U.S. News

Near the end of March, Gary Wilder, a professor of anthropology at the City University of New York, sent an email about his decision to decline attending a conference at Columbia University, explaining he was doing so because Columbia is ​“actively colluding with the U.S. government’s project to destroy higher education and criminalize dissent.”

“A boycott is one of the few instruments available to the academic community through which to censure Columbia,” Wilder wrote to many of those involved in the gathering.

Wilder is one of more than 1,800 academics and 50 organizations who have joined a quickly expanding boycott of Columbia, which has been at the center of U.S. state and political repression surrounding activism for Palestinian liberation.

This boycott is in line with the position taken by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) that ​“institutions of higher education that themselves violate academic freedom or the fundamental rights upon which academic freedom depends” are legitimate targets of academic boycotts.