Elsewhere, in the U.S., there continue to be both brutal police clampdowns – following the April-May 2024 upsurge of student protest against Israeli genocide – and university administrations’ repression against non-violent campus dissent. Germany’s banning or academic ‘cancellation’ of pro-Palestine scholars, e.g. since early April, of the renowned medic and Rector of Glasgow University Ghassan Abu-Sittah, economist Yanis Varoufakis from the University of Athens, and political philosopher Nancy Fraser of the New School for Social Research. There are deepening concerns about violence and repression – including violations of academic freedom – across specific parts of the African continent, such as in Darfur, Sudan, and in the DRC, and many other hotspots.

Contestation of space in South African intellectual life became even more heated in September-October 2024 as two institutions – Johannesburg’s ‘New South Institute’ (supported by major Zionist funders) and the University of Cape Town – drew criticism for events featuring what were considered to be pro-genocide guest speakers. In the former case, an ‘African Global Dialogues’ conference controversy led to ‘genocide-washing’ charges against the Institute, leveled by the South African Palestine Solidarity Campaign, given the Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement’s condemnation of pro-Israeli academics. Sufficient pressure was mounted to withdraw both major African scholars from the event, and permission to use the event site (initially the Constitutional Court). The University of Cape Town leadership was persuaded to postpone an address by the publisher of Bild on grounds of protest against that German publication’s pro-genocide stance.

The politicisation of academic expression is familiar territory for South Africans. Two days after his 11 February 1990 release from 27 years in prison, Nelson Mandela spoke in Soweto – not far from what is now a University of Johannesburg (UJ) campus – linking to broader violations of human, civil and political rights: “The crisis in education that exists in South Africa demands special attention. The education crisis in black schools is a political crisis. It arises out of the fact that our people have no vote and therefore cannot make the government of the day responsive to their needs. Apartheid education is inferior and a crime against humanity.”

At the time, South African universities and individual scholars faced condemnation from many academic institutions and societies across the world, due to the recognition that all forms of pressure – especially “Boycott Divestment Sanctions” (BDS) – against a pariah apartheid system would help weaken the regime. BDS-academia occurred in spite of the recognition that in some instances, universities did assist in hosting democratic, non-racial activities, including education that ultimately prepared black scholars to govern. BDS-academia continued, nevertheless, because it contributed to the broader political strategy of delegitimising an apartheid state committing a crime against humanity. Partly as a result of non-violent sanctions pressure, the country avoided full-fledged civil war and was steered to democracy by 1994 – and as a result, the lifting of academic boycotts was one of the rewards.

The same theme Mandela expressed in 1990 – that education occurs in political context – was taken up on 9 May 2024, when then Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Naledi Pandor delivered the University of Johannesburg second annual Shireen Abu Akleh Memorial Lecture, “The Responsibility of the Academy in a Time of Genocide.” As UJ News reported, Pandor forcefully reminded of our responsibility to cherish and protect our hard-won academic freedoms:

“It is vital, I believe, that academics and academic institutions devote more time to the decline in Freedom of Expression, and to the growing threat to it. The decline began well before the advent of embedded journalists. But it has lately snowballed, and we need to be very worried about this development.”

The most acute challenge Pandor discussed was what the International Court of Justice described as Israel’s “plausible” violation of Palestinian rights under the Genocide Convention since 8 October 2023 (following Hamas’ attack on Israel the day before). For our purposes when considering academic freedom, there is no doubt Israel’s attack on Gaza is of unprecedented humanitarian concern, in part because of the twelve universities that existed in 2023, none have been left standing, and thousands of their students, faculty and leaders are now dead. According to UN Human Rights Council special rapporteurs: “With more than 80% of schools in Gaza damaged or destroyed, it may be reasonable to ask if there is an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as ‘scholasticide’.”

