As conflict in the Middle East persists, study abroad in Israel becomes a flash point
Pitzer College will pull back from a longstanding study-abroad partnership with the University of Haifa, in Israel, a relationship that has been the subject of a boycott campaign by students, faculty members, and alumni of the California liberal-arts college.
In a message to the campus, Allen M. Omoto, dean of the faculty and vice president for academic affairs, said the decision to remove the Haifa program and 10 others from a list of preapproved study-abroad programs was the result of low enrollment or curricular overlap and was not influenced by calls to cut academic ties with Israel. “These actions,” he said, do not “reflect an academic boycott.”
Students will still be able to petition the study-abroad office to go to Haifa, and the program will not be formally closed, Omoto said in the statement.
But campus organizers of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, or BDS, movement called Tuesday’s announcement a victory. They noted that Omoto said the decision was based on the recommendations of several committees of professors and students, which had cited concerns about whether such a partnership was in keeping with core college values.
Pitzer administrators are “trying to deny the explicit BDS principles under which the program was closed,” said Bella Jacobs, a student organizer. “Please do not allow the tension between governance bodies at Pitzer to overshadow the plain fact that Pitzer is now the first college or university in the U.S. to enact a major part of an academic boycott.”
In a press release and social-media post, the Claremont Colleges chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace called on other colleges to suspend study-abroad programs and other academic ties with Israeli universities. (Pitzer is one of five undergraduate colleges and two graduate schools that are part of the Claremont consortium.)
College campuses have increasingly been on the political and cultural frontlines since the Israel-Hamas war began in October, and criticized by both sides for public statements and programmatic ties.
Efforts to call off study-abroad programs to Israeli universities in protest of the Israeli government‘s policy toward Palestinians predate the recent conflict, however. And Pitzer’s partnership with Haifa has been a flash point for even longer — in 2019, the College Council, a body of professors and students, voted to end the relationship, but that move was overturned by Pitzer’s president at the time, Melvin L. Oliver, who cited academic-freedom concerns. Last year, BDS supporters said they were renewing efforts to end the Haifa program.
Jacobs, who is Jewish, co-authored a new resolution with a Palestinian American classmate to suspend institutional ties with Haifa. It said such a relationship was not socially responsible and out of step with college values. In February, the Student Senate approved the resolution, 34 to 1. The College Council was slated to vote on the measure later this month.
Some 430 alumni and parents also signed a pledge saying that they would not donate to Pitzer while it maintained ties to Israel, Jacobs said.
At the same time, Pitzer’s Study Abroad & International Programs Committee approved guidelines for opening and closing overseas programs, which included among the criteria whether a program “aligns with Pitzer values, educational objectives, and/or student learning outcomes.” The committee includes faculty and staff members, as well as students.
While Charlotte Wirth, a student member of the committee, said that low student interest was the impetus to remove most programs from the approved list during a March review, the group voted to drop the Haifa program because of broader concerns about maintaining such a partnership with an Israeli university, in addition to enrollment reasons. (No students have studied abroad through the program in the past five years.)
A meeting memo shared with The Chronicle that details the recommendations states, “Additional criteria aligning with Pitzer values and adequate local resources are cited in the Haifa-specific proposal.” The committee also appended the student resolution to the memo, noting, “this latter proposal comes with considerable community support.”
The study-abroad panel’s recommendations were then reviewed and endorsed by the college’s Curriculum Committee and the Faculty Executive Committee. Omoto cited all three committees’ actions in Tuesday’s announcement.
On Tuesday, faculty leaders sent out a statement on the crisis in the Middle East approved at the most recent faculty meeting. While the statement did not mention the Haifa program by name, it said, “We stand firmly against any form of discrimination targeting Palestinian students and faculty, and the deliberate exclusion of Palestinian perspectives from the curriculum within Israeli universities. As a result, we will actively discourage any partnerships with institutions that perpetuate such practices.”
The chair of the Faculty Executive Committee did not respond to a request for comment. A college spokeswoman said she could not comment beyond the publicly posted statement.