Major violation of academic freedom at the University of Washington

A major donor to the University of Washington has withdrawn an endowment supporting a chair and program in Israel studies because the current holder criticized Israel!  Some details:

The University of Washington has put its five-year-old Israel Studies Program on hold after a major donor, angry about a professor’s criticism of Israel, took her money back.

Becky Benaroya, a prominent Seattle philanthropist, gave $5 million in 2016 to create the program. But after a professor who held the Jack and Rebecca Benaroya Endowed Chair in Israel Studies was among hundreds of Jewish studies and Israel studies professors to sign a widely circulated statement criticizing Israel last year, Benaroya became concerned about what was happening in the program she had funded.

She requested months of meetings with the professor, Liora Halperin, and university officials to discuss her views on the program’s direction. Those meetings — which also included a representative of the pro-Israel advocacy group StandWithUs, according to a person familiar with them — culminated in the university returning the entire endowment to Benaroya earlier this year.

 

“Based upon the direction the program had taken, my mom didn’t want her name connected with it,” Larry Benaroya, Becky Benaroya’s son and the current CEO of the family real-estate firm The Benaroya Company, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in an email.

As a result, the university stripped Halperin of her chair position and halted programming related to Israel studies — moves that Halperin told JTA will have consequences both on campus and well beyond it.

The Beonaroyas are a disgrace, but the real question here is how could UW have negotiated the endowment on terms that would permit this kind of meddling and intrusion by a know-nothing partisan hack with no scholarly qualifications?

(There is a petition in support of Prof. Halperin here, although it appears to invite signatures only for scholars and students in the field of Jewish and Israeli studies.)

(Thanks to David Guberman for the pointers.)