Taking Issue, Taking Stock

Kwame Anthony Appiah·
Columns by K. Anthony Appiah

Originally published in the Winter 2016 MLA Newsletter

The Modern Language Association of America is a scholarly organization. Is it also a political one? Not in a straightforwardly partisan way: our legal status prohibits us from endorsing candidates for elected office. But on topics that are central to our mission and that we can address in a clear and unified voice, the MLA can make a contribution to the national conversation. Among the issues that the association has been concerned with are the growth of contingent labor and the decline of tenure in higher education; language study as an educational right; and, very broadly, a diminishment in support for the humanities.

I invoked a national conversation, yet composition and literary and cultural studies are transnational enterprises, even if some places speak louder (or, at any rate, are heard better) than others. Your MLA has sought to enrich our transnational connections. This past summer we had our first conference outside North America, with participants from thirty-six countries; it was held in Germany, and it was, in the opinion of this participant, a success. At the same time, the attacks on academic freedom in scores of nations affect all of us, wherever we work.1 The MLA has spoken out recently about the appalling assaults on the academy in Turkey. Especially when we draw on our distinctive professional knowledge and understanding, we can help sustain cultures around the world where free inquiry is respected.

The proper remit of our political engagements, however, has occasioned heated discussion. At our convention this coming January, I’ve been asked to chair a town hall meeting to discuss the question “Should the MLA endorse a boycott of Israeli academic institutions?” We are likely to have related resolutions or motions to debate at the Delegate Assembly. It is evident that the membership is divided on the issue.

I’ve had many conversations and exchanges with advocates and opponents of the academic boycott, and I have been consistently impressed with their seriousness and good will. All are affected by a continuing sense of the tragedy that has overtaken the Palestinians. There is disagreement about how to apportion blame for this among the many parties involved. There is disagreement as to the special status of this tragedy in a world where billions of people lack the basic resources for a decent human life. The question on which MLA members are most deeply divided, however, pertains not to our roles as individual citizens of a country or of the world but to our collective role, as a scholarly association.

Some members believe that this is one of the great moral questions of our time and that the MLA should lay down a marker, whether or not it connects directly with our professional activities. Some think that it does relate to the primary purposes of the association, because the practices of the Israeli state curtail the freedom of Palestinian scholars and students. The relationship between the governments of the United States and Israel gives Americans particular responsibility for Israel’s actions, some say, regardless of whether those actions represent a unique enormity.

Others think it unfair to single out one government and one country in a world full of lamentable injustice, and they point to the infringements on free speech and academic freedom by the Palestinian authorities in the West Bank and in Gaza. Indeed, some have suggested that focusing on Israeli universities suggests that we are not opposed to the policies of other regimes that support universities while doing terrible things. They even ask, with Noam Chomsky, whether, by the logic of the boycott, academic associations around the world should shun American universities, which take money from a government that is Israel’s leading supporter and whose policies, they reckon, have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people over the past few decades in the Middle East.

In the town hall meeting, we will no doubt hear these and other arguments for and against the MLA’s supporting the movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. But I have heard specifically institutional considerations, too, raised by members involved in the everyday work of the association.

They ask how pronouncing on this matter will affect issues that are uncontroversially basic to the MLA’s mission. To improve the situation of language study, for example, we must influence public opinion—addressing politicians and university trustees and administrators, parents and students, and the wider citizenry. These members wonder whether adopting a position on a contentious issue about which we are divided could weaken our capacity to accomplish such goals. They wonder about effects on the external funding, public and private, we need to advance our work.

Finally, some members have expressed concern about how the MLA’s collective voice is represented. If passed by the Delegate Assembly, a resolution can be ratified by a majority vote representing the support of just ten percent of our members. Is this percentage sufficient to present a ratified resolution as the consensus view of the Modern Language Association? A gesture of solidarity produced in the face of deep division, some members argue, may entrench and exacerbate that division. In their view, it thus risks being a self-undermining performance.

In the light of such concerns and complexities, I have asked the MLA Executive Council to convene a special working group charged with clarifying procedures for speaking out publicly on issues, reviewing current practices, and making recommendations for change. In what sense is this scholarly association also a political one? In a sense that is always to be negotiated and renegotiated. Inasmuch as politics is a rendezvous of interest, principle, and pragmatism, there is invariably a politics to staking out a “politics.” While the working group deliberates, though, let me say a word for that least glamorous of virtues, comity. Where we are not united, we can at least proceed with respect for those with whom we take issue. A regard for the past, present, and future of the MLA requires a shared culture—call it a political culture—that sustains us when we do not agree and enables us to work together when we do.

Note

  1. Visit http://monitoring.academicfreedom.info/ to learn more. ↩
Previous ArticleSetting Boundaries
Next ArticleDan Edelstein
Kwame Anthony Appiah

Related Posts

3 Responses

  1. As a supporter of the MLA resolution to boycott Israeli universities, I would like to make three points in response to Professor Appiah’s essay:

    1. It is correct to describe the plight of Palestinians under Israeli occupation as a “tragedy,” but it is critical to recognize their tragedy as a man-made event. Between 1955 and 2013, the UN passed 77 resolutions condemning Israel for human rights violations, including the construction of illegal West Bank settlements. In 2014, UN rapporteur Richard Falk described the continued construction of settlements as ethnic cleansing.

    2. Kudos to the MLA for condemning Erdogan’s vicious repression in Turkey. Since the failed coup in Turkey, as part of its normalization of state power, Turkey has signed a reconciliation agreement with Israel. The MLA has a responsibility to stand up and criticize equally undemocratic states everywhere. In the Palestinian case, as with South Africa, the call for justice and solidarity comes from within an oppressed civil society.

