<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
<div id="container" class="container font-size5 content-width3">
<div id="reader-header" class="header" style="display: block;"> <font
size="-2"><a id="reader-domain" class="domain"
href="http://mondoweiss.net/2016/10/california-scholars-academic/">http://mondoweiss.net/2016/10/california-scholars-academic/</a></font>
<h1 id="reader-title">California scholars decry ‘assault on
academic freedom in the interest of one foreign gov’t, Israel’</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">California Scholars for
Academic Freedom<br>
October 10, 2016<br>
</div>
</div>
<div class="content">
<div id="moz-reader-content" class="line-height4"
style="display: block;">
<div id="readability-page-1" class="page"
xml:base="http://mondoweiss.net/2016/10/california-scholars-academic/">
<div class="entry-content c2-8">
<p class="p1 sizeable"><span class="s1"><i>The following
is a press release </i></span><span class="s1"><i>from
California Scholars for Academic Freedom </i></span><em><span
class="s1">(<a
href="https://cascholars4academicfreedom.wordpress.com/"
class="sizeable">CS4AF</a>), a group of over 200
scholars at twenty California institutions of higher
learning, urging a renewed and strong support by
university administrators for academic freedom and
the right to free speech and dissent in light of
the alarming recent history of assaults on academic
freedom, </span></em><span class="s1"><i>including a
list of over 20 such assaults:</i></span></p>
<p class="p1 sizeable"><span class="s1">On September 13,
well after the school year had begun, UC Berkeley
Chancellor Nicholas Dirks and Dean Carla Hesse
cancelled a course entitled “Palestine: A Settler
Colonial Analysis” that had been vetted and approved
by all the appropriate committees and authorities. It
was soon revealed that 43 Zionist organizations (some
of these may be organizations in name only) had sent
letters of protest asking for its suppression. Faculty
and student protest forced the administration to
reinstate the course.<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But adding
insult to injury, UC Berkeley administrators have
refused to apologize publicly, and have continued to
conceal the obvious reasons for their caving in to
outside pressures behind a veil of administrative
lingo and half-truths.</span></p>
<p class="p3 sizeable"><span class="s1"> The UC Berkeley
case is but the latest assault on academic freedom
that has increased in intensity over the last fifteen
years, overwhelmingly in the interest of one foreign
government, namely Israel. </span></p>
<p class="p5 sizeable"><span class="s1"> Well-funded
interest groups outside of the university, including
AMCHA, Campus Watch, Louis D. Brandeis Center,
Anti-Defamation League, Zionist Organization of
America, the David Horowitz Freedom Center, the Canary
Mission Website, the Middle East Forum, and the David
Project Center for Jewish Leadership have kept up a
continuous effort to silence open debate about a
controversial issue: the Israeli occupation and
Palestinian rights</span><span class="s2">. </span><span
class="s1">It is worth noting that two of the main
proponents of these organizations, David Horowitz and
Daniel Pipes, were named as leading Islamophobes by
the Southern Poverty Law Center.</span></p>
<p class="p3 sizeable"><span class="s3">Increasingly, such
groups are intervening in campus matters across the
nation, and they do so with the intent of chilling
freedom of expression. </span><span class="s1">It is
clearly their intent not only to intimidate but also
by example to threaten others and deter them from
their rights to academic freedom and free speech.
