Neocons movement against academic freedom

[Moses]

The following is an analysis of the Columbia ad-hoc committee's report on the alleged faculty misconduct by a graduate student who has been closely observing the proceedings (and wishes to remain anonymous).

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The Columbia Ad-Hoc Committee that was created in response to allegations of intimidation in the classroom by several faculty members in the MEALAC program was released on March 31. I watched the David Project's film for the first time on March 6th. I gather from those who had seen the film once before, that this was the 7th version of the film. The makers of the film have constantly changed it in the face of criticism--including
criticism in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz. The incidents that were described in the film did not appear to be acts of intimidation to me.

Rather the film gave an entirely new meaning to the term intimidation: intimidation was everything that did not fit the David Project's political agenda! In response to criticisms from several Columbia faculty members, the makers of the film said that it was not a documentary, but an affidavit of evidence. The film itself was screened all over the place--to politicians in the US and Israel; to trustees; to the alumni; before it arrived here for students to evaluate. It seems everyone had a right to respond to it except the accused. The film's supporters have argued that the proof of guilt of the accused was in their scholarship and their political stance. There were and still are demands from the film's supporters that the University set up a commission of inquiry made up of outside experts, chosen in consultation with the David Project and its allies (i.e. vetted by them). I have concluded from various conversations here at Columbia, that the President of the University had in fact agreed to the creation of a such a committee.

However, several senior faculty members demanded a meeting with President and trustees, to argue that outside interference would violate academic freedom and the autonomy of the university. The CU administration set up an ad hoc committee as a compromise solution. I gather that at the political-ideological level the lines within the university were between those who have internalized the Zionist/Israeli state definition of anti-Semitism versus those that believed that a critique of Israeli policy was a valid academic pursuit and that such critique was not by definition anti-Semitic. At the "purely" administrative level the line was between those who presumed from the beginning that the allegations were valid and true versus those who did not make such a presumption.

Unlike most faculty and many graduate students here at Columbia, I view the creation of the ad hoc committee as a serious problem. It should never have been created because it sets a precedent and sends a message to anyone who wants to target teachers and the academy. I know that most faculty view the ad hoc committee as a way to protect the University’s autonomy from outside right wing attacks (a common sense conclusion). I happen to differ with them on the committee because there were and are very powerful forces on the inside who want to institute a political witch hunt, and will do it even if it means undermining this autonomy.

Nor are these folks going to be going to be easily out maneuvered. In addition, events prior to and after the committee issued its report suggest that Joseph Massad is being singled out by both the David Project and by the University administration. A few weeks ago, before the committee's report was released, Bollinger addressed a group of students on this controversy and prefaced his comments by saying that he would "assume that the allegation are true." Also, one has to assume that the committee did not issue a unanimous report--rather the document reflects a compromise of a divided committee. There is no public evidence of this; but I feel that there are good grounds to believe this from what the rumor mill is saying.

The University administration and now the ad hoc committee claims that Columbia's grievance procedures are obscure, unclear and did not work. That’s pure bull nuts. There are administrative processes and structures in place to handle grievances. All they had to do was appoint a senior dean of undergraduate advising as a temporary special administrator, whose responsibility would be to gather these grievances and then to walk them through the grievance process (which I gather takes longer than 3 months, but does work). If the existing grievance structures were not up to the task to handle the complaints, there were are all kinds of
internal committees that were already reviewing grievance procedures here at Columbia; and these could have been speeded up. So the evidence that was to presented could have been gathered and while the 'reform' committees were told to expedite their work. This would have shown that the university had more spine than to cave in and it would have killed
the problem much more subtly and quietly. There were also other strategies available to the administration to question the claims that Columbia is afflicted a severe case of anti-Semitism.


The tactic of using a film to make serious allegations, and that too in a manner that disregards the privacy of both accuser and accused is itself a violation of the rules that govern such administrative procedures. I have worked for seven years at a small college and served on an internal grievance panel for two of those years. The procedures there were even more obscure. But one thing stood out--all sides were required to respect
the privacy of everyone involved. Here, the accused were named in very public way and portrayed as guilty until proven innocent by everyone. In effect, even though the Committee's report tries to criticize this aspect of the film, it has legitimized this tactic of public accusations and the violation of privacy by its very existence.