Citing this report, Pandor observed,

“After six months of military assault, more than 5 479 students, 261 teachers and 95 university professors had been killed in Gaza, and over 7 819 students and 756 teachers have been injured – with numbers growing each day. At least 60 percent of educational facilities, including 13 public libraries, have been damaged or destroyed and at least 625 000 primary and secondary school students, and over 100 000 college and university students in Gaza have no access to education. The IDF has damaged or destroyed nine out of every ten schools, at least 65 of which were UNRWA-run facilities, sheltering thousands of displaced civilians.
“Between October 2023 and January this year, the IDF bombed all the universities in Gaza. Consequently, Gaza’s treasured intellectual landmarks, including the Islamic University of Gaza, the North Gaza and Tubas branches of Al-Quds Open University, and Palestine Technical University have all been destroyed. Another 195 heritage sites, 227 mosques and three churches have also been damaged or destroyed, including the Central Archives of Gaza, containing 150 years of history. Israa University, the last remaining university in Gaza was demolished by the Israeli military on 17 January this year.
“The obliteration of Palestine’s schools, universities, and libraries furthers the settler-colonial project of erasure because these are spaces that nurtured the creation and transmission of knowledge. The destruction of schools, universities, libraries, and research facilities has deprived Palestinians of the histories and knowledge housed in these institutions. Attacks on education are often a key indicator of state intolerance of views that do not reflect state thinking. They should not be tolerated.
“The international academic community should have sent a clear message that those who target schools and universities in other states will be held responsible, and that accountability for these violations will include an end to collaboration, an end to donations and financial support. Universities are the bedrock of knowledge and truth and require freedom to do their essential work of knowledge generation and innovation. World universities must keep a watching brief on the reconstruction of Palestine and insist that the programme includes the reconstruction of education at all levels.”

Implications for University of Johannesburg debates on academic freedom

These incidents provide an urgent context for the UJ Senate Academic Freedom Committee to propose the UJ Senate take a firm stand, combining a recommitment to academic freedoms – including offering some version of a safe haven to repressed scholars (as did, for example, the New School for Social Research and Brandeis University during the 1930s) – with an awareness that official university relations are in certain cases not justified with institutions that do not (in some cases cannot) ensure the most basic human rights and academic freedoms are protected.

Debates on how to apply academic freedom in such situations began in earnest during apartheid when South African scholars – of all races and at all educational institutions, including Rand Afrikaans University (the predecessor name of UJ) – were subject to BDS as a general strategy. Such an approach was called for by the African National Congress and allies after Albert Luthuli won the Nobel Prize in 1961. Four years later, in the immediate wake of the apartheid state’s banning of historians Jack Simons and Eddie Roux, 500 academics from 34 British universities declared their intent to “Protest against the practice of racial discrimination and its extension to higher education [and] pledge that we shall not apply for or accept academic posts in South African universities which practice racial discrimination.”

BDS-academia strategies were strengthened in subsequent decades and endorsed by scores of international scholarly associations (until relaxed from 1990 and ended in 1994). Although the methodology was unrefined and tools of BDS-academia were sometimes excessively blunt (even by the acknowledgement of some of the primary proponents), the strategy behind all such BDS tactics was honourable: to delegitimise and weaken a state engaged in what the United Nations and international courts termed a crime against humanity.

The blanket treatment of all South African academics during the BDS process was, however, debated in the early 2000s and found to be wanting when applied to Israel (given that many critics of that state worked for progress within universities). The second major application of BDS was in 2005 when in Palestine, the BNC established consensus among a wide range of civil society groups drawing from refugees in exile, Palestinians under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the discriminated Palestinian citizens of the Israeli state.

As the BNC statement explained, the group was “inspired by the struggle of South Africans against apartheid and in the spirit of international solidarity, moral consistency and resistance to injustice and oppression.” Like South Africa where the demand for “one person, one vote, in a unitary state” was the strategic demand that required BDS tactics, the Palestinians made three conditions for ending BDS against Israel: 1) ending its occupation and colonisation of all Arab lands occupied in 1967 and dismantling the Wall; 2) recognising the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and 3) respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194.

