LAST SPRING, Britain's 120,000-strong University and College Union voted to endorse a motion to boycott Israeli universities, calling on British academics to condemn the “complicity of Israeli academia in the occupation.” Martha Nussbaum, Mohammed Abed, and Murray Hausknecht debate the legitimacy--and political utility--of academic boycotts."Economic boycotts are occasionally valuable. Symbolic boycotts, I believe, are rarely valuable," Nussbaum argued in her Summer 2007 article, "Against Academic Boycotts. "Scholars who have strong views about the Israeli government would be well advised, I think, to focus on the tactic of organized (nonviolent and non-disruptive) public protest, directed at the government and its key actors."
>>Read Martha Nussbaum's “Against Academic Boycotts”
>>Read Mohammed Abed's “In Defense of Academic Boycotts”
>>Read Nussbaum's reply to Abed
>>Read Murray Hausknecht's “Scholars and Public Debate”
