Academic Freedom at Risk on Campus

The article claims:


they have severely disrupted academic processes, the free
function of which once made American universities the envy of the
world.

During the McCarthy Cold-War era many profs. were blacklisted because of real or imagined connections to communism. My own university (Brandon University) in Manitoba was able to hire an economic prof. graduate of Oxford to teach economics. He was blacklisted in the US and had gone back to farming. He was an expert on Soviet agriculture. In his case he had actually been a member of the US Communist Party. US campuses were anything but free during the cold war and were not the envy of anyone in terms of freedom. They were the butt of many jokes worldwide.



Academic freedom at risk on campus
By SAREE MAKDISI
GUEST COLUMNIST

"Academic colleagues, get used to it," warned the pro-Israel activist
Martin Kramer in March 2004. "Yes, you are being watched. Those
obscure articles in campus newspapers are now available on the
Internet, and they will be harvested. Your syllabi, which you've also
posted, will be scrutinized. Your Web sites will be visited late at
night."

Kramer's warning inaugurated an attack on intellectual freedom in the
U.S. that has grown more aggressive in recent months.

This attack, intended to shield Israel from criticism, not only
threatens academic privileges on college campuses, it jeopardizes our
capacity to evaluate our foreign policy. With a potentially
catastrophic clash with Iran on the horizon and the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict spiraling out of control, Americans urgently
need to be able to think clearly about our commitments and intentions
in the Middle East. And yet we are being prevented from doing so by a
longstanding campaign of intimidation that has terminated careers,
stymied debate and shut down dialogue.

Over the past few years, Israel's U.S. defenders have stepped up
their campaign by establishing a network of institutions (such as
Campus Watch, Stand With Us, the David Project, the Israel on Campus
Coalition, and the disingenuously named Scholars for Peace in the
Middle East) dedicated to the task of monitoring our campuses and
bringing pressure to bear on those critical of Israeli policies. By
orchestrating letter-writing and petitioning campaigns, falsely
raising fears of anti-Semitism, mobilizing often grossly distorted
media coverage and recruiting local and national politicians to their
cause, they have severely disrupted academic processes, the free
function of which once made American universities the envy of the
world.

Outside interference by Israel's supporters has plunged one U.S.
campus after another into crisis. They have introduced crudely
political -- rather than strictly academic or scholarly -- criteria
into hiring, promotion and other decisions at a number of
universities, including Columbia, Yale, Wayne State, Barnard and
DePaul, which recently denied tenure to the Jewish American scholar
Norman Finkelstein following an especially ugly campaign spearheaded
by Alan Dershowitz, one of Israel's most ardent American defenders.

Our campuses are being poisoned by an atmosphere of surveillance and
harassment. However, the disruption of academic freedom has grave
implications beyond campus walls.

When professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer drafted an essay
critical of the effect of Israel's lobbying organizations on U.S.
foreign policy, they had to publish it in the London Review of Books
because their original American publisher declined to take it on.
With the original article expanded into a book that has now been
released, their invitation to speak at the Chicago Council on Global
Affairs was retracted because of outside pressure. "This one is so
hot," they were told. So although Michael Oren, an officer in the
Israeli army, was recently allowed to lecture the council about U.S.
policy in the Middle East, two distinguished American academics were
denied the same privilege.

When President Carter published "Palestine: Peace not Apartheid" last
year, he was attacked for having dared to use the word "apartheid" to
describe Israel's manifestly discriminatory policies in the West Bank.

As that case made especially clear, the point of most of these
attacks is to personally discredit anyone who would criticize Israel
-- and to taint them with the smear of "controversy" -- rather than
to engage them in a genuine debate. None of Carter's critics provided
a convincing refutation of his main argument based on facts and
evidence. Presumably that's because, for all the venom directed
against the former president, he was right. For example, Israel
maintains two different road networks, and even two entirely
different legal systems, in the West Bank, one for Jewish settlers
and the other for indigenous Palestinians. Those basic facts were
studiously ignored by those who denounced Carter and angrily accused
him of a "blood libel" against the Jewish people.

That Israel's American supporters so often resort to angry outbursts
rather than principled arguments -- and seem to find emotional
blackmail more effective than genuine debate -- is ultimately a sign
of their weakness rather than their strength. For all the damage it
can do in the short term, in the long run such a position is
untenable, too dependent on emotion and cliché rather than hard
facts. The phenomenal success of Carter's book suggests that more and
more Americans are learning to ignore the scare tactics that are the
only tools available to Israel's supporters.

But we need to be able to have an open debate about our Middle East
policy now -- before we needlessly shed more blood and further erode
our reputation among people who used to regard us as the champions of
freedom, and now worry that we have come to stand for its very
opposite.

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Saree Makdisi is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at
UCLA and a frequent commentator on the Middle East.