As the Palestinian BNC statement on BDS-academia observes, there is now a more selective approach than was used against South African apartheid, requiring those who support BDS-academia to be more nuanced and rigorous in their selection of targets, so as to pinpoint scholarly relations with Israel that explicitly strengthen its state and apartheid system. Within the BNC, the Palestine Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) began in 2004 to qualify how freedom of expression should be understood, drawing upon the definition provided in 1999 by the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (UNESCR):

Academic freedom includes the liberty of individuals to express freely opinions about the institution or system in which they work, to fulfill their functions without discrimination or fear of repression by the state or any other actor, to participate in professional or representative academic bodies, and to enjoy all the internationally recognized human rights applicable to other individuals in the same jurisdiction. The enjoyment of academic freedom carries with it obligations, such as the duty to respect the academic freedom of others, to ensure the fair discussion of contrary views, and to treat all without discrimination on any of the prohibited grounds.

Hence, the BNC promotes international recognition to courageous Israelis who oppose the oppression of Palestinians: “Mere affiliation of Israeli scholars to an Israeli academic institution is therefore not grounds for applying the boycott.” (Hence, for example, in 2014 several South African universities warmly welcomed well-attended lectures by Israel’s most celebrated historian, Ilan Pappé, who seven years earlier had been fired by Haifa University for recognising the BNC’s argumentation as valid.)

Before 2024, the most famous precedent for which a BDS-academia determination was made occurred in March-April 2011 when after a major investigation and debate, the UJ Senate voted 72-45 to break off its official research relationship with Ben Gurion University on grounds of “institutional complicity and active collaboration with the Israeli military, occupation and apartheid practices.” This did not prevent individuals from ongoing research, but it sent a very strong signal against gross discriminatory practices in a context of overall political repression.

There are many reasons various Israeli universities are being targeted at present, including their location in part within the Occupied Territories, the discriminatory ratios of students and staff (in which Palestinian Israelis are overwhelming underrepresented), and their service to the state’s machinery of oppression. In April 2024, for example, international solidarity support was given to renowned Palestinian feminist Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Lawrence Biele chair in law at Israel’s Hebrew University and the global chair in law at Queen Mary University of London. Hebrew University had suspended her, explicitly for using the word genocide to describe the attack on Gaza, and for calling for a cease-fire. The international pressure was sufficient to reverse the suspension, albeit not to prevent her subsequent arrest by the Israeli state.

Also in the current context, one of the clearest recent examples of students objecting to their university’s role in the genocide, was when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s student group Jews for a Ceasefire built an encampment in April 2024, to protest “MIT’s direct research ties to the Israeli Ministry of Defense.” After more than 2000 arrests of students across the U.S., several major universities have felt sufficient pressure to accept the BDS-academia demands in full or in part.

However, in general, it is not particularly useful for any institution, no matter how powerful prestigious, to conduct BDS-academic activities in the absence of a broader solidaristic strategy of the sort established by broad-based Palestinian civil society (via the Boycott National Committee) in 2005. Even in relation to many campaigns for justice on our own continent, there is not yet such a movement for BDS-academia, e.g. in countries where African Union criticism and sanctions occasionally applied, usually at the behest of oppressed people.

There are, of course, countless examples of countries characterised by humanitarian concerns and indeed gross human rights violations that are condemned by broader societies, oppressed intellectuals, the African Union, international human rights organisations – and that occasionally attract political and economic sanctions. They include, in recent years, Eswatini, against a repressive monarchy; Zimbabwe, for its flawed democracy; Morocco, over its occupation of the Western Sahara; Uganda, due to official homophobia; Sudan and South Sudan, suffering brutal civil wars; sites of extreme resource looting such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia or Sierre Leone; and many coup regimes, especially in West Africa, that have taken power by force.

Likewise we have not yet seen BDS-academia calls in many repressive countries – including new partner members of the BRICS+ bloc (invited to join at the August 2023 Johannesburg summit) such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and Ethiopia – where democratic rights are regularly violated or where, for example, women are oppressed and rise up to demand a rightful place in academia. In such cases, even without a formal BDS-academia process, it may be useful for UJ to take a formal, public stand, in defense of academic freedom.