These groups have a well-organized campaign to end any
critical discourse on Israel. One of them, the Canary
Mission website has made its main mission to
intimidate and blacklist students and faculty who
speak out in support of Palestinian rights.<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The Canary
Mission website tries to prevent college students who
have been active in seeking Palestinian rights from
attaining employment upon graduation, conflating their
activism with anti-Semitism. They list the names of
these students, their employment history, and other
personal information, contacting prospective employers
and graduate schools, claiming without evidence that
the students are anti-Semites and terrorists. </span></p>
<p class="p7 sizeable"><span class="s1">The claims of
these various groups are made in the name of
protecting the ethnic or religious sensitivities of
students, usually by intemperate and exaggerated
characterizations of the statements or scholarly work
of those they target. In particular, the charge of
anti-Semitism is routinely and opportunistically
invoked, often on the basis of the spurious and
unfortunate equation made by the State Department
between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. Quite aside
from the criticism that this definition has gathered
from the scholarly community, the fact that a
governmental definition that is the fruit of lobbying
and political considerations is <i>de facto </i>assumed
as valid for academic discussions is <i>in itself </i>a
limitation of academic freedom, which is specifically
designed to be independent of political constraints,
and, more generally, push the boundaries of
politically-mandated definitions and notions. In none
of the cases listed below, was there any evidence
whatsoever that the scholarly criticisms of Israel
have in fact been anti-Semitic. The charge is meant to
harass and silence criticism and open debate. In
addition, nearly all of the harassment is one-sided:
against those who are critical of Israel. All such
charges of anti-Semitism against university campuses
have been dismissed. Still, this charge continues to
be invoked to silence debate on a controversial issue,
a core of academic freedom. </span></p>
<p class="p8 sizeable"><span class="s1">These attacks have
included the threat to punish a university if it fails
to deny tenure to a targeted faculty member; efforts
to sanction or suppress the activities and even
existence of organizations like Students for Justice
in Palestine or the Muslim Students Association;
attempts to “eliminate” classes deemed to be biased
against Israel and to prevent speakers from appearing
on campus; and threats to individual students and
professors. The organization Palestine Legal as well
as Jewish Voice for Peace have both documented the
increasing harassment.</span></p>
<p class="p7 sizeable"><span class="s1">At UC Berkeley and
on campuses all over the country, currently no issue
compares to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the
passions and animus that disagreements evoke. But even
more importantly, nothing presently compares to the
problematic way that some university and college
administrators have chosen to deal with this
particular conflict, including advocating a censorious
approach. </span><span class="s4">Too often,
university administrators concerned about donors have
caved in to these outside pressures rather than make a
robust defense of academic freedom. </span></p>
<p class="p7 sizeable"><span class="s1">Academic freedom
means the freedom of faculty to conduct and
disseminate scholarly research; the freedom to design
courses and teach students in their areas of their
expertise; and the right to free speech for students
and faculty enshrined in the First Amendment.</span></p>
<p class="p7 sizeable"><span class="s1">Academic freedom
includes the freedom of faculty and students to reach
conclusions that contradict existing dogma, whether
within the academy or throughout the larger society.
This includes raising concerns and proposing actions
regarding violations of international legal norms by a
government considered to be a strategic ally of the
United States.</span></p>
<p class="p7 sizeable"><span class="s4">Academic freedom
includes most importantly the freedom for scholarly
debate about controversial issues.<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Academic
freedom ensures that scholarship and inquiry into
controversial matters is not over-ridden by political
interests. It means </span><span class="s1">the
freedom of professors and students from administrative
or political interference with research, teaching, and
governance, and the constitutional academic freedom
that insulates the university in core academic affairs
from interference by the state.</span></p>
<p class="p1 sizeable"><span class="s1">We review here
only some of the most prominent examples over the last
15 years of these unconstitutional efforts to suppress
academic freedom and freedom of speech:</span></p>
<p class="p1 sizeable"><span class="s1">In 2003, tenured
chemistry professor Sami Amin al-Arian was fired by
the University of South Florida after conservative
talk show host Bill O’Reilly made inflammatory
accusations against him as a supporter of terrorism,
for his support of Palestinian rights. The faculty at
USF vigorously and overwhelmingly opposed this
administrative firing as an assault on academic
freedom.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The
U.S. government subsequently got involved. Professor
al-Arian was forced into a plea agreement in the wake
of post-9/11 legal accusations that never held up in
court. He was eventually deported, although he was a
U.S. citizen. </span></p>
<p class="p1 sizeable"><span class="s1">In 2004, the
Boston-based David Project Center for Jewish
Leadership produced a film “Columbia Unbecoming”
accusing professors in Columbia University’s Middle
East and Asian Languages and Civilizations of
intimidation of Jewish students. The film did not
interview the professors.<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Columbia
University formed a committee that investigated the
charges and found no credible evidence of harassment
or intimidation that warranted disciplinary action.</span></p>
<p class="p1 sizeable"><span class="s1">In 2007, a
widespread campaign was undertaken by some Barnard
College alumni and spread through many pro-Israel
websites to deny tenure to Barnard Professor Nadia Abu
el-Haj for her book <i>Facts on the Ground </i>about
Israeli archaeology, which argued that Israeli
archaeology shaped the archaeological facts to support
the state of Israel, including suppression of facts
that did not support their case. She was eventually
granted tenure. </span></p>
<p class="p1 sizeable"><span class="s1">In 2007, Norman
Finkelstein, a prominent political scientist whose
primary fields of research are the Israel/Palestine
conflict and the politics of the Holocaust, was denied
tenure by the DePaul University administration after
public attacks by pro-Israel lobbyists and scholars
such as Alan Dershowitz, despite the fact that the
faculty on the relevant promotion committees
overwhelmingly voted to award him tenure. The
university administration was forced into a monetary
settlement with Professor Finkelstein. </span></p>
<p class="p3 sizeable"><span class="s2">In 2008, </span><span
class="s1">Thomas Abowd, was dismissed from a
tenure-track position in anthropology at Wayne State
University. He had recently received the university’s
President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and a
merit raise. Undergraduates who had never taken a
class with him, plus Zionists in the local community,
complained to the administration about a speech he
made at a political protest on campus. They accused
him of being “anti-Semitic” and an “anti-white
racist.” There was a suit, the university eventually
admitted that these accusations were fraudulent, and
Abowd agreed to resign with a settlement.</span></p>
<p class="p1 sizeable"><span class="s1">In 2008 and 2009,
I was was twice brought up on charges at my
university, UC Santa Cruz, by two right-wing
pro-Israel faculty, including Tammi Rossman-Benjamin
who heads AMCHA, for events I organized that were
critical of Israel.<span class="Apple-converted-space">
</span>All the participants in these events were
Jewish, including a representative of the group
Breaking the Silence, who are Israeli soldiers against
the occupation.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>With
no sense of irony, Rossman-Benjamin and her husband
claimed that I had broken the rules of academic
freedom by bringing political speech onto campus.<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>When those
charges were dismissed, AMCHA, using the tactic of
lawfare, brought a lawsuit under the </span><span
class="s4">U.S. Department of Education Office of
Civil Rights (OCR) charging UC Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley
and UC Irvine with creating campus climates that were
anti-Semitic.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The
lawsuit was eventually quietly dropped, but not before
these campuses had to spend taxpayers’ money to prove
the charges were illegitimate. </span></p>
<p class="p5 sizeable"><span class="s1">In 2009, Professor
William Robinson, at UC, Santa Barbara, was attacked
by pro-Israel groups, led by the Anti-Defamation
League (ADL), in a campaign against him that lasted
nearly six months and that included among those who
attacked him some of his faculty colleagues. The
charge: Professor Robinson had included optional
reading materials drawn from the international press
for classroom discussion that evening on the
Israel-Palestine conflict. These outside interest
groups made threats against the university if they did
not fire Professor Robinson. The harassment also
involved slander, defamation of character, hate mail
and death threats. The disciplinary procedure
initiated against him by his university’s
administrators involved a host of irregularities,
including violations of the university’s own
procedures, breaches of confidentiality, denial of due
process, conflicts of interest, failure of disclosure,
and improper political surveillance.<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>A campaign
of support initiated by students and some faculty
eventually forced the university administration to
back down. </span></p>
<p class="p7 sizeable"><span class="s6">In 2010, </span><span
class="s1">the student group Muslim Identities and
Cultures (MIC) on the UC Berkeley campus was attacked
by AMCHA, in an attempt to stop an event entitled
“What Can American Academia Do to Realize Justice for
the Palestinians” that featured several faculty
speakers, including a featured speaker from Birzeit
University. MIC was simply co-sponsoring with 5 other
groups.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>However,
AMCHA singled out that group to slander as well as the
group’s faculty advisor Professor Paola Bacchetta.
Then Chancellor Birgeneau wrote a statement deciding
in favor of the students’ and faculty academic
freedom.</span></p>
<p class="p7 sizeable"><span class="s1">In 2011, AMCHA
launched a multi-year campaign of intimidation and
harrassment of David Klein, a professor of mathematics
at California State University Northridge, for his
co-authored petition to the CSU Chancellor not to
reopen the Israel Study Abroad program because of its
discriminatory treatment of students, his webpage in
