MLA leaders won’t let members vote on pro-boycott resolution

In the 2010s, a handful of U.S.-based scholarly associations endorsed boycotting Israeli academic institutions. But not the Modern Language Association, the largest scholarly organization for the humanities.

At its annual convention in 2017, the MLA Delegate Assembly voted 113 to 79 to reject the academic boycott. Then, for good measure, it immediately passed another resolution calling on the organization to refrain from supporting such a boycott.

Fast-forward to January of this year. Amid Israel’s continuing war in Gaza and a flurry of related statements from other disciplinary groups, the elected assembly overwhelmingly passed an emergency motion. While it didn’t call for an academic boycott in which scholars and scholarly groups refuse to work or associate with targeted universities, it defended college and university employees and students who were facing threats, harassment and violence for criticizing Israel’s own violence against Palestinians.

Then, this fall, Anthony Alessandrini, an English professor at the City University of New York’s Kingsborough Community College, submitted a resolution resurfacing the boycott issue, hoping for a vote at the January 2025 annual convention. Other MLA members joined Alessandrini as signatories. After this year’s convention, he said, there had been “a lot of concern to make sure that Palestine continued to be discussed within the MLA.”

“This resolution was essentially a fresh start” on the boycott issues, said Alessandrini, who also teaches in the Middle Eastern studies master’s program at the CUNY Graduate Center.

The resolution begins, “Whereas, international law experts, including UN officials, describe the Israeli war on Gaza as a genocide …” It says Israel has been pursuing a “campaign of scholasticide”—the intentional eradication of an education system—among other harms against Palestinians, before ending with “be it resolved that we, the members of the MLA, endorse the 2005 BDS call.” That was a call from Palestinian organizations that kicked off the international boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.

But the resolution, despite obtaining the necessary 100 signatures from other MLA members, won’t even go before the MLA Delegate Assembly for a vote at the upcoming convention in New Orleans. And without the assembly’s vote, the full membership won’t get to weigh in on it.

The MLA’s Executive Council, its top elected board, rejected the resolution late last month. Paula Krebs, executive director and a nonvoting council member, said this was in accordance with MLA procedural changes in the past few years to have the Executive Council do “a legal and fiduciary review” of resolutions early in the process. She said this was designed “to save a lot of debate about something that couldn’t possibly go forward.”

The Executive Council made its decision without meeting with Alessandrini or the other organizers of the resolution.

Contractual Concerns

Alessandrini said MLA leadership has helped make the resolution proponents’ point.

“The purpose of this resolution was, among other things, to call attention to the genocide being carried out in Gaza and the complicity of academic organizations,” including through their silence, he said. He contended that “the leadership of the MLA, through its action to suppress even the discussion of the resolution … has succeeded in proving its complicity.”

In a two-paragraph Oct. 29 email to Alessandrini, Krebs wrote, “I know this isn’t the news you’d hoped to hear … but after much research and due diligence the council has decided that it cannot forward your resolution to the Delegate Assembly. As the fiduciary of the association, the council considers the many ways the association could be impacted by any resolution, including the financial and legal effects.”

What were those unspecified considerations? Krebs told Inside Higher Ed Tuesday that the roughly 15 Executive Council members in attendance for the meeting were unanimous in not forwarding on the resolution, and that their concerns focused on finances.

Krebs said more than half of states have laws or executive orders limiting them from contracting with entities that engage in boycotts or related activities or even just support them. Some private institutions and major library consortia also have such rules, she said. The MLA’s contracts, which the resolution could jeopardize by cutting off customers, provide a significant share of its revenue, with the MLA International Bibliography, which it sells to libraries, providing over half the organization’s operating budget, Krebs said.

“To carry out our mission, we depend on these contracts with state institutions,” Krebs said. “They’re absolutely key to our operations, and that’s a difference between us and why we can’t do this but the Middle East Studies Association could, for example.”

Alessandrini said he was aware of financial concerns with the resolution, but he only heard the council’s reasoning for shooting it down when Inside Higher Ed relayed it to him Tuesday afternoon. He said it was disappointing that it took a call from a journalist for him to learn their thinking.

He also said he was skeptical of the supposed financial risk, saying he doubts Krebs’s figure of 27 states with antiboycott laws. He said that giving proponents a chance to discuss such concerns with the council, to address them before it decided whether to push the resolution on to the MLA delegates, “was precisely the goal of having some sort of consultative process with the leadership.”

A New Push for Boycotts?

The effort is not over, Alessandrini said. “We’re not going to let go of this. I think the hope of the MLA leadership was to kind of sweep this under the carpet or to avoid discussion of it, and that will not happen.”

Krebs said that even with the Executive Council’s denial of the resolution, she expects “a very lively discussion” by the Delegate Assembly in New Orleans, even though delegates won’t get to vote.

It could be one of multiple revived discussions on such boycotts within scholarly associations and on campuses in the wake of the American Association of University Professors’ announcement this fall that it has dropped its two-decade categorical opposition to academic boycotts.

The failed MLA resolution had referenced that shift. It noted that the AAUP called academic boycotts “legitimate tactical responses to conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education.”

The AAUP’s new statement still says boycotts shouldn’t “target individual scholars and teachers engaged in ordinary academic practices,” such as conference presentations, and that such “boycotts should target only institutions of higher education that themselves violate academic freedom or the fundamental rights upon which academic freedom depends.” The proposed MLA resolution had also mentioned boycotting “institutions, not individual Israeli academics.”

Alessandrini said the AAUP’s opposition had “so often been used as a kind of cudgel against any notion of academic boycott and specifically against the Palestinian call for BDS.” And the AAUP’s change, plus the “scholasticide” in Gaza, “makes it all the more shocking that the MLA is not prepared to even have a conversation about this,” Alessandrini said.

Miriam Elman, executive director of the Academic Engagement Network, a group that supports Jewish and Zionist faculty and administrators, said her organization helped convene longtime MLA members who opposed the now-dead resolution by writing to leadership. After “the AAUP shifted its long-standing policy,” she said, “many BDS supporters are using that to now dust off academic boycott motions.”

“There hasn’t been this push in the MLA for a while, and other associations,” Elman said. She said her organization, which she says stands for academic freedom, and others “will stand together to push back against that—against this trend.”