As another example with enormous implications, we can expect climate-related BDS to become an increasingly serious demand from those with intergenerational awareness. In the case of South Africa, there will inevitably be such trade sanctions imposed against exports to the West that contain high levels of embedded greenhouse gases (under the rubric of the European Union’s 2026 Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, also endorsed by the United Kingdom for imposition in 2027). Indeed the prospect of a potential return to a U.S. climate-denialist government – led by Donald Trump in 2025 – reminds of his administration’s 2017 withdrawal from United Nations climate summits and 2018 orders to cancel or blunt federally-funded research, and anti-U.S. reactions (e.g. by former French president Nicolas Sarkozy – as well as Nobel laureate Joe Stiglitz and Naomi Klein – that included a trade-based sanctions proposal). UJ has many ties to U.S. institutions which were (in the late 2010s) – and could again come – under financial or ultimately administrative and even legal pressure not to engage in research on the problem of greatest long-term consequence to humanity, in a clear violation of academic freedom.

A final point of concern is the way BDS is being tarred as a campaign of academic hypocrisy insofar as South African universities now come under pressure to reject pro-Israeli speakers, as in the case of University of Cape Town as well as the New South Institute’s African Global Dialogue conference. It is a forceful campaign based on a higher responsibility, suggesting that like all speech, there are limitations to protections of academic speech.

In sum, the political context for taking up humanitarian concerns within academia is of enormous importance, so that solidaristic sentiments are more coherently directed. However, in lieu of a full-fledged solidarity movement with a stand on scholarly relations in such countries, it is vital nevertheless for academic institutions to track violations explicitly related to academic freedoms, and be willing to address these when appropriate. The approach I suggest might be taken would be not only negative – by endorsing BDS-academia against specific countries such as Israel – but also positive, by offering safe haven to scholars under threat.

As Pandor told her UJ audience, if “academic institutions devote more time to the decline in Freedom of Expression,” then a set of broadly-acceptable principles should be agreed upon to guide action, not only in relation to scholasticide affecting Palestinians, but the violations of rights of all academics who freely express opinions associated with humanitarian concerns, and are punished as a result. In scores of countries, these violations have reached extreme levels.

Potential principles to guide protection of scholarly expression

In my view, these would be the kinds of considerations that would lead to the following conclusions, for my own university and others:

1)A commitment to nurture three types of academic freedom:

• protection of scholarship and public-intellectual activity from intervention and censorship;
• scholars’ determination of research agendas and teaching curricula in a manner that is free from market pressures or threats of career sabotage; and
• resistance to (or ‘whistleblowing’ against) workplace misconduct in our university, without fear of losing future career chances.

2) With rights come responsibilities, so that while exercising academic freedom, members of the university community – faculty, students and staff – are expected to not be complicit in activity (or with institutions) understood to contribute to crimes against humanity, war crimes, genocide, apartheid or other major rights violations. In some countries, specific historical contexts mean prohibited forms of ‘hate speech’ are well-defined and understood as unacceptable by society, e.g. displays of neo-Nazi nostalgia or, in our own case in South Africa, of racist or sexist insults.

3) Major societal and interstate conflicts that cause violations of humanitarian rights – especially those reaching the stage of genocide, war crimes and tyrannies – are of increasing urgency, requiring concern and indeed action in all appropriate ways. Reflecting this, several Boycott Divestment Sanctions processes have been launched, especially in the case of Israel’s war on Palestine (in the wake of the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023), Russia’s on Ukraine (especially after the 24 February 2022 invasion), the Myanmar junta’s on its own people (following the 1 February 2021 coup), and various other aggressors in numerous sites of repression. These have generated international condemnations (and International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice prosecutions), state-to-state hostilities, people-to-people solidarity and academic sanctions.

4) In April-May 2024, at hundreds of universities across the world (including UJ), students have provided forceful moral leadership through campus encampments and other non-violent protests. Students and faculty demand that their administrations no longer ignore Israeli genocide, the apartheid legal framework, extreme forms of oppression and the long-term settler-colonial occupation of Palestine. (The latter includes Israel’s refusal of Palestinians’ ‘right of return’ and reparations payments – as mandated in United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 of 1948 – in stark contrast to the way post-apartheid South Africa formally accepted the need for land restitution based on reversing the racist 1913 Land Act that displaced tens of millions of rural people to repressive Bantustans.)

