Rutgers Faculty Calls for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Against Israel

The Endowment Justice Collective, a coalition of organizations at Rutgers University, held a die in, Piscataway, New Jersey, March 19, 2024. Photo: USA TODAY NETWORK via Reuters Connect

Faculty unions at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, have passed a resolution calling for the adoption of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

According to one announcement issued by the university’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) 58 percent of faculty “voted” yes to divest from companies associated with Israel and suspend all programs with Tel Aviv University, while 38 percent “voted no.” A similar resolution was approved by the university’s chapter of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), an affiliate of the AFL-CIO, which represents adjunct professors, with 62 percent voting in favor.

“Our unions have many battles ahead of us,” said a joint statement issued by the two groups on Friday. “We will need to work together to resist the Rutgers administration’s ongoing attempts to undermine our contract wins. We will see the consequences on Rutgers of the incoming Trump administration’s looming assault on all of higher education.”

It continued: “Confronting the challenges that 2025 will bring, we will be stronger if we are united across union, rank, department, school and campus – as we were during our victorious strike in 2023. Together we fight ! Together we win!”

Launched in 2005, the BDS campaign opposes Zionism – a movement that supports the Jewish people’s right to self-determination – and rejects Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish nation-state. It seeks to isolate the country with economic, political and cultural boycotts. Official guidelines issued for the campaign’s academic boycott state that “projects with all Israeli academic institutions should be terminated,” and outline specific restrictions that its supporters should adhere to—for example, denying letters of recommendation to students applying to study abroad in Israel.

The unions’ passage of a resolution calling for BDS comes amid a new investigation into the role faculty — specifically the group Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) — has played in promoting campus unrest, extremism and anti-Semitism — an issue that attracted new attention this week when it was announced that Columbia University is allowing a professor who cheered Hamas’ atrocities against Israelis last October 7 to teach a course on Zionism. At Rutgers, this month’s resolution was e.g. heavily promoted by the FJP, which accused the university of supporting genocide in over a dozen social media posts it published to promote it.

As previously reported by The GeneralFJP is a faculty spinoff of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a group with numerous ties to Islamist terrorist organizations, FJP chapters have opened at colleges since the October 7 Hamas massacre in southern Israel. Throughout the 2023-2024 academic year, its members, which include faculty employed at the most elite American colleges, have promoted campus unrest, circulated anti-Semitic cartoons and called for severing ties with Israeli businesses and institutions of higher education.

According to a study by the campus anti-Semitism watchdog AMCHA Initiative, titled “Academic extremism: How a faculty network fuels campus unrest,” its presence throughout academia is insidious.

Using data analysis, AMCHA was able to establish a link between a school’s hosting of an FJP chapter and anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic activity. For example, the study found that the presence of FJP on a college campus increased by seven times the “likelihood of physical assault and Jewish students” and increased by three times the chance that a Jewish student would be subjected to threats of violence and death—which it happened at Rutgers University in November 2024 when freshman Matthew Skorny, 19, called for the killing of a fraternity member he identified as an Israeli, said on the popular social media forum YikYak, “To all the pro-Palestinian protesters (sic) … Go kill him.”

The FJP also “extended” the duration of “Gaza Solidarity Camp” protests on college campuses, where students illegally occupied part of the campus and refused to leave unless administrators capitulated to demands for a boycott of Israel. The study added that such demonstrations lasted over four and a half times longer, with FJP faculty free to influence and provide logistical and material support to students. Professors at FJP schools also spent 9.5 more days protesting than those at non-FJP schools.

“So much attention has been focused on, for example, Students for Justice in Palestine, the camps and all the unrest. The primary face of it has been students and student groups, and they have captured the attention of administrators, members of Congress, and the public, but if you look deeper—behind closed classroom doors, at department events and statements, or the activity of groups like (FJP) , you find an even more important predictor and determinant of anti-Semitism, said AMCHA Executive Director Tammi Rossman-Benjamin The General recently during an interview where she discussed the latest research on faculty anti-Semitism.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.