The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) announced Thursday it would postpone a conference on academic boycotts scheduled to begin next week in Bellagio, Italy.

The conference, which was originally sponsored by the Ford, Rockefeller and Nathan Cummings Foundations, came under attack due to the fact that more than 8 of the 21 academics invited to participate in the conference publicly support boycotts of Israeli universities. Another decisive revelation that led to the postponement of the conference was that material distributed prior to the conference included an anti-Semitic paper by a Holocaust denier.