Itongadol/AJN.- Congressman Eliot Engel condemns boycott, charges ASA with bias in open letter.
Opposition mounted against the American Studies Association this week as over three dozen US universities publicly rejected the organization\’s boycott of Israeli academic institutions.
Yale, Wesleyan, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, Duke, Stanford, Harvard, Brown, the University of Chicago, New York University and Washington University in St. Louis, among others, have all condemned the boycott in recent days, distancing themselves from the organization.
The ASA is a group of loosely affiliated university departments and individual professors devoted to the study of the United States. The group voted on December 4 to protest Israeli universities, as well as some Israeli cultural institutions.
The executive committee of the Association of American Universities, which represents 62 schools across the US and Canada, has also rejected the boycott.
Congressman Eliot Engel, ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, sent a letter to ASA president Curtis Marez on Monday with State Department country reports attached for a litany of nations that fail to respect academic freedom or the rights of their citizens.
"Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas himself made clear that his government does not support boycotts of the institutions that the ASA is now targeting," Engel wrote.