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Sunday, November 15, 2009

Followup: NTNU votes against boycott

The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) decided against supporting a boycott of Israei academic institutions, as it was considering.

As CAMERA reports:
The board of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) unanimously voted to reject a proposal by staff members to boycott Israel. The Board stressed the need to maintain open communication between scientists at NTNU and those at academic institutions in Israel. This comes after a counterpetition of professors at the same university (which drew three times as many signatories as did the original boycott proposal ) and an international counter-boycott petition (which drew over 3,500 signatories — i.e. more than 1.000 times as many as the original proposal) became public.
One win for the good guys.

Of course, this always puts advocates for Israel in a defensive mode. And it wouldn't do to push for academic boycotts of other countries because the entire idea of an academic boycott is bad. So the only real offense would be to strengthen ties between world universities and Israeli universities, as NTNU already has ties to Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem.