Hey, BDS-Loving Professors Watching the Assault on Academic Freedom in Turkey: Why So Quiet?
Following the failed coup attempt in Turkey last weekend, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government has stripped 59, 628 private school teachers of their accreditation, and the state-run Council of Higher Education called on all 1,577 the deans of private and public universities to immediately resign. Yesterday, the government took the assault on academic freedom a step further, firing an additional 100 academics and issuing a travel ban on all professors still employed.
In light of this blatant assault on the very core of academic freedom, I would like to offer a hearty mazel tov to the legions of American academic associations rising up to fight for principle and stand in solidarity with their beleaguered Turkish colleagues. The calls this week by the American Anthropological Association, the American Studies Association, the Association for Asian American Studies, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies, the Critical Ethnic Studies Association, and others were all shining examples of precisely the sort of fierce commitment to freedom and justice we’ve come to expect of American academics, those lionhearted champions of liberty, those defenders of moral…