support of BDS and Palestinian human rights, and his
hosting of Ilan Pappe’s visit. AMCHA and 23 other
Zionist organizations petitioned the California
Attorney General, Kamala Harris, to prosecute Klein
for misuse of university resources. When she declined
on the basis that no violations of law had occurred,
Zionist organizations sent a letter to Los Angeles
City Attorney Trutanich accusing Harris of abdicating
her responsibilities and urging him, without success,
to prosecute Klein. He became the target of hate
mail, threatening phone calls, and character
assassination for several years. </span></p>
<p class="p9 sizeable"><span class="s1">In 2012, The AMCHA
Initiative waged a campaign to prevent Ilan Pappé from
speaking on three CSU campuses. Ilan Pappé, an
Israeli scholar, is Professor of History and Director
of the European Centre for Palestine Studies, and
Co-Director for the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political
Studies at Exeter University. That effort at
censorship failed due in part to the principled
defense of academic freedom by three CSU campus
presidents. </span></p>
<p class="p5 sizeable"><span class="s1">In 2013, Stand
With Us tried to suppress the introduction into a
class at San Diego State University a map of the area
of Palestine that controverts the Israeli government’s
map of the area but that reflects the understanding of
the region by others who live there.<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The Provost
caved in to these outside pressures and, because the
instructor did not have security of employment,
enjoined the instructor not to present this material
again. </span></p>
<p class="p5 sizeable"><span class="s1">In March 2014, the
Louis D. Brandeis Center made false accusations
against the University of California, Santa Barbara
campus for supposedly fostering a hostile environment
for Jewish students.<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>In that
case, the Center brought a U.S. Department of
Education Office of Civil Rights Title VI complaint
that was later quietly dropped. </span></p>
<p class="p5 sizeable"><span class="s1">In that same
month, the AMCHA Initiative along with several other
organizations sent highly inflammatory accusations
against San Francisco State University faculty members
and students, singling out Professor Rabab Abdulhadi,
for an event held on the campus that was a report of
an academic and labor delegation to Palestine.<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The AMCHA
letter accused the SFSU faculty members of meeting
with Palestinians, whom the letter labels as
“terrorists.” It demands that the university provide
“counter-programming” to what they called an
anti-Semitic event.<span class="Apple-converted-space">
</span>Professor Abdulhadi has been the repeated
target of smear attacks by these organizations, most
recently because of her leading role in the SFSU
collaboration with An-Najah National University in
Palestine.</span></p>
<p class="p5 sizeable"><span class="s1">In August 2014,
Chancellor Wise of University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign, overrode shared faculty governance
when she unilaterally withdrew the offer to Professor
Steven Salaita who had just been hired in the program
of American Indian Studies, for his personal tweets as
a private citizen exercising his First Amendment right
to free speech. about the latest Israeli assault on
Palestinians in Gaza that summer, that killed nearly
1900 people, most of them civilians, and damaged
nearly 167 schools and six universities, and raided
five universities in the West Bank.<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Chancellor
Wise’s action was condemned by the American
Association of University Professors, as well as other
professional associations and thousands of academics.
Professor Salaita sued the university and, in a
virtual admission of wrongdoing, the university
granted monetary compensation to Professor Salaita. A
FOI request subsequently found the Chancellor had been
in close communication with university donors opposed
to Professor Salaita. </span></p>
<p class="p5 sizeable"><span class="s1">In January 2015,
the University of Pennsylvania bowed to external
pressure to disinvite a guest speaker, well-known
journalist Chris Hedges, because of his expressed
views critical of the Israeli government. </span></p>
<p class="p5 sizeable"><span class="s1">In spring 2015,
the AMCHA Initiative, Accuracy in Academia, the David
Horowitz Freedom Center and Stand With Us sent false
accusations against a student-led course on Palestine
at the University of California, Riverside.<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The course
had been fully vetted and was sponsored by Professor
David Lloyd.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The
student involved in leading the course, as well as
Professor Lloyd, were subjected to hostile and racist
email.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The
student was accused of wishing the annihilation of
Jews.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>In
this case, the course was not cancelled, although the
Chancellor did not make a public defense of academic
freedom. </span></p>
<p class="p7 sizeable"><span class="s1">In spring 2015, UC
Santa Cruz Students for Justice in Palestine (a
frequent target of these outside interest groups),
held mock checkpoints on campus to illustrate their
concern about the Israeli occupation. Several
students, encouraged by AMCHA, lodged a false
accusation of hate/bias against the group for
allegedly targeting certain students (presumably
Jewish) and physically blocking them from entering
specific doorways unless they produced identification.
