On January 14, 2016, the Board of Directors of the Association of American Universities reissued a 2013 statement opposing boycotts of Israeli academic institutions. The statement proclaims that “any such boycott of academic institutions directly violates academic freedom, which a fundamental principle of AAU universities and of American higher education in general.” The AAU reissued their statement after other U.S. scholarly organizations passed anti-Israel resolutions. The AAU statement addresses the violation of academic freedom stating, “restrictions imposed on the ability of scholars of any particular country to work with their fellow academics in other countries, participate in meetings and organizations, or otherwise carry out their scholarly activities violate academic freedom.” It is important to defend all of our freedoms, especially academic freedoms, because an education is the most valuable thing anyone can have. The AAU was founded in 1900 by a group of 14 Ph.D.-granting institutions and has since grown to 60 U.S. and two Canadian research universities including Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. The primary purpose of the AAU is to provide a forum for the development and implementation of institutional and national policies. According to the AAU website, the major activities of the association include federal government relations, policy studies, and public affairs. Brandeis Center President Kenneth L. Marcus has argued that it is no coincidence that faculty anti-Semitism and campus anti-Semitism are swelling at the same time. “The professors are giving an air of legitimacy to the virulent anti-Israel hostility that sometimes spills over into outright Jew-hatred. It is like they are providing a moral justification, or permission, for hatreds that have otherwise been considered socially unacceptable.” Jeff Robins adds, “The proliferation of faculty-sponsored condemnations of the Jewish state by those who stay silent about grotesque regimes with incomparably worse human rights records than Israel has occurred contemporaneously with spreading anti-Semitism on American college campuses.” You can read the 2013 statement in full by following this link.