The other problem has been the administration's public response. I think there is special burden on senior administrators--especially the Provost and the University president to defend the idea that one aspect of liberal education is to teach students to recognize distinctions and make judgments. In this case, their challenge was to argue that that critiques of Israel are not by definition prejudiced or anti-Semitic and that such critiques do have a place in the academy. But neither has done that. Bollinger has done the exact opposite, as his statements to various news outlets suggest. He has for instance made comments on the content of the courses taught by some of the MEALAC faculty to the press. This is precisely what Jonathan Cole (the ex-Provost) argues is an invitation from the inside to breakdown the autonomy of the University. And I keep hearing them (i.e. Bollinger, especially) make these ridiculous statements that reduce the classroom to a space where opinions and 'beliefs' are to be freely expressed. This, again is bullnuts; it’s a lazy way of talking about academic freedom. I have yet to encounter a single professor who has let me get away with expressing my opinions and beliefs without challenging me. So, why should there be exceptions made for those who find a critique of Israeli policies offensive? The classroom is not Hyde Park. This is what Mahmood Mamdani keeps repeating in his speeches on this issue. So why can't Brinkley and Bollinger say the same, only in different terms? Why can't they say that students come to learn, that the faculty are hired to teach an issue or topic from a particular perspective; and that the University will protect both equally vigorously? Why can't they argue that "academic freedom" is a collective right and demands equal RESPONSIBILITY from student and teacher; that the University is committed to creating space for learning and teaching (not just spouting opinions)? I say equal responsibility even though there is a fundamental power difference between student and teacher because students are here at the university as adults, and because they are generally quite adept at distinguishing scholarship and pedagogy from ideological indoctrination. Mine are not very original or complex ideas about academic freedom; in fact, they can be communicated by any average thinker or pr hack. Yet, we have a president who is running rampant saying all kinds of stupid and yes, racist things. My favorite is his line about how we must have “balance” in our teaching of complex, disturbing issues. Presumably, neo-liberal economics does not require this balance because it is not disturbing as an economic theory! I guess, the next time I discuss the Gujarat pogroms of 2002 with my students I should provide them with a balanced view by presenting them with Vajpayee and Narendra Modi’s denials! After all, I should not unsettle my Hindu nationalist students—it will intimidate them.
(continued_)

[Moses]

It is also very disturbing to me that neither the administration nor the faculty has made a single public comment on how or why Massad's research and teaching projects are well within the bounds of very mainstream research agendas within Middle East studies. That, in fact, from the very beginnings of Zionism, Jewish scholars and thinkers here in the US, in Europe and in Israel, have been reading and deconstructing Zionist narratives of the past and the present and critiquing them for their silences and exclusions. Massad's crime has been to bring these together and teach these texts in his Israel-Palestine class. So, far from being controversial, his research is so mainstream that it would not raise an eyebrow in most circles within Middle East studies, and definitely not in the academy in Israel. I think the David Project's problem with Massad is more subtle than most liberals like Bollinger will ever recognize. Massad is truly subversive and dangerous to them because when one translates his research into the realm of politics, it subverts the two holy grails of Bush-Sharon and of liberals here: 1) that Israel is a democracy and 2) their commitment to the two-state solution. This solution is the one that Sharon-Bush and every liberal claims is the only legitimate one and one to which they are all committed to. The two-state solution is also what goes by the name of balance in the academy and media. However, these same folks, when presented with evidence of Israel's rapid expansion into the West Bank, defend Sharon or remain silent. The leading students of the campaign constantly defend themselves in public that they are balanced/unbiased (in contrast to Massad) because they stand for a two state solution. This is somehow meant to silence their critics. But when pushed, they have NOTHING to say about the fact that Israel has virtually transformed the West Bank into three bantustans. (For evidence of their positions, you can take a loom at Ariel Beery's blog on the net. Beery is a former IDF spokesman and the leader of the students here at Columbia.

Much of what he spews on his blog is so outlandish, it’s unworthy of comment. On his blog, Beery says he was a peace activist in the Gaza. I want somebody to ask him the name of that organization. I am curious to know its acronym! You can also take a look at the web site of their local group: www.columbiaacademicfreedom.org/)

By creating the committee, the university has actually sent out the wrong message: that a critique of Zionism/Israel is so problematic within the academy that such projects (both as teaching and research projects) need special scrutiny at all times. According to news reports, and this was predictable, the David Project is unhappy with the ad hoc committee's report; claiming it’s a white wash. I think that the problem from their perspective is that the report a) finds 'credible' one of the allegations intimidation against Massad and concludes that he violated University norms; b) it finds 'credible' one allegation against Saliba and the second against Massad, but concludes that these cannot be judged as violations of any university norms; c) does not punish/censure these individuals; instead it recommends that the University needs better grievance procedures; and d) the report does not address the other "allegations" that were brought to the committee's attention. All of this is a way for them to pursue their real aims—which are to breach the autonomy of the university.

Of course, from my perspective, the finding that the allegations are credible and that on one instance Massad violated university norms is odd. There were 3 witnesses who backed up the student making the allegation against Massad. One of them was an unregistered auditor, and well-known activist for a Zionist group in New York, who had spent most of the time in class reading from the propaganda booklet that Massad mentions in his testimony. But there were also 3 witnesses who testified in favor of Massad—two of them were teaching assistants and one a registered student. The student making the allegation admits that she was graded fairly. Yet, the committee finds against him (implying that he and his TAs are lying). The committee report does not give us enough of a sense of their reasoning or the evidentiary basis on which they concluded that this incident did occur. One can only conclude that there was a division within the Committee and the more powerful amongst them or from outside (the Pres?) prevailed.

