South Africa F. W. Lancaster and Lorraine Haricombe conducted a large survey of South African academics just as the academic boycott was coming to an end. Their report here begins with an important clarification. They list some of the academic activities a boycott can affect, everything from honoring another library's request for a book to choice of a visiting professor. While we might expect total boycott to be hardest to justify, Lancaster and Lorraine suggest that justifying some selective boycotts may be at least as hard. Imagine physicists planning a conference in London having to write a South African colleague that consideration of her paper on quarks has been deferred pending receipt of convincing evidence of her opposition to apartheid.
Most academics associate such political criteria with politically oppressive regimes.
Few want their professional society imitating the very regime they are boycotting. If Lancaster and Haricombe offer an aerial survey, Neville Alexander reports from the ground. What Alexander reports is not a single boycott but a disorderly, confused, and evolving attempt at some sort of resistance to apartheid. Even in its final form, the boycott seems to have had little effect on the government or the academic friends of apartheid. Its primary effect seems to have been to retard slightly the very academic research the post-apartheid regime would need.