Pitzer College Becomes First in US to Call for Academic Boycott of Israel
Photo: Student protest against BlackRock Vice Chairman and then Pitzer Trustee Robert Fairbairn, on the wall of a Pitzer College dorm in Fall 2019. | Donnie Denome – The Student Life.
On April 1, the administration of Pitzer College in Claremont, California, outside of Los Angeles, announced that it would be suspending its student exchange program with the University of Haifa in Israel. The following day, the Dean of Faculty’s Office claimed in a statement that the decision to suspend the program did not “reflect an academic boycott,” but “lack of enrollments for at least five years, exchange imbalance, or curricular overlap.” The statement could have passed for a belated April Fool’s Day joke, seeing as how students and faculty at Pitzer and other schools belonging to the consortium of Claremont Colleges had been demanding their institutions sever ties with the Israeli economy and academia due to the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza, which has killed at least 34,488 Palestinians, including 14,500 children and 8,400 women, according to Al Jazeera at the time of this writing.
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