Almost all of the groups allied with David Project (the Israel on Campus Coalition, campus-watch, etc.) have openly stated that their aim is to breach the self-governance of the faculty and radically transform the peer review, the hiring and firing processes of the University. Columbia is a test case for them. To do this, they are still arguing for an outside review committee (the demand that they began with). The ad hoc review committee’s report does dwell on the role of these outside groups; it even points to the role of current faculty who support these outside groups. For instance, the report has some muted reactions to the fact that there are faculty members who actively recruited students to spy on Massad and others in class and then report back to them. But it does not conclude that such activities could be intimidating to Massad; or that these are serious and gross violations of University norms that deserve more than expressions of sadness. (For a sampling of the views endorsed by these faculty members, take a look at the videos and transcripts of a conference that they hosted here at Columbia on March 6^th . These can be found at spme.net/columbia.html.)

I have a feeling that the right-wingers will be coming in fast and furious now and it will be interesting to see what their next move will be. My guess is that there will be more editions of the film; and they will in all likelihood be targeting other individuals who have signed the divestment petition. Their spokespersons have promised that they will not stop till Bollinger gets rid of everyone they have targeted (and will target in the future) at Columbia. Will there be another committee each time a new version of the film is released? Or will the University quietly start firing everyone here at Columbia?

[Moses]

www.juancole.com/2005/04/friedmans-slander-of-middle-east.html


Sunday, April 10, 2005

Friedman's Slander of Middle East Studies and How it is Wrong and Ignorant

On April 7, 2005, in his New York Times op-ed piece, Thomas Friedman wrote:


' Until the recent elections in Iraq and among the Palestinians, the modern Arab world was largely immune to the winds of democracy that have blown everywhere else in the world. Why? That's a pretty important question. For years, though, it was avoided in both the East and the West.
In the West, it was avoided because a toxic political correctness infected the academic field of Middle Eastern studies -- to such a degree that anyone focusing on the absence of freedom in the Arab world ran the risk of being labeled an "Orientalist" or an "essentialist." '

I don't know Tom Friedman well. I once had dinner with him and Lee Bollinger, just after September 11, at the university president's house here at the University of Michigan, so I can say I've met him. I remember some of our conversation at that time. I argued, at a time when it seemed clear that the US would go to war with Afghanistan, that simply bombing the Taliban and al-Qaeda would not be enough. I said that the US had a responsibility to do nation-building in Afghanistan. Not only did we owe the country for helping devastate it by using it in as a proxy in our war with the Soviets, but if we did not help it out, it might well fall back into chaos and generate forces that might hit us again. Tom absolutely disagreed and, on free market grounds, argued that no attempt at government state building should ever be undertaken. I explained why I thought it was not only desirable but inevitable. He said, "Well, someone would have to show me how it could be done." I am glad to say that I clearly won this argument after the fact, and Tom seemed rather more enthusiastic about US nation-building a year later, when considering Iraq. Indeed, he now seems to want the US government to engage in vast social-engineering projects throughout the Middle East. Tom, I was just talking about Afghanistan. Even if I convinced you, I didn't mean you to go quite this far.

In the friendliest of ways, I would now like to address the two paragraphs above, in which Tom rather surprisingly lashed out at the field to which he himself belongs. (He has a master's degree in Middle East studies from St. Anthony's at Oxford University, and surely that training-- with some of the same people who trained or influenced the rest of us in the field-- is part of the secret of Tom's success as a journalist of the area).[There are just far too many people who attended Oxford U in positions of power in the US and too many of them are opinion-makers -- the British elitism and in fact the British intersts are supposed to have been rejected in US- along w/ their theocratic imperialism. These Oxford 19th Century Imperialists should be swept off our editorial pages and out of policy-making positions. Let them return to the suffocating class-ridden UK -- before they suffocate our democracy-- dd comment]

He begins by wondering why the winds of democracy have not blown in "the Arab world" except recently "in Iraq and among Palestinians" (sic) (why not "and in Palestine"?). He says it is an important question that has been avoided by the academic Middle East studies field in the West, because that field was "infected" with a "political correctness" that made it impossible to speak of the problem of authoritarianism in the Middle East without risking being branded an "essentialist."
Now, there are at least four things wrong with these assertions.

First, it is not true that the recent elections in Palestine and Iraq were so unique. Lebanon had regular elections from 1943 until the civil war of the mid-1970s, which resumed in the 1990s. The Palestinians had what were widely regarded as relatively free and fair elections in 1996. And, important steps toward democratization were begun in Jordan in 1989, in Yemen after unification, in Morocco in 2002, and in Bahrain in 2002. Tom himself praised some of these developments at the time. These parliamentary elections were all flawed in important ways, and marred by continued aspects of authoritarianism, but they can't be dismissed as insignificant. And, the elections in Palestine and Iraq, both held under conditions of foreign military occupation with substantial portions of the electorate engaged in a boycott and poor security conditions, were also deeply flawed. (In Iraq, where the very names of the candidates were largely kept secret for fear they would be assassinated, the election was anonymous and therefore in some real sense not a democratic election at all, but a sort of national referendum on a set of party lists.)

So Tom's premises here are, well, downright weird, and contradict other things he has said in the past.

Then there is the inconvenient fact that political scientists such as Michael Hudson and others have in fact attempted to understand why the Arab world was an exception to the "third wave" of democratization. There is a fair literature on the subject by political scientists, of which Friedman seems, to my astonishment, completely unaware. Tom might enjoy reading ....[suggested reading for Tom at link]. This is just a small sample of an enormous scholarly literature. Is it really true that Tom has departed so far from his earlier training that he can't even look articles up in Index Islamicus online, much less bother to read them?

