The members of the Department of Politics and Government at Ben Gurion University have agreed among themselves not to individually publish opinion pieces on the threat of closing of their department. For this reason, I have taken down the first version of this post. Instead I reproduce here the explanation of the situation of the department and the state of academic freedom in Israel given on the site Israel Academy Under Attack. For more information on the attack, go to the site, which includes suggestions for ways concerned readers can effectively respond to this assault on academic freedom. -Jeff

On September 4th 2012 the sub-committee for quality control of the Israeli Council of Higher Education recommended that the department of Politics and Government at BGU be prevented from registering new students for the 2013-14 academic year. This recommendation — which, if implemented, will lead to the closure of the department — will be voted on by the CHE in its next general meeting, due to take place on October 23rd. Below we provide an overview of the events that led to the sub-committee’s decision.

The saga began when the Israeli Council of Higher Education established an international evaluation committee to scrutinize political science departments in Israel.

From the very beginning, the process was mired by irregularities. First, Prof. Ian Lustick, a prominent American political scientist from U of Penn and an internationally recognized expert on Israeli society and politics, was removed from the evaluation committee for unknown reasons. In response, the original committee chair, Prof. Robert Shapiro of Columbia University, resigned and the political science department at Hebrew University stopped cooperating with the committee. The committee was subsequently recomposed with Prof. Thomas Risse from Frei University in Berlin taking the helm (Risse was aware that the other people resigned and still took it on), and included such people as Israeli Prof. Avraham Diskin who had previously written articles in support of the radical right wing group Im Tirzu.

This committee, whose members are praised as positivist and empiricist political scientists produced a report that was not . . .

Read more: Academic Freedom Attacked in Israel