Boycotts, Academia, and the Ethics of Solidarity

There’s something performatively clean about a boycott. You refuse to show up, you make a statement, you symbolically withdraw your presence and support. And in many spheres—consumer activism, corporate accountability, fossil fuels—this tactic has teeth. But when it comes to academia, boycotts get ethically muddy in ways that few seem eager to acknowledge. They are as much about optics as they are about outcomes, and the line between solidarity and symbolic self-sabotage is perilously thin.

The idea of collective punishment dressed up as moral clarity is not new. When scholars boycott institutions in the United States because of its government’s actions—wars, policies, presidents—they often do so out of principled objection. But those objections land not on policymakers, who rarely notice, but on fellow scholars—those whose classrooms are full of dissent, whose lectures critique empire, whose grant applications are rejected for being “too political.” In the age of MAGA, where universities are painted as hotbeds of Leftist subversion, academic boycotts of American institutions perversely serve the narrative of the far right. If universities are the “enemy of the people,” as Trump claims, then fewer international scholars coming to conferences is not a wound—it’s a win. 

The same contradiction emerges in discussions of boycotting Israeli academia. Israel’s government is deeply entangled in policies that have rightly drawn global condemnation. And yet, the academic world within Israel is disproportionately populated by critics of those policies—many of whom have been publicly vilified by their own state for their views. Calls to boycott these institutions often assume that academia is an extension of state power. But in practice, it is more often a site of resistance, a fragile one, barely holding out against the encroachments of nationalism and militarization. When scholars in Tel Aviv or Haifa or Jerusalem lose access to international colleagues, they don’t become more powerful—they become more isolated.

The Russian case sharpens the dilemma. Since 2022, Russian state aggression has prompted sweeping cultural and institutional ostracism. But to cut ties with Russian academics because of their passport—especially those who have spoken out, resisted, or fled—is to abandon the very principle of intellectual solidarity. It reduces individuals to representatives of regimes they neither voted for nor benefit from. And worse, it reinforces a notion that nationality equals complicity, erasing the moral agency of people struggling under authoritarianism. That’s not ethics. That’s convenience masquerading as principle.

What all these cases have in common is the presumption that institutions can be cleanly separated from the people within them, and that withdrawing engagement is a morally upright act. But ethics, especially academic ethics, rarely benefits from such abstraction. To pretend that boycotting a university is merely a gesture against a government is to ignore the human cost—the junior scholar whose career is derailed, the student who loses a mentor, the grassroots movement that loses allies.

True solidarity, the kind that changes things, is relational. It requires presence, dialogue, and the difficult labor of distinguishing friend from foe, even when they occupy the same institutional space. It’s messier than a boycott. It looks less like absence and more like engagement with boundaries. It’s attending the conference in Texas and using your keynote to decry state policies. It’s co-authoring with an Israeli scholar who’s under attack for opposing the occupation. It’s mentoring a Russian postdoc in exile. It is going to a US-based conference out of solidarity with the American scholars under siege. 

Fear of harassment at the border is a different matter. While the actual risks are astronomically low, they are not zero. No one should be pressured into travel that they find frightening or demeaning. But let’s be clear: personal safety decisions are not political acts of protest. Declining to attend is a valid choice. Just don’t conflate fear with boycott. They’re not the same thing. 

Boycotts can have their place. But they are not ethical in and of themselves. Their morality lies in their effect, and when that effect is to harm those trying to do good in dark times, it’s time to reassess. Blanket withdrawal may feel like justice. But justice, like scholarship, demands more than feeling. It demands thinking—especially about who we hurt when we don’t show up.