Third, the way you would get accused of essentialism is to engage in it. This fancy word just means that you say things that depend on there being eternal essences of things. So, for instance, if you said, "Palestinians are now and always have been a violent, fanatical, and duplicitous race." -- that would be essentialism (also racism). You would be assuming that Palestinians have a shared and unvarying essence. If you said, "Arabs are incapable of democracy because their political instincts are always authoritarian"-- that would be essentialism. If you said that most Arab governments are authoritarian, and tried to explain why that was with reference to changing political, social or economic factors, then that would not be essentialist. It would be social science.

The fourth problem is that what Friedman has alleged about lack of critiques of authoritarianism in the region is completely untrue. I am going to be charitable and attribute his lapse of judgment to ignorance, or to listening to the wrong people and not reading enough in the field.

But I just did a few keyword searches in Lexis Nexis and on google, putting in the names of a few random major American scholars of Middle East studies. I tried to go back in time a bit, before the most recent controversies stemming from 9/11, so as to show that critiques have been being offered all along. I'll let readers judge if "political correctness" deterred the persons below, who are central to the field, from critiquing authoritarian governance in the Middle East. Most academics mainly write journal articles and books, rather than op-eds, and relatively few get quoted in the press. So if I could keyword search the books written by Middle East studies scholars, I could give many more examples. But even what is below is enough to show that Tom is dead wrong.

(more suggested reading for Israeli Propagandist wirting as “America’s Arabist” Tom Friedman, at link)

[Moses]

Add California to the states in which the neocons are pushing their legislation to oversee academic content:

www.signonsandiego.com/news/education/20050420-9999-7m20commies.html

/or/

tinyurl.com/eymcf

Faculty Members See Bill as 'Grave Threat' to Freedom
by Lisa Petrillo
© 2005 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.

Wednesday, April 20, 2005 -- Harry Steinmetz worries.

He grew up in the shadow of the McCarthy era, whose anti-communist hysteria led to his father's firing from the San Diego State psychology department in 1954, and Steinmetz joins many in the higher-education community who fear history could repeat itself.

At issue is a proposed law in Congress and more than a dozen state legislatures, including California's, that would limit what college professors could talk about in their classrooms in the name of protecting students from being bullied ideologically by their authority.

The proposals are being championed by conservative groups [sic-- in fact they are pro-Israeli orgs that are branches of the Likud in Israel] nationwide and sponsored here by Oceanside Republican Senator Bill Morrow, who said he wants to preserve academic freedom, not limit it. [Bill Morrow is a sinister liar]

"This is not about letting every wacko nut theory be presented in the classroom; it's about diversity, it's about generally accepted theories," said Morrow, who said he was intimidated by liberal professors in his college days.

The state Senate Education Committee is set to discuss his bill today.

What Morrow's proposal and similar ones nationwide don't spell out is who decides what is ideologically unacceptable, and what happens to those professors who cross the new politically drawn lines.

"It's up to common sense and Webster's," said Morrow. The dictionary definition of what constitutes indoctrination would suffice to set the boundaries on what acceptable classroom discussion would be, he said.

A spokesman for the American Association of University professors, which opposes Morrow's bill and similar proposals, calls the attempts to legislate curriculum "a grave threat to academic freedom."

"The premise of these bills is that these students come in ready to have their mind shaped by these extraordinarily influential professors. It assumes they can be brainwashed," said John Knight of the national faculty group that argues that students are adults and capable of making up their own minds. [Yes-- get the Libertarian professors off campus!! With their generous funding from right wing think tanks]

Conservatives have long accused U.S. universities of liberal domination. A 2002 study by UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute, which polled 32,000 full-time undergraduate professors, found that 48 percent identified themselves as "liberal" or "far left," compared with 18 percent who described themselves as "conservative" or "far right." Whether their politics at either side of the spectrum reach the classroom, however, is part of the national debate on the issue.

The effort to legislate academic freedom has gained momentum nationwide in the past year, passing the Georgia State Legislature and Florida House. At California State University San Marcos, which is in Morrow's 38th Senate District, a forum on the subject last month drew 300 students on the campus of 8,000.

Cal State San Marcos junior Ashley Stuart, a communications major, said she and her fellow College Republicans have backed Morrow's bill and that she personally believes students need its legal protections. [College Republicans: Alma Mater of Jack Abramson, his protogee Ralph Reed, and Karl Rove-- hardly a group that needs protection-- quite the reverse]

"I've learned to keep my mouth shut in some classes," she said, because she fears her grade might suffer because of her conservative views. [because she is a moron]

Critics of Morrow's bill include the CSU Campus Democrats, the Cal State University Faculty Senate and CSU's student government. They say colleges have extensive grievance procedures in place to handle student complaints.

It is the vagueness of who gets to decide what is ideologically acceptable that worries Steinmetz and Phiz Mezey, a college professor who lost her job in the days when Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy led a national witch-hunt, claiming communists had infiltrated America's vital institutions, including universities.

"Things that are happening now are frightening in their similarity," Mezey said from her San Francisco home. "I am very depressed about it."

