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.
Cornel Ronald West is an American philosopher, political activist, social critic, actor, and public intellectual. The grandson of a Baptist minister, West focuses on the role of race, gender, and class in American society and the means by which people act and react to their "radical conditionedness." A socialist, West draws intellectual contributions from multiple traditions, including Christianity, the Black church, Populism, Marxism, neopragmatism, and transcendentalism. Among his most influential books are Race Matters (1993) and Democracy Matters (2004).
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.
Robert Neelly Bellah was an American sociologist and the Elliott Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was internationally known for his work related to the sociology of religion.
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 in universities has taken place in many countries at various times. 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 staff. In some instances, universities have supported antisemitic government or social policies and condoned the development of antisemitic cultures on campus. In many jurisdictions, especially since World War II, discriminatory practices, including within the context of a university, are in breach of anti-discrimination laws, though antisemitic cultural values still persists on many campuses.
Nadia Abu El-Haj is an American academic with a PhD in anthropology from Duke University. She is a professor of anthropology at Barnard College, Columbia University.
João Guilherme Biehl is a Brazilian anthropologist who is the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, where he is also the Co-Director of the Program of Global Health and Health Policy and where he holds an Old Dominion Professorship at the Council of Humanities, as well as being a Visitor at the School of Social Sciences of the Institute for Advanced Study. He specializes in medical anthropology, and his interests include social studies of science and religion, psychological anthropology, globalization and development, global health, ethnographic methods, critical theory, and Brazilian and Latin American societies. He is the winner of the Rudolf Virchow Award given by the Society for Medical Anthropology, the Margaret Mead Award in 2007, the Presidential Distinguished Teaching Award in 2005, and Princeton Universities' Graduate Mentoring Award in 2012.
Mark Stratton John Matthew Smith is an American biblical scholar, anthropologist, and professor.
David K. Jordan is a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego since 2004. He received his Ph.D. from University of Chicago in 1969. 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 currently participates in the university Academic Senate committees including the UCSD Graduate Council and the Council of Provosts.
Disinvestment from Israel is a campaign conducted by religious and political entities which 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 wing 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.
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 at Princeton University and the chair of the board of the Ethiopian Peace and Development Center.
The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law (LDB) is a nonprofit organization founded by Kenneth L. Marcus in 2012 to advance the civil and human rights of the Jewish people and promote justice for all. LDB is active on American campuses, where it, according to the organization, combats anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.
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 Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and American Studies at Princeton University, and the author of Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion (2015). Beliso-De Jesús is also the editor-in-chief of Transforming Anthropology.
The American Studies Association's boycott of Israel is an ongoing boycott of Israeli educational institutions by the American Studies Association (ASA). ASA's decision to begin boycotting Israel in December 2013 was controversial because it was the first major American scholarly organization to do so and it was heavily criticized. In April 2016, four ASA members aided by the pro-Israeli Brandeis Center sued ASA but the lawsuit was dismissed in 2019 when the judge ruled that plaintiffs lacked standing.
