The End of Academic Freedom and the Israel Lobby
Terri Ginsberg and Rima Abdelkader survey the wreckage of a once proud tradition of American academic integrity.
This is what I wrote last week on the subject:
' Academics at Risk
Please Donate to MESA
A report on the Iraqi professors' panel at the Middle East Studies Association meeting that just wrapped up in Boston. Their stories of everyday life on Baghdad campuses are heartbreaking.
There is also a McCarthyite and frankly racist campaign being waged by far rightwing Zionist groups in the United States to corrupt the academic hiring and tenuring process. Yellowbellied or corrupt academic administrators who bow to it should be thrown out by their outraged faculties.
To help the Middle East Studies Association defend academic freedom and keep blogs like this one going, donate to the Committee on Academic Freedom. The cart works in $10 increments, so if you change the "1" in the "quantity" box to "3" (e.g.), you would be donating $30.
Pennsylvania's legislature was conned by the Neocon master of Disinformation and the Big Lie, David Horowitz, into wasting taxpayer money to investigate if professors mistreat their students because of the latter's politics. The commission found that such instances are "rare" and that nothing further need be done. D'oh. There is not any way to know how students vote, and why would you bring that in to grading their paper on Moliere's plays? Pennsylvania voters should consider whether Rep. Gibson C. Armstrong, R-Lancaster, deserves to sit in their legislature if he is going to waste their hard-earned money on these silly wild goose chases. Isn't there a Pennsylvania (or better, Lancaster) bloggers' network that can bring Armstrong's record in this regard before the public? [Ooops, see the comments. The good people of Pennsylvania have already dumped him in favor of someone who can think straight!].
Mark Lynch discusses issues in academic blogging (the rightwing reaction to which has often threatened academic careers and freedom of speech), in the course of commenting on a blogging panel at the Middle East Studies Association this weekend in Boston. Participants included Lynch, Josh Landis of Syria Comment, and Helena Cobban of Just World News, as well as As'ad AbuKhalil, Leila Hudson (no longer blogging?) and myself.
The general tone of the participants' comments suggested that academic blogging has severe drawbacks and, with regard to Middle East bloggers, has not produced a 'second generation' after the crop of 2002. One reason in my view is that academics who blog on the Middle East are relentlessly harassed and cyberstalked by Likudnik crazies and other sorts of wingnut. You have to have very thick skin and, I think, you have to just not care about the career ladder or social climbing of other sorts to risk it. In my case, I think it helped to have been an army brat. You're always being transferred to another base and you can't count on friendships lasting very long, so you just become self-reliant. And, of course, the ethos of the army encourages you to stand up to bullies. But I take Mark Lynch's point that it isn't everyone's cup of tea.
There is something wrong with our society if simply sharing one's expertise for free is actually punished. We should do something about that. Please give money to MESA's Committee on Academic Freedom (scroll down). '
posted by Juan Cole @ 11/28/2006 12:12:00 AM
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2 Comments:
That academic freedom is being pinched is not surprising. This is -- in part -- a result of the laziness of many to keep the scope of their knowledge no greater than required for getting passing grades. This is best illustrated in the "No Child Left Behind Act" programmes that stipulate the concentration on reading and mathematics (hopefully higher than the dinner bill arithmetic) while de-emphasising various other studies along the Liberal Arts lines. I suppose the basics are vastly more important than electives such as logic, history, art, and the like but a well-rounded education is imperative. With the focussing on a very narrow core curriculum, it is easier to train students in the sense that they will be more susceptible to being swayed to a particular perspective given the lack of prior effort and the need to comply with grading and graduation requirements. This is the old "pâté de foie gras"
method whereby the gaggles of gullibly goosed will become sated, dumb, and happy being forced-fed a specific diet. The silly geese are more easily selected for being eliminated (slaughtered) for not having sufficiently exercised (their minds) and having had a well-rounded lifestyle. And, this is just high school.
There was a recent article in which the drop-out rate was being decried, approaching if not exceeding 50% in some of the better high school districts. This may be news to some but it has been a long-established trend in what we know as the traditional "Southern" states.* The rationale is simple: teach the kids little or nothing, disenfranchise them, substitute religious pablum where critical thinking was once standard, and, presto-zippo, you have a more immediately compliant population. As far as those who are able to somehow get into college, they have been conditioned to respond to stimuli designed to effect obedience, to the system and to its rigidity. While it may be true that academic professionals are being squeezed, the process is much easier when there are legions of mental anorexics who will more easily fit the "lean and mean" teaching processes, being fed only enough to get them through the narrowed learning mazes. Rather than being made fat, they have become more efficient students in that their intellectual diets are being kept at the survival levels.
