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Middle East Studies Under Siege
* During an anti-war teach-in at Columbia University, Nicolas De Genova, an assistant professor of Anthropology and Latino Studies, said he wished the United States would experience “a thousand Mogadishus.” Alumni of Columbia and others off campus, rallied in part by articles in the conservative New York Sun, demanded his immediate dismissal. President Bollinger, invoking the First Amendment right of free expression, refused to fire De Genova. * The New York Times reporter Chris Hedges was booed by some in the audience at a Rockford College (Illinois) commencement for a speech that included criticisms of the war in Iraq. * At Drake University (Iowa), in February 2004, a federal grand jury issued subpoenas to gather information about participants in an anti-war forum sponsored by the university chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. The subpoenas were accompanied by a gag order, making it impossible for those affected to speak publicly about what was happening. After much legal maneuvering and many protests against this intrusion into the life of the university community, the subpoenas were withdrawn. Although most of these attempts to suppress or denounce criticism of the war were unsuccessful, their very existence points to an atmosphere of increasing pressure on those with dissenting views, many of whom are, not coincidentally, scholars who work on the Middle East and whose perspective is necessarily more complex than the good-versus-evil characterizations offered by the Bush administration to justify its decision to go to war. THE BALANCE TEST Another part of the context we need to consider is the attempt to monitor critical teaching in the name of “balance” in the classroom. This effort has been led by David Horowitz and his army of Young Republicans. Horowitz was a Marxist in the 1960’s American New Left movement, but today is a neo-conservative affiliated with Students for Academic Freedom and Campus Watch. He and his army of Young Republicans have been campaigning to pass what he calls an academic bill of rights for students at state and national levels. Happily, many of his efforts have failed because of intense lobbying by university administrators, by A.A.U.P., and by other national academic organizations. However, a resolution calling for consideration of Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights did pass the Pennsylvania House of Representative in July 2005. It created a special committee charged with investigating how faculty members at state colleges are hired and promoted, whether students are fairly evaluated, and whether students can express their views without fear of reprisal. The committee’s report will determine whether or not the House considers passage of an academic bill of rights. Horowitz’s campaign has created an atmosphere of concern on university campuses, I’d even call it fear, and this has led to a great deal of self-policing by many faculty and administrators. One need only look at the website of Students for Academic Freedom, which lists, professor by professor, course by course, university by university, unverified and uncorroborated complaints by conservative students about the lack of balance in their classrooms. These complaints have been picked up by legislators and sometimes offered as “proof” that indoctrination has replaced instruction in the classrooms of the academy. One of the disturbing aspects of Horowitz’s campaign is the way it justifies and encourages outsiders to the academic establishment, with very little information or insight, to take coercive action and attempt to interfere in its internal workings. Dedicated to securing “freedom” for all points of view, Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights claims to rest upon our most hallowed liberal principles: freedom of expression, freedom from indoctrination, respect for diverse points of view, pluralism. In fact, this is a stealth attack on the very concepts the bill purports to defend: it appeals to liberal ideas to advance a conservative agenda. That agenda is aimed at overturning the supposed leftist bias of universities (as measured by the number of registered Democrats and Republicans on faculties) in several ways, the most dangerous of which is to bring legislative and judicial scrutiny to bear on the hiring and promotion of faculty, the conduct of teachers in their classrooms, and the awarding of grades to students. These activities, now understood to be functions regulated and monitored by disciplinary communities and governance mechanisms internal to university life, would, under the Academic Bill of Rights, be turned over to external political bodies with little or no understanding of how universities work. Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights enjoins colleges and universities to appoint faculty “with a view toward fostering a plurality of methodologies and perspectives.” On the face of it, there’s nothing wrong with this kind of call for diversity, it echoes the call to end discrimination based on race and gender that many of us have long supported. But it is, in fact, the opposite of that demand because it substitutes political criteria (the numbers of conservatives or liberals measured by Republican or Democratic party affiliation) for social criteria (how many women, African-Americans, etc. are employed) and so changes the terms of what counts as a measure of discrimination. Moreover, it imposes a rule that supersedes the intellectual criteria established by a faculty or discipline; indeed it employs a political test for faculty appointment. In the idealized version of the liberal university, it is left to the collective judgment of scholarly communities to decide what counts as responsible knowledge; whether, for example, Holocaust deniers should be included in history departments, or creationists in biology departments.
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