In April of 2012, the California Association of Scholars, a division of the National Association of Scholars, prepared a report for the University of California Regents entitled “A Crisis of Competence: The Corrupting Effect of Political Activism in the University of California.” In that report, the association outlined in a thoughtful way how the politicization of teaching by the professoriate degraded academic integrity, conflicted with the core principles of academia, and was antithetical to the promotion of scholarship and the pursuit of meaningful learning.
In fact, the report suggested, “Political activism is the antithesis of academic teaching and research. Its habits of thought and behavior are un-academic, even antiacademic.” Why is that? Because, the report said, “political activism values politically desirable results more than the process by which conclusions are reached. In education, those priorities must be reversed.”
Imposing a one-sided, pre-determined line of thought in coursework has the exact opposite effect that most universities strive to achieve; namely, preventing the truth from emerging as a result of considering competing views and coming to conclusions about the truth by analyzing many views on a topic. “The fixed quality of a political belief system will stifle intellectual curiosity and freedom of thought when it dominates a classroom,” the report noted. “In any worthwhile college education, a student’s mind must have the freedom to think afresh and to follow wherever facts or arguments lead. But this freedom of movement is constrained when the end process of thought has already been fixed in advance by a political agenda.”
Apparently, the recommendations in this report have been forgotten at least at one UC school—Berkeley—where this fall a student-taught, one-credit course, “Palestine: A Settler Colonial Analysis,” drew collective howls of indignation from Jewish organizations and others who saw the course as being a prime example of politicized instruction that not only seemed to violate the spirit and letter of the Regent’s policy on course content, “constitut[ing] misuse of the University as an institution,” but also, more troublingly, had as its primary teaching purpose an assault on Zionism itself, and a blueprint for the possibility of dismantling Israel through “decolonization.”
Tellingly, Israel as a sovereign, democratic state is not even mentioned in the course syllabus; instead, the factitious country of Palestine is the focus of the course, an area now overrun by colonial “settlers” who might reasonably be extirpated by utilizing the ideological tactics outlined in the coursework. The revealing syllabus notes that the course will “examine key historical developments that have taken place in Palestine, from the 1880s to the present, through the lens of settler colonialism . . . [and] will explore the connection between Zionism and settler colonialism . . . in Palestine. Lastly, drawing upon literature on decolonization, we will explore the possibilities of a decolonized Palestine, one in which justice is realized for all its peoples and equality is not only espoused, but practiced.”
