Rutgers Faculty Call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Against Israel
The Endowment Justice Collective, a coalition of organizations at Rutgers University, held a “die in,” Piscataway, New Jersey, March 19, 2024. Photo: USA TODAY NETWORK via Reuters Connect
Faculty unions at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey have passed a resolution calling for the adoption of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
According to an announcement issued by the university’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) 58 percent of faculty “voted” yes to divest from corporations linked to Israel and suspend all programs with Tel Aviv University, while 38 percent “voted no.” A similar resolution was approved by the university’s chapter of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), an affiliate of the AFL-CIO which represents adjunct professors, with 62 percent voting yes.
“Our unions have many fights ahead of us,” said a joint statement issued by the two groups last Friday. “We will need to work together to resist the Rutgers administration’s ongoing attempts to undermine our contract victories. We will face the consequences at Rutgers of the incoming Trump administration’s looming assault on all of higher education.”
It continued, “In confronting the challenges that 2025 will bring, we will be stronger if we are united across union, rank, department, school, and campus — as were during our victorious strike in 2023. Together we fight! Together we win!”
Launched in 2005, the BDS campaign opposes Zionism — a movement supporting the Jewish people’s right to self-determination — and rejects Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish nation-state. It seeks to isolate the country with economic, political, and cultural boycotts. Official guidelines issued for the campaign’s academic boycott state that “projects with all Israeli academic institutions should come to an end,” and delineate specific restrictions that its adherents should abide by — for instance, denying letters of recommendation to students applying to study abroad in Israel.
The unions’ passing a resolution which calls for BDS comes amid new scrutiny of the role faculty — specifically the group Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) — have played in fostering campus unrest, extremism, and antisemitism — a problem which drew fresh attention this week when it was announced that Columbia University is allowing a professor who cheered Hamas’s atrocities against Israelis last Oct. 7 to teach a course on Zionism. At Rutgers, for example, this month’s resolution was heavily promoted by FJP, which accused the university of supporting genocide in over a dozen social media posts it published to promote it.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, FJP is a faculty spinoff of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a group with numerous links to Islamist terror organizations, FJP chapters have been opening on colleges since Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel. Throughout the 2023-2024 academic year, its members, which include faculty employed by the most elite US colleges, have fostered campus unrest, circulated antisemitic cartoons, and advocated severing ties with Israeli companies and institutions of higher education.
According to a study by the campus antisemitism watchdog AMCHA Initiative, titled “Academic Extremism: How a Faculty Network Fuels Campus Unrest,” its presence throughout academia is insidious.
Using data analysis, AMCHA was able to establish a correlation between a school’s hosting an FJP chapter and anti-Zionist and antisemitic activity. For example, the study found that the presence of FJP on a college campus increased by seven times “the likelihood of physical assaults and Jewish students” and increased by three times the chance that a Jewish student would be subject to threats of violence and death — as happened at Rutgers University in November 2024, when freshman Matthew Skorny, 19, called for the murder of a fraternity member he identified as an Israeli, saying on the popular social media forum YikYak, “To all the pro-Palestinian ralliers [sic] … Go kill him.”
FJP also “prolonged” the duration of “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” protests on college campuses, in which students occupied a section of campus illegally and refused to leave unless administrators capitulated to demands for a boycott of Israel. The study added that such demonstrations lasted over four and a half times longer where FJP faculty were free to influence and provide logistic and material support to students. Professors at FJP schools also spent 9.5 more days protesting than those at non-FJP schools.
“So much attention has been focused on, for example, Students for Justice in Palestine, the encampments, and all of the unrest. The primary face of that has been students and student groups, and they’ve occupied the attention of administrators, member of Congress, and the public, but if you look more deeply — behind closed classroom doors, at departmental events, and statements, or the activity of groups like [FJP], you find an even more important predictor and determinative factor precipitating antisemitism,” AMCHA executive director Tammi Rossman-Benjamin told The Algemeiner recently during an interview in which she discussed the latest research on faculty antisemitism.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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