18 June 2026
The American Historical Association appears to have been the worst, but evidently they have nearly all been doing it, as Daniel Segal (pictured) explains in Academe Blog.
Academic Freedom and Democratic Governance for Learned Societies Too
BY DANIEL A. SEGAL
We—meaning both faculty and the AAUP—know that when our teaching and research disturb powerful interests, we risk repression on our campuses from administrators, trustees, donors, and elected office holders. This has certainly been the case in recent years in the context of both the second Trump administration and widespread efforts to shield the Israeli state from accountability for its genocide in Gaza. What is less expected is that in the current historical moment, parallel repression has arisen in a site adjacent to our campuses, specifically in several of our learned societies, at the hands of their leadership—typically, a salaried executive director and an elected board with fiduciary responsibility.
Consider the American Historical Association (AHA). At its 2025 annual meeting, members attending the business meeting voted 428–88 in favor of a “Resolution to Oppose Scholasticide in Gaza.” Organizers supporting the resolution—including Historians for Peace and Democracy and Historians for Palestine—expected that the AHA’s Executive Council would send the resolution to the full AHA membership for a vote, in accord with the association’s rules and established procedures. Instead, the Council vetoed the resolution, stifling debate and blocking a democratic membership vote.
The Council’s publicly stated reason for its veto was that the resolution was “outside of the AHA’s mission.” This is patently pretextual, patently preposterous. The association’s mission, as found in the AHA’s Congressional Charter, names promoting “historical studies” and “collecting and preserving historical manuscripts”—along with a capacious category of “kindred purposes.” Even setting aside the last, the first two mandates are unquestionably undermined by the Israeli state’s violent and systematic destruction of Gaza’s schools, universities, libraries, archives, museums, and archaeological sites. By the plain language of the association’s charter, then, the resolution is fully within the AHA’s mission.
Let us note, moreover, that the Council’s claim that the resolution departs from the association’s mission implies that the 428 members who voted “yes” at the business meeting (82 percent of those voting) misunderstand the AHA’s mission—even though the association’s leadership had pleaded this case against the resolution prior to and during the business meeting.
Put simply, the Council’s public rationale for its top-down, undemocratic procedural ad hocery defies literacy, beggars gullibility, and engages in calumny against the association’s own members—including the several past AHA presidents who had publicly supported the resolution.
And more: in 2022, the Council approved a resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—somehow without any concerns about the AHA’s mission not allowing it.
It is, in sum, exactly as if for the AHA’s leadership, the association’s mission has a carve out, an exception, for Palestine.
Once was not enough for the AHA Council, moreover. In the run up to the 2026 annual meeting, the Council refused to admit to the agenda for the business meeting two new resolutions, both drafted and put forward fully within the association’s rules and established procedures: a “Resolution in Solidarity with Gaza” and a “Resolution Opposing Attacks on Core Principles of Education.” In response, the members attending the business meeting defied the Council, introducing the resolutions from the floor and passing them with nearly 80 percent support. Yet, these decisive votes notwithstanding, the Council met the next day, in closed session, and vetoed the two resolutions—twice again stifling debate and pre-empting democratic voting by the association’s full membership. (For an important account of and response to the 2026 vetoes, see this commentary from the Palestinian Historians Group.)
Sadly, one could tell parallel stories of repression of pro-Palestinian speech and upending of democratic governance by the leadership of other learned societies, notably the Modern Language Association and the American Sociological Association.
Importantly, the anti-Palestinian and antidemocratic conduct of the leadership of these and other learned societies is of a piece with a far broader pattern. Especially since October 2023, we have seen again and again and again that nothing draws the leadership of mainstream—and ostensibly liberal—institutions to engage in antidemocratic repression, and to pervert and set aside their own rules, more swiftly and cynically than acts of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for equality and freedom. Our colleges and universities do it, the Democratic Party does it, and our learned societies do it too.
This common obeisance to compulsory Zionism is a complex matter, but it is safe to say that it reflects the fact that support for the Palestinian struggle carries and validates broader demands—an end to settler colonialism and US empire and militarism—that are material threats to those who benefit the most from the existing world order.
In anti-Palestinian repression on our campuses—and certainly in the Democratic Party—we thus see the controlling hand of dominant classes, purposefully (and at times, gleefully) setting aside the will of broader constituencies and stakeholders. The role of faculty in shared governance, we have learned, was always conditional, with boards of trustees retaining final decision-making power even in areas we mistakenly thought were covered by academic freedom protections for faculty and students.
What is less obvious is why we find the same obeisance to compulsory Zionism on the part of the leadership of learned societies, given that these are membership organizations with elected boards comprised of disciplinary peers. Why do these boards adopt the consciousness of dominant classes in regard to Palestine? Here we need a serious inquiry into the ways members serving on elected boards are so often pulled into what Steven Thrasher has termed “the overseer class”—persons of a given class who take on the task of disciplining others of their class on behalf of dominant classes and their interests. We see something similar, far too often, when faculty seek and obtain administrative positions, especially when they then pursue careers and advancement in administration rather than returning to full-time faculty roles as teacher-scholars. A different term for this might be insidious insider-ism.
The good news is that there are sustained efforts in our learned societies to fight back and rebuild democratic governance and academic freedom, fully rejecting an exception for Palestine. Here there is a constructive role for the AAUP to play. The association can and should extend its championing of academic freedom and democratic governance by drafting and adopting a statement—an addition to the Redbook—affirming that both are crucial for our learned societies, just as they are on our campuses.
Daniel A. Segal is the Jean M. Pitzer Professor Emeritus at Pitzer College of the Claremont Colleges. He served two terms on the executive board of the American Anthropological Association, once as the Association’s secretary. He is a past president of the AAUP chapter of the Claremont Colleges and a member of the Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace. His scholarship ranges from social life in Jane Austen (with Richard Handler) to racial discourses in contemporary societies to theorizing states and nonstates within the long course of human history.