Mezey and Steinmetz's father, psychology professor Harry Steinmetz, were among an estimated 500 college professors nationwide who lost their jobs during the McCarthy era, many of them blacklisted for years afterward.

Steinmetz is a part-time instructor for the San Diego Community College District who would be subject to Morrow's anti-indoctrination law -- an irony for the son of the only local professor fired during the McCarthy era.

His late father was a World War I veteran and an outspoken liberal dismissed by San Diego State after 24 years for refusing to tell a committee whether he was a communist.

"Dad took a stand on principle, though we begged him to answer the questions. It was a point of honor for him," said Steinmetz, whose father spent the rest of his life trying to restore his name. He eventually won the title of professor emeritus from SDSU before his death in 1981.

McCarthy-era scholar Ellen Schrecker of Yeshiva University in New York said she sees many similarities between then and now. She believes the Academic Bill of Rights movement already is having a chilling effect on campuses without having become the law of the land.

"Professors are more and more avoiding dealing with controversial subjects, as they did in the McCarthy era," Schrecker said.

Morrow defended his bill, which he calls the Students' Bill of Rights, as necessary to protect the state's nearly 2 million public college students from inappropriate political and ideological crusading by professors.

"It's crazy," he said of the McCarthy comparisons. "McCarthyism is the definition of what they're doing. Instead of it being McCarthy saying everyone is a communist, they're saying everyone who supports this is McCarthy."

His first attempt at similar legislation died in committee last year. But Morrow is optimistic, noting that he'll present his bill before a committee with many new members, including himself.

"There is a reason why you have conservative action here, because most professors are liberals," Morrow said. "Because you have inadequate rules to protect students, you have liberal professors harassing and haranguing them. If the roles were reversed -- and I wish they were, but that doesn't have anything to do with the bill -- you would have the Legislature trying to do something about it. The professors work for us."

---

The Communist Syndrome - Tuesday, May 18, 2004 1:19 PM by David Horowitz, sponsor of the academic oversight legislation, along w/ CAMERA, and the National Review)
I received this report from reader Janice Sentara who was listening to a "liberal" talk show and heard the following, which to me recalls the attitudes and apologias of the same left for Communist atrocities during the Cold War. Focusing on this parallel should help people to understand that we are facing a fast fifth column support group for our terrorist enemies, which is entrenched in the United States and is in positions of great power in all our institutions, particularly those which shape public opinion. -- David Horowitz , May, 2004.

[Moses]

www.the-dispatch.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?Date=20050425&Category=APN&ArtNo=504250957&SectionCat=&Template=printart

Article published Apr 25, 2005
N.C. Wesleyan professor's Web site, course draw criticism

By EMERY P. DALESIO
Associated Press Writer

The classroom where North Carolina Wesleyan College's only political science professor is teaching a course titled "9-11; The Road to Tyranny" has become the latest battlefront in the ongoing campus culture war.

On Tuesday, the six students enrolled in the elective course taught by Jane T. Christensen were to attend the course's final session: "Police State USA (Where Do We Go From Here?)"
Christensen's course has conservatives raging against campuses loaded with unaccountable liberals. The president of N.C. Wesleyan, a school of 1,800 students 50 miles east of Raleigh in Rocky Mount, is defending her right to academic freedom.

"Slander and anti-Semitism are permitted by a bigot posing as a scholar," Mike Adams, a criminal justice professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, wrote in an online critique on Frontpagemag.com.

Adams is a frequent critic of academic liberalism; Frontpagemag.com is a Web site headed by David Horowitz, a one-time liberal campus activist turned conservative critic.

One text required in Christensen's 9/11 course holds that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States were orchestrated and carried out by U.S. government elites. The course teaches that the official story about Sept. 11 is the result of "government involvement in the coverup."

The attacks were used by neo-conservatives in the Bush administration, acting on behalf of pro-Israel Zionists, as "a catalyst for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the attack on civil liberties in the United States," according to the course's syllabus.

"I teach the truth about 9/11 in all of my courses," said Christensen, who also teaches classes on research methods and the American political system.

Other professors have encountered criticism for voicing alternative views of the Sept. 11 attacks. University of Colorado ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill came under scrutiny after writing that workers in the World Trade Center were the equivalent of "little Eichmanns," a reference to Adolf Eichmann, who ensured the smooth running of the Nazi system. Churchill said his essay referred to "technocrats" who participate in what he calls repressive American policies around the world. Churchill also spoke of the "gallant sacrifices" of the "combat teams" that struck America.

And North Carolina has seen battles over the academic community's response to Sept. 11, as when three incoming freshmen sued the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill over a summer reading assignment of a book that examined Muslim beliefs.

In an interview Monday with The Associated Press, Christensen - a tenured professor with 15 years at N.C. Wesleyan - defended her course.

"This is a war by the extreme right wing motivated by the Zionists to quash academic freedom on campus," she said. [It's true!]

Students will "never find anything that resembles the truth about 9/11 or the war in Iraq from the mainstream media," she added.[Also true!]

