Pitzer College ends study abroad program with Israeli university, claims it's not due to 'academic boycott'
Pitzer College announced it has ended its study abroad program with a university in Israel, but claims it's not because of any academic boycott.
Pitzer College announced it has ended its study abroad program with a university in Israel, but claims it’s not because of any academic boycott.
Allen Omoto, vice president for academic affairs at Pitzer announced on Tuesday that the college will remove the University of Haifa from its pre-approved list of study abroad programs.
”The programs are no longer pre-approved for enrollment by Pitzer students because they do not meet our criteria, due, specifically, to lack of enrollments for at least five years, exchange imbalance, or curricular overlap,” Omoto said of the changes. “I want to clarify that these programs are not closed, nor do any of these actions reflect an academic boycott. Pitzer students may still attend these programs through a petition process overseen by the Study Abroad and International Programs Committee; the programs are simply no longer pre-approved for enrollment by Pitzer students.”
Other universities in Brazil, South Korea, Germany, Denmark and more were also taken off the list of pre-approved study-abroad programs.
While Pitzer claimed the move wasn’t made based on any pressure for an academic boycott of Israel, the Claremont Colleges chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, which includes Pitzer, viewed it as a victory in a statement on social media.
”The closure follows a long-term campaign at Pitzer in support of the Palestinian-led call for U.S. colleges and universities to support Palestinian freedom, including academic freedom, by suspending institutional relations with Israeli universities, due to their complicity in Israel’s military occupation, apartheid regime,” the group said.
According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, a College Council previously voted in 2019 to end the institution’s relationship with the University of Haifa, but former Pitzer president Melvin L. Oliver overturned the vote.
The Canary Mission told Campus Reform in a statement that “Claremont College is engaging in an appalling antisemitic academic boycott of Israel thinly veiled as an administrative procedure.”
”When colleges and universities make academic decisions on the basis of misinformed student protest, they lead the nation down a dark road. Claremont now has the distinction of being first in the nation in capitulating to the well-organized and funded antisemitic masses,” the statement read.
