The authors of the American Association of University Professors’ new stance on academic boycotts say the previous position had been unclear and controversial since it was adopted 18 years ago.

Last week the association announced it would no longer categorically oppose academic boycotts, in which faculty members decline to work with other scholars or academic institutions. The association now says that academic boycotts “can be considered legitimate tactical responses to conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education,” although it specifies that such boycotts “should target only institutions of higher education that themselves violate academic freedom or the fundamental rights upon which academic freedom depends.”

Some critics, including a former president of the association, have accused it of abandoning the principle of academic freedom. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression responded by reiterating its opposition to academic boycotts, “as a threat to academic freedom.”

Rana Jaleel, chair of the AAUP’s committee on academic freedom and tenure, which wrote the new statement on academic boycotts, said the previous position opposing academic boycotts had drawn criticism since it was adopted, in 2006. “As soon as it was passed, it was a contested policy,” said Jaleel, an associate professor of gender, sexuality, and women’s studies and Asian American studies at the University of California at Davis. “It’s been an ongoing discussion.”

Many faculty members have written to the AAUP’s academic-freedom committee over the years, both to ask it to stick with its position against academic boycotts and to urge it to reconsider, she said.

Jaleel said the committee decided within the last year to rethink its position “because we want to make sure at all times that our policies are consistent with our principles.” She said that while that decision was made “in the context of what’s happening in Gaza and Israel,” the conflict was not the only consideration.

Jaleel said the 2006 statement was “a bit unclear” in that it recognized the right of individual faculty members and groups of academics not to cooperate with other individual faculty members or academic institutions but also said that if that noncooperation took the form of academic boycotts, it would threaten academic freedom. “We think that tension between those two statements … was worth exploring,” she said. “And so we did explore it, and we came to a different conclusion.”

Todd Wolfson, the association’s new president and an associate professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, said he hopes the new position will lead to more discussions — in AAUP chapters, faculty senates, and student governments — about the role of boycotts and divestment. “All we’re saying now is that you can’t use the 2006 statement to delegitimize the position of a faculty senate or an AAUP advocacy chapter,” Wolfson said.

Jaleel emphasized that the AAUP is not advocating for academic boycotts but merely clarifying that they are not categorically prohibited by a commitment to academic freedom.

The AAUP’s history has included support for campus faculty strikes, divestiture from South Africa over apartheid, and questioning institutional neutrality during the Vietnam War, Jaleel said.

“Some of what we wanted to do was make sure that academic boycotts as a tactic are not overwhelmed by politics or treated differently in AAUP policy than any other collective tactic that people might use on campuses,” Jaleel said.

Ellen Schrecker, a historian, retired faculty member, and member of the academic-freedom committee, sees the new position as a sign of the association’s willingness to revise an “outdated conceptualization.” And while Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel moved the issue to the front burner, Schrecker said, “it had been a long time coming because the previous statement about academic boycotts turned out not to be useful for dealing with the complexity of the issues.”