This is certain to backfire with a great deal of blowback, with heat comparable to a blowtorch in that once people are keyed into learning about certain truths, there is little or nothing that can obstruct progress. Excepting, of course, a concerted effort by those politicians who see their continued success in establishing "NCLB" regimentation and secretly gleeful about the numbers of those increasingly less educated (oxymorons abound), the ones who will become vehemently opinionated and more easily mispersuaded at election time without the inconvenient facts getting in the way. On this point, I am with Ann Coulter who suggested that a literacy test be administered to qualify a person for voting. So requiring, people will scramble to either get educated or get out of the way, making room for those who vote smartly and are entitled to contribute to the national cause.
It don't matter none if they is "Zionists" or "Fundies" or merely worm-minded wrong wing wreactionaries (there's that old "W" again), so long as the "right" information is used to get people to accede to wars and other repressive measures, abroad and at home. People with less education are more easily confused and are more likely to seek out authority figures to follow. This worked well for the religious groups who lost prominence as soon as people got more smarts and figured out the scams with all of their inconsistencies. Horowitz, our favoured Commie in the midst of a perpetual dialectical crisis (having been all the way "Left," he's gone all the way "Right"), keeps hoping Santa or the Sooth Fairy will present him with some generally agreed upon balance point of Synthesis. For the time being he's on a pitching sea, hoping everyone along with him will suffer mal de mer long enough for him to figure out how to really right his vessel.
All reduced education offers is the opportunity for the scam artists to once again do their "Enron" runs on peoples' minds, building up false hopes for something that probably doesn't exist. This is not only an American problem but one that other nations use to their advantage, something that Saddam Hussein, ironically and largely forgotten, tried to reverse, making education (prior to his being gelded in the 1980ies and -90ies) essential.** Also ironic is the pressure Iraq has been under, either by debilitating wars with fundamentalist Iran or under UN sanctions, all of the progress that Hussein was known to have made has gone up in smoke. Yes, he was brutal by "Western" standards. But, given the region and current state of affairs in his country, his methods might have been preferable to constant civil strife and annoying do-gooders who, scummy scam artists that they are, attempt to justify their actions by doing the same things but worse.
Remember institutionalised lucky learners: "Arbeit Macht Frei!" You too can succeed if you stay within bounds and follow the rules! "Freedom is another word for nothing left to lose!" Ha!
* http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=2667532&page=1
Students Dropping Out of High School Reaches Epidemic Levels
[Of course, the "NCLB" pResident got his edgimacation spoon-fed to him at Andover while his peers down home in Texas got something else][Lately, South Carolina, the state intent on establishing a "Christian" culture, has slightly less than a 50% HS graduation rate; Texas is around two thirds; IA, MN, NE, ND, and UT are the ones exceeding 80%; New Jersey gets the prize at around 90%]
** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_hussein
"Within just a few years, Iraq was providing social services that were unprecedented among Middle Eastern countries. Saddam established and controlled the "National Campaign for the Eradication of Illiteracy" and the campaign for "Compulsory Free Education in Iraq," and largely under his auspices, the government established universal free schooling up to the highest education levels; hundreds of thousands learned to read in the years following the initiation of the program."
Thank you for righting this.
It is important not to miss the intentions of this movement. Discrediting a researcher has given a carte blanche to ignoring their research. Citing your work or that of others like Professor Finkelstein and Lisa Anderson, I now receive the same comments I did citing Edward Said. Those of us who have presented on the conflict, not at the University, but for different human rights orgs have relied on non-Arab and non-Muslim professors to cite the same things that are well held by those scholars. It is a way of leaving those in the front lines no sources. Everyone who holds the same views are now "Anti-Semites" and have been denied the right to lecture or obtain positions because of it. See, it has a "proof" aspect. It is deeply discouraging.
I have referenced you work on mainstream blogs and had people rant that you were an anti-semite, then the blog pulled the quote as a violator of its "community standards". Yet, I have never seen a link from Dershowitz works pulled, nor Michelle Malkin ever pulled.
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