Professor Attacks Scholar Dismissal

In a withering attack on a British professor who dismissed two Israeli scholars from journal editorial boards because of their nationality, Cogan University Professor Stephen J. Greenblatt has argued against excluding academics because of political disagreements.

Egyptian-born Mona Baker, a professor at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, said Saturday that she had dismissed Miriam Shlesinger of Bar Ilan University and Gideon Toury of Tel Aviv University from two journals she owns because they are Israeli.

“I deplore the Israeli state,” Baker told the British newspaper The Sunday Telegraph. “Miriam knew that was how I felt and that they would have to go because of the current situation.”

Greenblatt has led the charge against Baker’s decision to remove academics from journals because of their nationality. Greenblatt, who is also president of the Modern Languages Association, called Baker’s decision “a crude and embittering policy of exclusion” in an open letter to her last month.

“An attack on cultural cooperation, with a particular group singled out for collective punishment, violates the essential spirit of scholarly freedom and the pursuit of truth,” Greenblatt wrote. “Such an act is intellectually and morally bankrupt.”

Greenblatt said Baker’s actions were “particularly grotesque” because the two journals involved, The Translator and Translation Studies Abstracts, deal with intercultural communication.

A petition has recently been circulating in European universities urging academics to cut off contact with their Israeli colleagues. Baker signed the petition prior to dismissing Shlesinger and Toury.

She defended her actions as “my interpretation of what a boycott of Israel means.”

Greenblatt and others have argued that a boycott undermines the “truth-seeking” goals of the academy and is not an appropriate tactic to indicate support for Palestinians.

“The pursuit of knowledge does not suddenly come to a halt at national borders,” Greenblatt wrote. “This does not mean that serious scholars must be indifferent to the world’s murderous struggles, but it does mean that they are committed to an ongoing, frank conversation.”

Those who oppose the dismissals have made appeals to principles of academic discourse, not the law. Because the editorial board was not employment, there is no legal protection for Shlesinger and Toury.

“It’s not a legal matter,” Greenblatt said.

Baker said that her actions against Shlesinger and Toury were not discriminatory against individuals, but rather against the Israeli state.

“I am not against Israeli nationals per se; it is Israeli institutions as part of the Israeli state which I absolutely deplore,” she said.

But Shlesinger seems far from a mouthpiece for the state of Israel—she was born in the United States and has criticized Israeli actions in the West Bank and Gaza.

Greenblatt again spoke out against Baker’s actions when he was accepting an honorary degree from London University last Saturday.

—Staff writer Stephanie M. Skier can be reached at skier@fas.harvard.edu.