MLA and BDS 8: You can resign without signing the pledge (Guest Post)

Mississippi River Outside the MLA New Orleans on Jan 10 2025

by Bruce Robbins

I didn’t sign the pledge not to renew my MLA membership. (Mine is a lifetime membership, so in any case the organization would not miss out on any money from me). The pledge says, “I refuse to be affiliated with or financially support an organization that both silences its members and is complicit in genocide.” As an American, I am paying taxes that have been financially supporting the genocide, and though sorely tempted, I am (literally) unprepared to resign from the United States. Complicity with genocide is not something I can pledge away. The MLA’s silencing of its members is another story.

You can resign without signing the pledge.

The craven illogic of the Executive Council’s decision not to allow discussion of BDS has been laid out in scrupulous detail by Rebecca Colesworthy, Anthony Alessandrini, David Palumbo-Liu, and Matt Seybold, among others. Anyone who has not yet found time to read their resignation letters is passing up on an indispensable moral archive, and a very good-bad story. Anyone who does not see the power of their case-- well, I suppose all I can say is that you and I probably don’t have much to discuss with each other. But things have changed in the last month. There is a fragile ceasefire. Donald Trump is in office. Adding insult to atrocity, he is threatening to take over Gaza and displace its population permanently.

The once unimaginable things Donald Trump has been doing since he took office put the cravenness of the MLA leadership in a new light.

The leadership has demonstrated that it is afraid to listen to its members. What it has not demonstrated is a willingness to lead.  Leadership, amid the flurry of Trump’s threats and closures, blockages and executive orders, will require something other than obeying Trump’s Republicans in advance. Obeying in advance is exactly what the MLA’s Executive Council did when they claimed fiduciary responsibility and closed down debate. 

As the new McCarthyism expands, much the same anticipatory obedience is to be anticipated from university administrations. That is what Harvard offered up to Trump when it accepted the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which allows vocal critics of Israeli violence to be classified as anti-Semitic (including Jews like me) and menaced with legal action. At other universities, apparently including mine, that definition is already in use behind closed doors to shut down freedom of speech and, it seems, to get student protesters deported.  

The MLA leadership did not start all this, but it certainly did nothing to stand apart from what was coming, let alone stand up to it. What we need from our leaders is principled integrity and a willingness to fight on behalf of the university’s principles and mission, if only in court (where MLA could have pledged to go), if only to defend freedom of speech. The MLA has meant a lot to me, and I don’t rule out the possibility that if it were under different leadership, I might want to participate in it again.  But that leadership would have to show that it’s leading.

And it would have to do so before Trump leaves office. No credit for waiting and seeing. As Omar El Akkad puts it, one day everyone will always have been against this. Some of us will be there to remind you that when it mattered, you weren’t.

Columbia University 

February 11, 2025