OPINION: UCT's decision to boycott Israel makes a travesty of academic freedom | KaraboKhakhau
The process to boycott Israel has been exclusionary from the very beginning, championing lockstep ideological uniformity at the expense of the diversity it hypocritically endorses, writesOn Saturday March 30, 2019, the council of the University of Cape Town's highest decision-making body will meet to rubber stamp a policy that will make a travesty of everything it stands for – and make it the only university in the world toWhen you go onto the university's website, one of the first...
The process to boycott Israel has been exclusionary from the very beginning, championing lockstep ideological uniformity at the expense of the diversity it hypocritically endorses. Shortly after I enrolled in 2016, the university was plunged into huge student unrest around the whole decolonisation of education issue known as #RhodesMustFall. Part of that debate was the conversation around Israel and Palestine. Among the agreements reached by the then vice chancellor Max Price and the student body was that there would be commissions and committees set up to investigate all of the issues that were raised during the protest actions.
It will be futile for council to send the decision back to senate to re-consider because the people who will be asking senate to do that will effectively be the same people who endorsed the decision in the first place.
This is not the end of the battle though. Student organisations Progress SA and the South African Union of Jewish Students are hard at work mobilising the broader student body, to get as many students on board to understand the ramifications of this decision and to get them to oppose it. We want to go back to the ground and engage them at grass roots level and come up with petitions.
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