The American Studies Association (ASA) is an organization founded in 1951. It is the oldest scholarly organization devoted to the interdisciplinary study of American culture and history. The ASA works to promote meaningful dialogue about the U.S., throughout the U.S. and across the globe. Its purpose is to support scholars and scholarship committed to original research, innovating and effective teaching, critical thinking, and public discussion and debate.
Contents
- History
- Officers and Governance
- Membership
- Chapters
- Publications
- Annual meetings
- Prizes and grants
- 2013 boycott of Israeli academic institutions
- Criticism
- Response from the ASA
- References
The ASA consists of almost 5,000 individual members along with 2,200 library and other institutional subscribers. It publishes the American Quarterly at Johns Hopkins University Press. The concerns and activities of the organization are international in scope.
History
The American Studies Association was founded for purposes of
the promotion of the study of American culture through the encouragement of research, teaching, publication, the strengthening of relations among persons and institutions in this country and abroad devoted to such studies, and the broadening of knowledge among the general public about American culture in all its diversity and complexity.American Studies departments, programs, and centers exist around the world.
Past Presidents of the ASA include Carl Bode (1951-1952), Daniel J. Boorstin (1969), Daniel Aaron (1972-1973), and William H. Goetzmann (1974-1975).
Officers and Governance
The President of the ASA for the 2014-2015 term (ending June 30) is Lisa Duggan, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. The President-elect is David Roediger, Professor of History at the University of Kansas. Curtis Marez of the University of California, San Diego was President during the 2013-2014 term.
Membership
Membership is available to any individual with an interest in the study of American culture. Colleges, universities, museums, foundations, societies and other institutions can also be members of the ASA.
Chapters
The ASA includes thirteen chapters:
Publications
The ASA regularly produces several publications including:
Annual meetings
The annual ASA annual meeting features speakers and workshops connected to a broad theme important to the field. The 2015 meeting, "The (Re)production of Misery and the Ways of Resistance" is scheduled for October 8–11, 2015 at the Sheraton Centre in Toronto, Canada. The 2014 meeting, "The Fun and the Fury: New Dialectics of Pleasure and Pain in the Post-American Century," was held on November 6–9, 2014 at the Westin Bonaventure in Los Angeles. Subsequent meetings are scheduled for November 17–20, 2016, at the Hyatt Regency Denver at Colorado Convention Center in Denver, Colorado, and November 9–12, 2017 in Chicago, Illinois.
Prizes and grants
The ASA awards a number of prizes and grants including:
2013 boycott of Israeli academic institutions
In December 2013, members of the ASA voted to join the boycott of all Israeli educational institutions. This followed a similar vote taken in April 2013 by the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) to boycott Israeli universities and academic institutions in response to calls from Palestinian civil society; the boycott has since been joined by the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. In a statement on the boycott, ASA's National Council encouraged members to vote in support of the boycott because of "Israel's violation of international law and UN resolutions; the documented impact of the Israeli occupation on Palestinian scholars and students; [and] the extent to which Israeli institutions of higher education are a party to state policies that violate human rights." Some faculty, however, have objected that it is inappropriate for senior administrators to publicly position their college or university on an issue that faculty believe is one of academic freedom.
Criticism
Israeli officials and the Anti-Defamation League reacted by stating that political and academic debates should not be mixed and accused the ASA of discrimination against Israel and "Orwellian antisemitism", a charge denied by supporters of the boycott such as George Bisharat, David Lloyd and Colin Dayan. The Israeli ambassador to the US, Ron Dermer, stated, "Rather than standing up for academic freedom and human rights by boycotting countries where professors are imprisoned for their views, the A.S.A. chooses as its first ever boycott to boycott Israel, the sole democracy in the Middle East, in which academics are free to say what they want, write what they want and research what they want." AMCHA International maintains an updated list of universities that have terminated their ASA membership, and a list of universities that reject the boycott.
Senior administrators at over 200 universities have rejected the academic boycott of Israel and four universities withdrawn from the organization: Brandeis University, Indiana University, Kenyon College, and Penn State Harrisburg. Prominent university and college presidents who have publicly condemned the boycott include Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger, Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber, New York University President John Sexton, Amherst College President Carolyn Martin, University of Rochester President Joel Seligman, MIT President L. Rafael Reif, Wesleyan University President Michael S. Roth, Bard College President Leon Botstein, Case Western Reserve University President Barbara Snyder, Boston University president Robert A. Brown, Oberlin College President Marvin Krislov, and Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust.
In January 2014, 134 members of Congress (69 Democrats, 65 Republicans) signed a letter to ASA president Curtis Marez and president-elect Lisa Duggan, which accused the ASA of engaging in a "morally dishonest double standard." The letter stated that: "Like all democracies, Israel is not perfect. But to single out Israel, while leaving relationships with universities in autocratic and repressive countries intact, suggests thinly-veiled bigotry and bias."
The Association of American Universities, the American Association of University Professors, and the American Council on Education have all publicly denounced the boycott as a violation of the academic freedom of not only Israeli but also US scholars as well.
Political commentator Rex Murphy sharply criticized the boycott, arguing that the ASA "seeks to amputate all connection with thousands of other scholars. Not because of the content of those scholars’ ideas, their research, their intelligence, or their field of study. But because they are Israelis. Or teaching and researching in Israel." Regarding the ASA's claim that the boycott only targets institutions, and not individuals, Murphy questioned how the ASA "intend[s] to catch fish [while] vow[ing] not to go near the water."