Christensen urged an interviewer to investigate how many Iraqis have been killed since the U.S. invasion two years ago, whether several of the suicide hijackers on 9/11 have since been spotted alive, and whether Israel is planning targeted killings of opponents in the United States.

"That's a hell of a lot more interesting than my (expletive) Web site," she said.

Christensen's page on the N.C. Wesleyan Web site shows a photo of black-clad people holding automatic weapons and the statement: "Fighting the New World Order."

The site includes links to founding documents of American democracy - like the Declaration of Independence and selected Federalist Papers - as well as to anti-war, anti-Bush, anti-Israel and pro-Palestine groups.

Ian Newbould, N.C. Wesleyan's president, defended Christensen in an interview.

"We don't tell professors what to think. We don't tell professors what to teach. The Eastern European Communist regimes, or Saddam Hussein for that matter, that's what they did," Newbould said Monday. "What makes America great is we don't do that. I've often used a quotation that they say comes from Voltaire, `I may disagree with what you say but I'll fight to your death your right to say it.' "

A year ago, Newbould participated in a panel discussion at a convention of independent college administrators about whether college presidents should express personal opinions on controversial national issues. He said presidents should stay in the background, while providing opportunities for campus discussion.

N.C. Wesleyan is a liberal arts college affiliated with the United Methodists.

Newbould said Monday the school is considering applicants for a second political science professorship - a hiring decision he said is independent of any controversy over Christensen.
---

[Moses]

Echoing the Orwellian propaganda of Pipes & Horowitz about "academic freedom", Nat Hentoff praises David Project students in Village Voice:

Liberty Beat
Columbia: The Awakening
Students accused of 'McCarthyism' have enabled all students to begin to be heard


by Nat Hentoff
April 25th, 2005 2:39 PM [/size]


Columbians for Academic Freedom: They would not be silenced (Bari Weiss, Ariel Beery, Daniella Kahane, and Aharon Horwitz).
photo: tinazimmer.com

---

We just want honesty. We want to feel comfortable expressing views in the classroom that might not be the views that professors themselves hold. We just want to make a safe and good educational environment. A Columbia student in the David Project film Columbia Unbecoming, which months ago ignited the international conflict about the university's Middle East studies department. Her face was not shown because she feared retaliation.

---

I believe change comes not from larger organizations, but from people who believe passionately in something and are willing to put themselves on the line for an ideal. And judging by the announcement of [Columbia's new] grievance procedure I think we've achieved many things in a remarkably short period of time without institutional support. Ariel Beery, a leader of the student group Columbians for Academic Freedom, The Jewish Week, April 15

---

Louis Brandeis was the wisest justice to have sat on the Supreme Court. He used to say, "Sunlight is the best disinfectant." A courageous small number of students at Columbia are responsible for bringing sunlight to a long festering controversy concerning the university's Department of Middle East and Asian Language and Cultures (MEALAC).

On April 11, Columbia released a new set of students' grievance procedures, which, though flawed, did have this section:

"Complaints Involving a Faculty Member [include] (1) Failure to show appropriate respect in an instructional setting for the rights of others to hold opinions differing from their own; (2) Misuse of faculty authority to promote a political or social cause within an instructional setting; and (3) Conduct in the classroom or another instructional setting that adversely affects the learning environment."

Bari Weiss, 21, of Columbians for Academic Freedom, explained to The New York Sun's Jacob Gershman the significance of that last cause for student complaint: "[An] atmosphere of intellectual orthodoxy creates an environment where dissenters are turned into pariahs."

It's worth repeating something else Bari Weiss said [in my April 13-19 column, "Columbia Whitewashes"]: "We are doing this because we believe in the rights of all Columbia students to dissent without fear of abuse. Yes, this means for conservative students as well as left-wingers, for Zionists as well as anti-Zionists. . . . Criticizing professors does not violate their academic freedom or stifle debate. It only adds to it."

On Columbia's campus, these students were reviled by other students, and by some professors, for engaging in a "right-wing onslaught," for being "witch-hunters," and for engaging in "McCarthyism."

I am of an age to have experienced McCarthyism directly from the source and his followers, as was revealed years later in my FBI files (obtained through the Freedom of Information Act). It was there I learned the names of the towns in Russia from which my late parents came, and in which I was accused of being at "radical" meetings in other countries where I've never been and of mocking FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

The ravening senator from Wisconsin and his acolytes—including many in the press (anyone remember George Sokolsky?)—were dedicated to suppressing speech by "subversives," "fellow travelers," and other unpatriotic dissenters.

To call what the students in Columbians for Academic Freedom have been doing "McCarthyism" shows the need for much more teaching in schools, including universities, about that fear-ridden period of actual McCarthyism in American history—and what could happen again if there is another 9-11 or its equivalent.

Bari Weiss and her colleagues at Columbia have been expanding and deepening free speech, not suppressing it. As Ariel Beery notes:

"There are those people who just pass, and those who are willing to stake their claim in stepping outside of the normal discourse to spur the rest of society to action. Sometimes, it upsets people that [these] others seem to claim a right to be heard, and they feel like we're ruining it for everyone. But you have to stand up for what you believe sometimes."