    3. Professor Appiah expresses worries by anonymous member who “wonder whether adopting a position on a contentious issue about which we are divided could weaken our capacity to accomplish such goals. They wonder about effects on the external funding, public and private, we need to advance our work.” The American Studies Association earned 1,000 new members, including many new institutional memberships, after passing its boycott resolution in 2013. It also saw a significant increase in financial contributions the organization. ASA was recognized around the world for its commitment to social justice. MLA has an opportunity to demonstrate similar leadership, and reap similar benefits, by voting to support the academic boycott of Israeli universities.

  2. I’d like to thank Anthony Appiah for his thoughtful comments, and for asking the EC to review the Association’s procedures regarding public statements on contentious political issues. I support the boycott movement, if anything more firmly now, after the election of Donald Trump and his nomination of David Friedman for the position of US ambassador to Israel, than before. To Bill Mullen’s response I would add this note. Professor Appiah asks: “In what sense is this scholarly association also a political one?” I agree with his answer: “In a sense that is always to be negotiated and renegotiated.” With this caveat, though. That this “sense” is constantly negotiated does not—should not—mean that the Association does not attend to the urgency of the moral claims made by the catastrophe—the one we face now, in Israel-Palestine; and others no doubt before us still. “Constant negotiation” may eventually produce a momentary institutional clarity, and that’s to the good. But if “constant negotiation” serves, again and again, to delay or even block entirely the Association’s responses to urgent if contentious claims, then “constant negotiation” has become a formal way of evading political and moral questions. I hope that the BDS resolution will be upheld in the Delegate Assembly and then by the membership. I also hope the EC will not allow the appealing formal comity of “constant negotiation” to delay the Association’s facing this grave situation—which I take to be, in Professor Appiah’s words, “one of the great moral questions of our time.”

  3. I find our MLA president’s “Taking Issue, taking Stock” deeply disturbing, especially as I write this in the wake of President Obama’s brave but long overdue refusal to veto the UN Security Council’s consequently at long last unanimous condemnation of Israel’s continued aggressive building of settlements, flouting numerous UN resolutions, global opinion and international law. Two little phrases in particular in Professor Appiah’s statement strike me as seeking to justify more shameful inaction on our Association’s part. One has been much noticed: “I have asked the MLA Executive Council to convene a special working group charged with clarifying procedures for speaking out publicly on issues….” Sorry, but this is bureaucratic nonsense: when in doubt, form a committee and kick the ball down the road. “Twinkle, twinkle little star, what you do is what you are,” as many students used to describe existentialism in its heyday. “Ten toes on the ground,” echoes a friend of ours in prison, is how you judge a person’s moral commitment. To delay a BDS decision in favor of more debate about the MLA’s obligations to the wider public, at a time when no member is or should be unaware of the issues, is a charade.

    The second disturbing statement is the “continuing sense of the tragedy that has overtaken the Palestinians…,” and the consequent(?) “disagreement about how to apportion blame for this among the many parties involved.” Well, naturally, if all is simply a tragedy that has overtaken the poor victims, no one is to blame: it’s just the fated nature of the world. I have talked of this misuse of the notion of “tragedy” in many places: “the tragic Indian” and “tragic mulatto” are all-too-well-known instances. Again: sorry. It’s a matter of who has the power. Israel’s founding was enabled by two then dominant world powers, Britain and the US. The latter has, since that time, provided an average of $3 billion a year for Israel to maintain its “own” dominance in the region, besides weaponry, technology and intelligence. Over the next ten years it is now committed to $3.8 billion a year. Over stateless Palestinians, this gives Israel all power. These outrageous sums of US taxpayer monies are given to a country whose existence was possible only by displacing hundreds of thousands of its population and to condemning those who remain to a status of second-class citizens (at best). No tragedy has “overtaken” the Palestinians. International power politics and local seizures of land, water and most other available resources, the first fueled by guilt for the European Holocaust, the second by an utterly abusive moralizing rhetoric feeding off the first, have condemned the Palestinians to refugee status, poverty, imprisonment, murder and, to our point, deprivation of the most basic rights, happiness and, yes, freedoms, including academic. It is not a matter of “the special status of this tragedy in a world where billions of people lack the basic resources for a decent human life.” That, too, is a cop-out. Israel makes special title to righteousness—historically, through what it claims as its unique holocaust, and religiously, through its claim, possibly yet more offensive to many, to be “god’s chosen people” on the land he has given them. The US has paid for hose claims to be realized in the modern world. That does, as Appiah partly acknowledges, leave us with a particular responsibility. Too, Israel does curtail the freedoms of Palestinian scholars and students. As Appiah seems to want to acknowledge, that does relate to our primary mission. Objections that we would be “singling out one country in a world full of lamentable injustice,” or that doing so implies that we are not opposed to the policies of other regimes are irrelevant red-herrings. More cop-outs. There are circumstances when the obligation to take a stance and speak out have to supersede worries about our own well-being or how doing so might affect our standing in others’ eyes.

    Yes, the MLA is and has always been “also a political” organization. Professor Appiah recognizes certain issues as constituting “our” political domains—those “central to our mission” appertaining to contingent labor and the decline of tenure, language study, support for the humanities, composition and literary and cultural studies, etc. Surely crucial to “our mission” is to assure something even more basic than that? The right we recognize for ourselves, for Turkish academics and for Israeli academics: the right even to study and be involved in those activities. Israel massively restricts Palestinians from such access. Nor, as a strong supporter of BDS for all these reasons, do I want to be patronized by someone’s being “impressed by [my] seriousness and good will”; tantamount to the old liberal saw: I wholly disagree with what you say, but will fight to the death for your right to say it. In the face of monstrous injustice and oppression, fighting for my right to say that’s what it is, is not enough. We actually have to do something about it. Set those ten toes on the ground.

Comments are closed.