Boycott Theory and the Struggle for Palestine (Off the Fence: Morality, Politics and Society) by Nick Riemer

Author:Nick Riemer [Riemer, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781538175880
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2022-12-12T18:30:00+00:00

Creating a “laboratory of ideas” in the service of national development: this is how Gabi Baramki described his aspiration in founding Birzeit University, Palestine’s first.1 Baramki’s description of the purpose of a university is entirely conventional: the development of ideas and thinking is at the heart of higher education’s self-conception. So debating the academic boycott of Israel means debating the nature and purpose of thinking in universities: the kinds of thinking that exist there, the kinds that universities should be laboratories for and the purposes that academic thinking does and should serve.

When we refer to “thinking,” “thought” or “intellectual activity,” we mainly have something individual in mind. But saying that someone has thought hard about something often means more than that they have reflected on it intensely on their own. Particularly if we are talking about academics, researchers or other “intellectuals,” it is also likely to mean that they have involved others in the development of their ideas – by talking with them, by informing themselves of others’ thoughts, by inviting reactions to what they have written. Laboratories, whether literal ones or Baramki’s “laboratories of ideas,” are collective places. Contrary to a frequent stereotype, then, what we call “thinking,” especially in universities, is a communal activity at least as much as a solitary one. The academic does not, as sometimes might be believed, resemble Rodin’s “Thinker” statue, heroically wracked in solitary meditation. They are, often far more, the orator before a crowd, adjusting the presentation of their ideas in response to the agreement, heckling or indifference their words provoke, the public an active partner in the elaboration of their thought, not its passive recipient.

For academics, then, thinking means dialogue – conferences, seminars, informal conversations, feedback on written work – not the solipsistic generation of a line of reasoning and its dogged pursuit to its ultimate logical conclusions. In fact, the very formulation of new ideas is impossible without considering the prospective audience for whom they are intended. Far from being an accessory, after-the-fact dimension of intellectual work, questions of audience shape the character of a theoretical analysis or intellectual position at its origin. In developing her ideas, an academic thinker engages in a process of imaginative projection in which she continually assesses the likely reception of her words by the readership or the audience to which they will be presented. Considerations of how this implicit public will respond, what objections the author will encounter and what claims she can reasonably make with different audiences all play a role in the development of her thought.

But when thinkers engage in the academic boycott, they suspend their input to this dialogue – and so, in a certain sense, they choose, with certain participants and in particular institutional contexts, to stop thinking. As we have seen, the decision often provokes indignation: surely progressive change, for Palestinians or for anyone, is impossible if its intellectual foundations are undermined. Isn’t a lapse into anti-intellectual philistinism a well-known danger for the left? How can academic defenders of

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