I asked Ariel Beery for his reaction to Columbia's new grievance procedure, with its tiers of faculty committees, deans, vice presidents, the ombudsman office, and other officials before students can get fully heard. The most glaring of his objections is "the fact that students will not sit on any adjudicating committee."

It is a measure of how far Columbia has yet to go to secure free inquiry for everyone in its community that students are omitted from this mechanism that is designed to encourage them to report their grievances without fear of retaliation from, among others, faculty members.

In a later column, I will explore the persistent hostility of the New York Civil Liberties Union to these students who have "stepped outside the normal discourse" to awaken not only Columbia but also, I expect, other universities to recognize that academic freedom is also the essential right of students.

For this awakening at Columbia, much credit also goes to its student newspaper, the Columbia Spectator (Megan Greenwell, editor in chief). From the beginning of this furor, the Spectator has accurately and comprehensively carried the story forward and has kept its pages open to the conflicting views—including bylined commentaries—across the spectrum of this resounding clash that is far from ended. And the Spectator showed up The New York Times by rejecting the administration's offer to give it an exclusive, along with the Times, on the release of the faculty investigative report if it promised not to include comments on that report from the students who made that report necessary.

The Times accepted the bottom-of-the-deck deal; the Spectator scorned it. Said the Columbia Journalism Review Daily: "Given that in this case, student journalists on a campus newspaper upheld a higher standard of journalistic integrity than the 'paper of record,' the Times is right to be embarrassed."

The Spectator also beat the Times in covering the whole story.

[Moses]

www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-makdisi4may04,0,1186970.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

COMMENTARY

Neocons Lay Siege to the Ivory Towers

By Saree Makdisi
Saree Makdisi is a professor of English literature at UCLA.

May 4, 2005

In the months ahead, the state Senate Committee on Education will consider a bill that pretends to strike a blow for intellectual honesty, truth and freedom, but in reality poses a profound threat to academic freedom in the United States.

Peddled under the benign name "An Academic Bill of Rights," SB 5 is in fact part of a wide assault on universities, professors and teaching across the country. Similar bills are pending in more than a dozen state legislatures and at the federal level, all calling for government intrusion into pedagogical matters, such as text assignments and course syllabuses, that neither legislators nor bureaucrats are competent to address.

The language of the California bill — which was blocked in committee last week but will be reconsidered later in the legislative session — is extraordinarily disingenuous, even Orwellian. Declaring that "free inquiry and free speech are indispensable" in "the pursuit of truth," it argues that "intellectual independence means the protection of students from the imposition of any orthodoxy of a political, religious or ideological nature." Professors should "not take unfair advantage of their position of power over a student by indoctrinating him or her with the teacher's own opinions before a student has had an opportunity fairly to examine other opinions upon the matters in question."

To protect students from what one might (mistakenly) suppose to be an epidemic of indoctrination, the bill mandates that students be graded on the basis of their "reasoned answers" rather than their political beliefs. Reading lists should "respect the uncertainty and unsettled character of all human knowledge." Speakers brought to campus should "promote intellectual pluralism," and faculty should eschew political, religious or "anti-religious" bias.

Notwithstanding its contorted syntax, the bill may sound reasonable. But, in fact, it has nothing to do with balance and everything to do with promoting a neoconservative agenda. For one thing, the proposed "safeguards" to "protect" students from faculty intimidation are already in place at all universities, which have procedures to encourage students' feedback and evaluate their grievances. Despite a lot of noise from the right about liberal bias on campus, there are simply no meaningful data to suggest that any of these procedures have failed.

The real purpose of the bill, then, is not to provide students with "rights" but to institute state monitoring of universities, to impose specific points of view on instructors — in many cases, points of view that have been intellectually discredited — and ultimately to silence dissenting voices by punishing universities that protect them.

"Why should we, as fairly moderate to conservative legislators, continue to support universities that turn out students who rail against the very policies their parents voted us in for?" asks the Republican sponsor of the Ohio version of the bill.

Backers of the Florida bill would like to empower students to sue professors with whom they disagree on the theory of evolution.


The campaign for academic "rights" actually originated with organizations and individuals committed to defending Israel from criticism, and whose interest in curtailing academic freedom dovetails with those of conservatives.

At the federal level, for example, a confluence of conservative and pro-Israeli forces helped push HR 3077 through the House of Representatives in 2003. That bill, which foundered in a Senate committee (but has been resurrected in the current Congress), called for government monitoring of international studies programs that receive federal funding. The bill was drafted in response to the claim that the federal government was funding programs that criticize American foreign policy. If passed, it would have created a board (including two members from "federal agencies that have national security responsibilities") to ensure that academic programs "better reflect the national needs related to homeland security." Its supporters included the American Jewish Congress, the Anti-Defamation League, and the American Israel Political Action Committee, the bulwark of Israel's Washington lobby.

The bill was also backed by pro-Israel agitators Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer, who, via allies such as neoconservative firebrand David Horowitz, are among the proponents of the "bill of rights" legislation at the state level. All the proposed bills before state legislatures are variants of a text written by Horowitz and backed by Students for Academic Freedom, which maintains a website where students can complain about their instructors' supposed bias.

The problem with all this is that the university is meant to be an insular environment. Those within its walls are supposed to be protected from outside political pressures so that learning can take place.