Jeffrey Klein, a New York State Senate Co-leader, and Assemblyman Dov Hikind have announced plans introduce a law that will withdraw state funding from colleges maintaining memberships in groups boycotting Israel. In a joint statement, the lawmakers described the ASA boycott as "targeted discrimination against Israel that betrays the values of academic freedom that we hold dear." Democratic Congressman Eliot Engel sent a letter to the ASA's president in which he criticized "the unfair double standard Israel is regularly and unfairly subjected to by organizations such as yours."
On January 27, 2014, the New York state Senate, by a vote of 56-4, approved a bill that will ban Universities and colleges from funding organizations that "have undertaken an official action boycotting certain countries or their higher education institutions." The bill's sponsor, Jeffrey Klein stated that "This legislation sends a very simple message, which is that we should never ask taxpayers to support religious, ethnic or racial discrimination" and further vowed that "I will not allow the enemies of Israel or the Jewish people to gain an inch in New York." In response, ASA president-elect Lisa Duggan described the bill as "a thinly veiled attempt to hide Israel’s ongoing violations of international law and human rights."
On January 30, 2014, the Philadelphia City Council unanimously passed a resolution sponsored by Kenyatta Johnson which condemned the ASA's boycott of Israel.
Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University, sharply criticized the ASA, writing in the Los Angeles Times that "The ASA has not gone on record against universities in any other country: not against those that enforce laws against homosexuality, not against those that have rejected freedom of speech, not against those that systematically restrict access to higher education by race, religion or gender. No, the ASA listens to civil society only when it speaks against Israel. As its scholarly president declared, "One has to start somewhere." Not in North Korea, not in Russia or Zimbabwe or China — one has to start with Israel. Really?"
In addition to challenging the ideological grounds of the boycott, some have questioned its practical effect since the ASA consists of "only about 4,000 members and lacks any formal ties with Israeli institutions in the first place." Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Stanley N. Katz of Princeton University, who opposes the boycott, opined "Why anyone should care what the ASA thinks bewilders me. It is not a very large academic association, and it is not one that characteristically has a big impact in the academy."
In January 2015, former Harvard University President Lawrence Summers said in response to the ASA boycott that "universities should make clear that their names cannot be invoked as the purported sponsor for conferences or dialogues in which the primary thrust is demonization of Israel .... And it goes without saying that they should not allow themselves to be used as economic leverage against Israel." Summers added that, had he still been president of Harvard at the time of the ASA boycott, he "would have said something like this: 'The decision of the American Studies Association supported by a majority of its membership to single out Israeli institutions and Israeli scholars for selective boycott is abhorrent. The University believes it is very dangerous for scholarly associations to insert themselves into political issues outside of their range of competence. ... [T]he University is withdrawing its institutional membership in the ASA. We will withdraw from any scholarly association that engages in similar boycotts with respect to Israel or any other country.'" He said that universities must act with what he referred to as "moral clarity" when groups such as the ASA persecute "the world's only Jewish state for sins that even on the least sympathetic reading are small compared to those of many other nations."
George Mason University professor David Bernstein, writing in the Washington Post, describes the ASA as having moved from, "the ordinary lunatic fringe," into, "the racist lunatic fringe."
Response from the ASA
Curtiz Marez, the president of the American Studies Association and an associate professor and chair of the ethnic-studies department at the University of California at San Diego has responded to critics of the boycott by arguing that the ASA is "targeting Israeli universities because they work closely with the government and military in developing weapons and other technology that are used to enforce the occupation and colonization of Palestinian land, while university-associated think tanks develop political and communications strategies to advance government aims and defend them internationally." He has also predicted that "one day, after the tide turns, boycotts against Israel and the apartheid regime it has instituted will be viewed in the same way" as the Academic boycott of South Africa during the years of apartheid is now viewed, and that this comparison is especially apt just after the death of Nelson Mandela.
Speaking to The New York Times, Marez argued that America has "a particular responsibility to answer the call for boycott because it is the largest supplier of military aid to the state of Israel." Marez acknowledged that the United States has previously, and is currently, the largest supplier of military aid to many governments, including some with poor human rights records, but explained that Israel is the only country in which "civil society groups" had specifically asked the ASA to launch a boycott. Further responding to accusations that the ASA was singling out Israel while ignoring many other nations that have comparable or even worse human rights records that Israel (including many of Israel's neighbors), Marez replied: "One has to start somewhere."
Marez has written on the organization's long-standing commitment to social justice, and the ASA's belief in nonviolent strategies as a tool to effect change. "The academic boycott of Israel," writes Marez, "is grounded in the same anti-discrimination principles as other historical divestment and boycott strategies used to protest repressive state practices, including those employed against the South Africa apartheid regime and racial segregation in the United States." Marez goes on to note that the United States Supreme Court holds these kinds of boycotts, ones which "aim to effect 'political, social, and economic change," to be constitutionally protected speech activities.
However, eight past ASA presidents have signed a letter which described the boycott as "antithetical to the mission of free and open inquiry for which a scholarly organization stands." The letter also criticized the fact that “ASA Members were provided only the resolution and a link to a website supporting it. Despite explicit requests, the National Council refused to circulate or post to the ASA’s website alternative perspectives."