously scheduled participants" and"imply that we had come to accept [critics'] arguments about the direction and composition of the conference." (Planners who would even consider material from a journal with a reputation for anti-Semitic diatribes apparently have nothing to gain from listening to their critics.)

Instead, the AAUP will publish a series of papers on the issue, to include an introduction that"will answer those who wondered why we were holding a conference on a topic on which we had already taken a position in the AAUP statement condemning academic boycotts written in the spring of 2005." (Should make for fascinating reading: perhaps the AAUP can follow a similar procedure for its next such conference--on its statement upholding the value of tenure, where Joan Scott and associates will make sure that one-third of the slots go to administrators from the University of Phoenix who are open critics of AAUP policy and principles.)