Lawrence Henry Summers is an American economist who served as the 71st United States Secretary of the Treasury from 1999 to 2001 and as director of the National Economic Council from 2009 to 2010. He also served as president of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006, where he is the Charles W. Eliot University Professor and director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School. In November 2023, Summers joined the board of directors of artificial general intelligence company OpenAI.
Cornel Ronald West is an American philosopher, theologian, political activist, politician, social critic, and public intellectual.
Clifford James Geertz was an American anthropologist who is remembered mostly for his strong support for and influence on the practice of symbolic anthropology and who was considered "for three decades... the single most influential cultural anthropologist in the United States." He served until his death as professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.
Nannerl "Nan" Overholser Keohane is an American political theorist and former president of Wellesley College and Duke University. Until September 2014, Keohane was the Laurance S. Rockefeller Distinguished Visiting Professor of Public Affairs and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. She is now a professor in social sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, where she is researching the theory and practice of leadership in democratic societies.
Meyer Fortes FBA FRAI was a South African-born anthropologist, best known for his work among the Tallensi and Ashanti in Ghana.
Peter Schäfer is a prolific German scholar of ancient religious studies, who has made contributions to the field of ancient Judaism and early Christianity through monographs, co-edited volumes, numerous articles, and his trademark synoptic editions. He was a Professor of Religion and the Ronald O. Perelman Professor of Judaic Studies at Princeton University from 1998 to 2013.
Saba Mahmood (1961–2018) was professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, she was also affiliated with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Institute for South Asia Studies, and the Program in Critical Theory. Her scholarly work straddled debates in anthropology and political theory, with a focus on Muslim majority societies of the Middle East and South Asia. Mahmood made major theoretical contributions to rethinking the relationship between ethics and politics, religion and secularism, freedom and submission, and reason and embodiment. Influenced by the work of Talal Asad, she wrote on issues of gender, religious politics, secularism, and Muslim and non-Muslim relations in the Middle East.
Antisemitism at universities has been reported and supported since the medieval period and, more recently, resisted and studied. Antisemitism has been manifested in various policies and practices, such as restricting the admission of Jewish students by a Jewish quota, or ostracism, intimidation, or violence against Jewish students, as well as in the hiring, retention and treatment of Jewish faculty and staff. In some instances, universities have been accused of condoning the development of antisemitic cultures on campus.
Nadia Abu El-Haj is an American anthropologist at Barnard College and Columbia University.
João Guilherme Biehl is a Brazilian medical anthropologist known for his innovative studies of global health, poverty, and suffering. He is currently the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Anthropology, Chair of the Department of Anthropology, and Director of the Brazil LAB at Princeton University.
Hector Avalos was a professor of Religious Studies at Iowa State University, cultural anthropologist, and the author of several books on religion. Avalos was an atheist and advocate of secular humanist ethics.
Mark Stratton John Matthew Smith is an American Old Testament scholar and professor.
David K. Jordan is an American anthropologist, educator, and academic administrator. He is a professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, since 2004. Jordan is known for his various service posts to the university. These positions include the chair for the department of anthropology, the director for the program of Chinese studies, provost of Earl Warren College, interim provost of Sixth College, as well as one of the founders of the UCSD department of anthropology with psychological anthropologist Melford Spiro. Jordan participated in the university Academic Senate committees including the UCSD Graduate Council and the Council of Provosts.
Disinvestment from Israel is a campaign that aims to use disinvestment to pressure the government of Israel to put "an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories captured during the 1967 military campaign." The disinvestment campaign is related to other economic and political boycotts of Israel.
The Ontario division of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) has supported the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel since 2006. Their stance has encountered opposition from the Canadian Jewish Congress and parts of the press but also widespread support from university professors, Independent Jewish Voices, Palestine House, Canadian Arab Federation and labour unions. In 2009 the CUPE Ontario university workers' committee proposed to extend the campaign to boycott any joint work with Israeli institutions that carry out military research. That resolution became the focus of extensive controversy and was modified in response to pressure from the CUPE national president; the amended version was brought before the CUPE Ontario conference in May 2009 and passed with a 2/3 majority.
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) is a nonviolent Palestinian-led movement promoting boycotts, divestments, and economic sanctions against Israel. Its objective is to pressure Israel to meet what the BDS movement describes as Israel's obligations under international law, defined as withdrawal from the occupied territories, removal of the separation barrier in the West Bank, full equality for Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel, and "respecting, protecting, and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties". The movement is organized and coordinated by the Palestinian BDS National Committee.
Ephraim Isaac is an Ethiopian scholar of ancient Ethiopian Semitic languages and of African and Ethiopian civilizations. He is the director of the Institute of Semitic Studies based in Princeton, NJ. and the chair of the board of the Ethiopian Peace and Development Center.
The current campaign for an academic boycott of Israel was launched in April 2004 by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) as part of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign. The campaign calls for BDS activities against Israel to put international pressure on Israel, in this case against Israeli academic institutions, all of which are said by PACBI to be implicated in the perpetuation of Israeli occupation, in order to achieve BDS goals. Since then, proposals for academic boycotts of particular Israeli universities and academics have been made by academics and organisations in Palestine, the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries. The goal of the proposed academic boycotts is to isolate Israel in order to force a change in Israel's policies towards the Palestinians, which proponents argue are discriminatory and oppressive, including oppressing the academic freedom of Palestinians.
Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús is an American anthropologist, academic, author, and editor. She is the Olden Street Professor of American Studies at Princeton University, and chair of the Effron Center for the Study of America. She is the author of two books, Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion (2015) and Excited Delirium: Race, Police Violence and the Invention of a Disease (2024). Beliso-De Jesús is also the editor-in-chief of Transforming Anthropology.
The American Studies Association (ASA) began an ongoing boycott of Israeli educational institutions in December 2013. The ASA's decision to boycott was controversial because it was the first major American scholarly organization to do so. In April 2016, four ASA members aided by the pro-Israeli Brandeis Center sued the ASA, but the lawsuit was dismissed in 2019 when the judge ruled that plaintiffs lacked standing.