But the lesson of the recent upheavals at Columbia University — where an individual professor became the object of a concerted campaign of intimidation because of his criticisms of Israel — is that pressure groups targeting an individual professor for his public views are willing to inflict collateral damage on an entire university. What the new legislation offers such groups is the opportunity to inflict damage preemptively on our entire educational system.

Despite its narrow defeat in the California Senate Education Committee last week, SB 5's supporters clearly will not disappear quietly. If this and similar bills pass, who gets hired and what gets taught could be decided not according to academic and intellectual criteria but by pressure groups, many of whose members are failed academics driven by crassly political motivations. Society would pay the price.

[Moses]

....Several more influential organizations are worthy of mention in relation to this campaign. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP, former Clinton diplomat Dennis Ross, mythmaker of the “generous offer”), provides a “respectable” Washington think tank image for those who regularly bring their arguments to a more official academic environment, albeit in campus venues that systematically exclude Palestinian voices. At a more vulgar level, David Horowitz’s frontpagemage.com website works to disseminate the latest in anti-Arab and anti-Muslim propaganda from himself, Pipes, Chesler, and others to Zionist students, including campus newspaper columnists. Horowitz’s website has its origins in his Center for the Study of Popular Culture, with its far right critique of “political correctness” of (liberal) campus culture.

Within the framework of the venerable B’nai B’rith, the Anti-Defamation League has since the early 1960s provided a “civil rights” cover for equating criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism . As an adjunct of the B’nai B’rith, the ADL has institutional access to B’nai B’rith Hillel, the Campus Center for Jewish Life. Hillel also provides a networking environment for Zionist Jewish students, connecting them to organizations like AIPAC, Campus Watch, and the Zionist Organization of America ; as well as ferrying them to Washington and Israel for indoctrination in “Israel advocacy.”

Local Jewish Federations provide a larger institutional and religious context for campus repression, disseminating Zionist propaganda, demonizing campus advocates for Palestinian rights, and advising alumni to withdraw financial support unless demands to repress criticism of Israel and U.S. support for Israel are met. In conjunction with Hillel through local Federations, the Reform movement (Union for Reform Judaism) advises students on “how to talk to critics of Israel” (Hamerman). Students are told not to seriously consider a variety of perspectives, but instead to learn to detect “anti-Semitism” among critics of Israel who may either “deny Israel’s right to exist,” or “hold Israel to a higher standard.” The implication, of course, is that critics of Israel are to be either vilified or dismissed as Jew haters.

It is in this context that I have intensively observed and thoroughly documented events at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus during the past year, with particular attention paid to the actions of the local Jewish Federation and pro-Israel student columnists, which have worked together to create an environment that is verbally intimidating to Muslim students. The response by the Interim Chancellor, under pressure by local and outside Jewish officials, has been to speak out against either trivial or non-existent anti-Semitism against Jews, but not against blatant racism against Arabs and Muslims. At UIUC, it is also instructive to note the relationship between Jewish Federation and the Program for Jewish Culture and Society on campus, with the resulting effort to legitimize charges of the “new anti-Semitism”. In this connection, it is important to note increased pressure to hire professors in Israel Studies.

The defamatory behavior of both non-academic organizations and students who claim to be victimized by the “anti-Israel” climate on campus is certainly the primary basis for this campaign of repression against intellectual freedoms in regard to the Israel/Palestine conflict. But my own experience has also brought me to a serious consideration of the role of local “moderate” officials: secular and religious, academic and administrative, employed either by the university or in institutions associated with it. There is a characteristic political posturing among those officials, who claim to be opposed to both Palestinian terrorism and Jewish settlement. But there is never a specific criticism that passes their lips of settlement expansion or settler violence, never a word of genuine compassion for the occupied Palestinians, and a hair-trigger readiness to quickly point the finger at the Arabs when the “peace process” breaks down, as it inevitably will once again in the near future. It is these “moderate” officials who provide a civil façade on campus that allows racism and extremism to flourish in the relationships between outside groups like AIPAC, ZOA, and Campus Watch, and right-wing student groups, whether of a specifically Zionist or more generically neoconservative nature.

On a tactical level for pro-Palestinian campus activists, it is has become apparent to me that the self-assumed exalted and detached status of local Jewish officials makes them particularly sensitive to public criticism, and unwilling or unable to counter it with the kind of overt nastiness that is customary in the more ruthless world of pro-Israel propaganda. This is a reality that can be exploited, especially by critical Jewish activists. Without the institutional facilitation, behind-the-scenes maneuvering, and passive consent of “respectable” campus Jewish organizations, the current campaign of repression against intellectual freedoms on campus could not be nearly as active and destructive. Those who pretend to be above the fray should be firmly, politely, and critically called to account for their politics and actions, especially if they purport to represent the local Jewish community, no less Jewish ethics and values.

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David Green ([e-mail] ) is an employee of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is a member of AWARE, the local Anti-war Anti-racism Effort (www.anti-war.net ), and is associated with Not In My Name (www.nimn.org ), a Chicago-based group comprised largely of Jews who are opposed to Israel’s occupation of Palestine.