5) In the process, leading pro-Palestinian organisations – often including many Jewish students – have affirmed opposition to any manifestation of anti-semitism, while drawing a crucial distinction when criticizing ethnic-exclusivist, religious-separatist and repressive forms of Zionism promoted by the Israeli state. (A South African parallel to this approach is the broad-based social acceptance and constitutional codification of non-racial democracy, in which all citizens have equal rights.)

6) Typical demands by those in academia providing solidarity with Palestine, are that international universities break ties to Israeli institutions engaged in research, teaching and any other relationships that imply complicity with repressive institutions, the IDF and acts of violence; and that university investment funds be purged of companies doing business in or with Israel on grounds that the profits are tainted by genocide. These are reasonable means of showing solidarity with oppressed Palestinians, given widespread calls for BDS-academia. To this end, guidelines were recommended by the leading Quaker church organisation with experience in divestment (the American Friends Service Committee): adopt an Investment Policy Statement with a commitment to divest from companies that consistently, knowingly, and directly facilitate and enable human rights violations and violations of international law as part of prolonged military occupations, apartheid, and genocide; commit to a process with a reasonable timeline for implementing the new policy; report on the implementation periodically to a committee with student, faculty, and community representation. Universities should sell direct investments in stocks or bonds of companies highlighted for divestment for their ongoing complicity in Israeli human rights violations; engage with investment managers to identify or create pooled funds that comply with the new policy; and create a process to periodically review investments and better align them with the policy.

7) It is also important to invoke BDS-academia with a view to its reform or cancellation when conditions change. In the case of Israel, the 2005 Palestinian Boycott National Committee has offered appropriate analysis and three demands determined by civil society that would justify reversing BDS at some stage (the way sufficient progress towards ‘one-person, one-vote’ democracy allowed the dismantling of BDS against South Africa): ending occupation of Arab lands occupied in 1967 and dismantling the Wall, recognising rights of Israel’s Arab-Palestinian citizens, and allowing Palestinian refugees right of return as stipulated in UN Resolution 194.

8) At the same time pressure is rising on universities to address research agendas and financial benefits arising from ties to Israel, the freedom of expression that all universities consider sacrosanct has come under direct attack. While no doubt there are denials of freedoms of expression across the board, ideologically, there appears to be a far more systemic attack on pro-Palestine scholars, especially in Germany. At even prestigious educational institutions, the expression of solidarity with Palestine has adversely affected the academic freedom of some of the world’s most celebrated scholars.

9) There are additional cases beyond the Israel-Palestine conflict that have high priorities for international BDS-academia. While circumstances in Russia and Myanmar are different, both aggressors have lost cases in The Hague’s international courts, and as a result of extreme violations of humanitarian principles, have come under various forms of BDS. Actions that would end such a status would be Russia’s withdrawal from Ukraine following violations of sovereignty since 2014, and Myanmar’s return to civilian, democratic rule (which existed albeit in partial form prior to 2021).

10) Universities should continue to be at the frontline of respect for such BDS-academia processes, as occurred against Ben Gurion University when in April 2011, the UJ Senate voted (60-40%) to end institutional relations. But in addition, UJ also has many positive means of recognising courageous scholars whose academic freedoms have been repressed, e.g. through honourary degrees, visiting (or even permanent) professorships or research fellowships, named lectures, refugee sponsorship, etc. In many instances, such honours are given posthumously or in ways that have not translated into a positive reputational commitment, so UJ’s ability to achieve better recognition for such devotion to academic freedom should be improved. Ultimately, the role of universities in our society does – and should always – include guidance on matters of social conscience. When considering extreme humanitarian concerns and academic freedom holistically, a consistent approach can be adopted in order to facilitate formal UJ statements and actions that are deemed necessary expressions from society’s leading academic servants, in solidarity especially with those who contribute so much to scholarship and social progress, and who often pay a high price.

This paper is a revised version of what the author presented in May 2024 to the University of Johannesburg Senate Academic Freedom Committee, of which he is a member.