The administration later apologized to SJP for
publicizing what were unfounded accusations before
meeting with them to investigate. They offered to send
out a campus-wide apology but never did. </span></p>
<p class="p7 sizeable"><span class="s1">In 2014-2015,
right-wing pro-Israel groups heavily lobbied the
University of California to revise the university’s
intolerance policy to equate anti-Zionism with
anti-Semitism.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>After
much critical commentary opposed to such an
infringement on academic freedom and open debate, the
University of California issued an Intolerance policy
that states in its preamble (rather than in the body
of the text): “</span><span class="s7">Anti-Semitism,
anti-semitic forms of anti-Zionism and other forms of
discrimination have no place at the University of
California.”</span></p>
<p class="p10 sizeable"><span class="s2">In February 2016,
two Brooklyn College students were falsely accused by
the Anti-Defamation League and the Zionist
Organization of America of making anti-Semitic remarks
at a faculty council meeting that students </span><span
class="s1">interrupted to demand a return to free and
open admissions, more full-time faculty members of
color, and an end to the presence of undercover cops
on campus. None of their demands were related to the
Israel-Palestine conflict but two of the students were
involved with Students for Justice in Palestine.<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>After
inflammatory press coverage in New York that repeated
the false accusations, the Brooklyn College
administration, after first pressuring the students to
accept a settlement, eventually admitted that the
students never made any anti-Semitic statements. </span></p>
<p class="p10 sizeable"><span class="s1">In March 2016,
Sarah Schulman, faculty at City University of New York
(CUNY), was called before a CUNY Task Force on
Anti-Semitism, in her role as faculty adviser to
Students for Justice in Palestine.<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The Task
Force had a 14-page list of accusations filed by the
Zionist Organization of America, which turned out to
be vague and slanderous charges against Muslim
students who were said to make Jewish students feel
uncomfortable by their mere presence on campus.<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>In addition,
the ZOA had been harassing Professor Schulman, sending
tweets to her publishers, reviewers, friends and
colleagues and sabotaging her Wikipedia page. </span></p>
<p class="p5 sizeable"><span class="s8">As we send this
press release,</span><span class="s1"> Professor
Simona Sharoni, Professor of Gender and Women’s
Studies at SUNY Plattsburg, is under personal and
professional attack for her support for both victims
of sexual assault and for the human rights of the
Palestinian people.<span class="Apple-converted-space">
</span>More specifically she is under attack for her
publicly stated support for the constitutionally
protected Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement
against Israel. Stand With Us has now made 10 FOIL
requests to the University about Professor Sharoni.
She has also been subject to threatening e-mails and
twitter posts. </span></p>
<p class="p5 sizeable"><span class="s1">Palestine Legal,
an organization that protects the civil and
constitutional rights of people in the U.S. who speak
out in support of Palestinian rights, responded to 152
incidents of censorship, punishment or other burdening
of advocacy in 2014.<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>In the first
six months of 2015, they responded to 140 incidents.</span></p>
<p class="p12 sizeable"><span class="s1">These right-wing
pro-Israel groups have also tried to suppress academic
freedom by repeatedly introducing un-constitutional
bills into state legislatures that try to outlaw any
criticism of Israel by erroneously equating that
criticism with anti-Semitism. </span></p>
<p class="p12 sizeable"><span class="s1">Anti-Semitism—like
racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression—is a
real problem that universities should indeed take
seriously. However, the conflation of criticism of
Israel with anti-Semitism has become a standard tactic
by those groups who seek to censor criticism of
Israel. That tactic also ignores the many Jews who are
critical of Israel’s flaunting of UN resolutions and
international humanitarian law. </span></p>
<p class="p12 sizeable"><span class="s1">While both
federal and state law as well as university policy
protect students from discrimination or antagonism
based on their religious, ethnic, gender and other
identities, no law could possibly protect students or
faculty from hearing challenges to their political,
religious or cultural beliefs simply on the grounds of
their identification with them, so long as such
discourse is conducted in a non-coercive and
nonviolent manner.</span></p>
<p class="p13 sizeable"><span class="s1">Any organization,
internal or external, that seeks to limit the free and
full deliberation of any viewpoint, or the
representation of perspectives inimical to it,
trespasses on a principle of academic life so
fundamental that the university would be unimaginable
without it. It is a principle which cannot and must
not promise that in all situations students or faculty
will feel intellectual comfort: indeed, mental and
moral discomfort are often essential conditions for
serious learning and thoughtful consideration of views
that challenge our preconceptions. This is not,
however, the same thing as slanderous and intimidating
attacks, intended to silence rather than to promote
debate and inquiry.</span></p>
<p class="p14 sizeable"><span class="s1"> It is a
university’s responsibility to tolerate a wide range
of views on issues, even if they are unpopular or
minority opinions. While in the most recent attack on
academic freedom at UC Berkeley, the dean claimed that
the university should not tolerate “political
agendas,” surely the administrative suppression of the
course also constituted political advocacy, of a
negative kind. </span></p>
<p class="p14 sizeable"><span class="s1">Academic freedom
guarantees neither that any belief of any kind will be
held sacrosanct and above criticism, nor that in all
and every situation every view will be given equal
consideration. The university is the whole colloquy
of the views expressed in it and the preservation of a
broad and complete spectrum of views, all of them
allowed both space and time for their elaboration, is
essential to it. </span></p>
<p class="p5 sizeable"><span class="s1">The California
Scholars for Academic Freedom draws attention to this
very troublesome recent history to urge a renewed
support by university administrators for academic
freedom. We urge college presidents and deans to
re-affirm their commitment to academic freedom, the
hallmark of a university education. </span></p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div> </div>
</div>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863.9977
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.freedomarchives.org">www.freedomarchives.org</a>
</div>
</body>
</html>