A Georgetown Law Center professor is criticizing President John DeGioia’s decision to sign an advertisement on behalf of Georgetown University in opposition to a boycott of Israeli universities.
Louis Michael Seidman, a constitutional law professor at the Law Center, is also angry with the way DeGioia treated the professor’s complaints.
“I don’t think the president, on political issues, has the right or power to speak for all of us,” he said.
The ad, entitled “Boycott Israeli Universities? Boycott Ours, Too!” ran in the August 8, 2007 edition of The New York Times.
It was sponsored by the American Jewish Committee and signed by 286 other presidents of American universities, and it responded to a decision by the United Kingdom’s University and College Union to consider a boycott of Israeli universities because of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
Seidman contacted DeGioia after the ad ran and met him a few days later.
“To my surprise, he said he agreed with me and he thought that the advertisement was unbalanced and inappropriate,” Seidman said.
DeGioia said he was waiting to decide how to correct the ad, according to Seidman.
At a town hall meeting in front of faculty last month, DeGioia defended his decision to sign the ad.
“In this instance I believe it would have been disingenuous to give the impression, by not signing, that we support the boycott of intellectuals—when we do not,” he said.
Only after Seidman threatened to go public with his concerns, he said, did he receive a hand-delivered note from DeGioia referring him to the town hall meeting.
Seidman said DeGioia’s statement “did not in any way address the deficiencies of the advertisement.”
He wrote an open letter responding to DeGioia. In the letter, he complained that the ad did not mention the treatment of Palestinians that inspired the boycott.
“It is to ally oneself with those who deny that these things are true or who minimize their importance,” Seidman wrote in the letter.
“It is analogous to signing a statement condemning the founding of the state of Israel without mentioning the Holocaust.”
While he was able to e-mail the letter to faculty and staff at the Law Center, he said the office of Provost James O’Donnell denied him access to University e-mail lists, as well as clerical and photocopying services for distributing his letter.
“They are going to have to learn—because we are going to have to teach them—that Georgetown University is not Burma and that the people who run it are not a military junta,” Seidman wrote in the e-mail to Law Center faculty and staff.
O’Donnell’s decision was in accordance with policy guidelines, University spokesperson Julie Green Bataille wrote in an e-mail.
“[O’Donnell] seeks to balance the need for useful information with the burden such messages place on the resources of our IT systems and on the mailboxes of recipients,” she wrote.
Georgetown Israel Alliance’s co-president David Denker (SFS ’10) supported DeGioia’s decision to sign the ad.
“I think the ad was really right on,” he said. “I don’t think it’s an attack.”
Hammad Hammad (SFS ’08), a member of the Students for Justice in Palestine’s executive board, criticized the way DeGioia made his decision to sign the ad and wanted a different procedure for similar actions in the future.
“I would say have an open forum with students and staff where they can express their opinion and be more transparent with decisions like that,” he said.
-Additional reporting by Mike Stewart
