RUTHFULLY YOURS

Peter Wood is the president of the National Association of Scholars
When the defenders of academic freedom leave campus lynch mob victims to fend for themselves.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday in 1915 Columbia University economics professor E.R. A. Seligman shared a draft document with his colleagues, Princeton economics professor Frank Fetter and Johns Hopkins philosophy professor Arthur O. Lovejoy. The three succeeded in putting into final form what became the founding document of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), a 16-page “Declaration of Principles.” It defined for the first time a fully worked conception of “academic freedom” and is nine-tenths of the reason why Americans give any credence to the idea that college professors should have some special measure of protection for their research, their publications, and other expressions of (some of) their views.

One hundred years later, how is the AAUP’s founding vision holding up? Consider the case of Vanderbilt professor of political science and law Carol M. Swain. Professor Swain wrote an op-ed in the student newspaper, The Tennessean, last January, under the title “Charlie Hebdo attacks prove critics were right about Islam.” The university’s Muslim Student Organization objected and the furor reached the national press. Swain also posted some of her pro-Christian views on her popular Facebook page, which Vanderbilt students began to read more assiduously after the op-ed, apparently fascinated by the spectacle of someone who was willing to dissent publicly from the prevailing ideological orthodoxy. The spectacle finally proved too much for one alumna, Emily Arnold, who created a petition calling for Swain to be fired from the university. The petition was later amended to call for “suspending” Swain instead of firing her, and requiring her to undergo “cultural sensitivity” training.

The petition says that over the past few years Swain “has become synonymous with bigotry, intolerance, and unprofessionalism.” Swain, it alleges, has engaged in unprofessional intimidation on social media, discriminatory practices in the classroom. It had gained as of a few days ago 1,736 signers.

The gist of the petition is that Arnold and her friends disagree with Swain’s views and would like Vanderbilt to shut her up or get rid of her. In an online interview, Arnold expresses her delight in the large number of fellow students who have joined her. She is “shedding tears of joy.”

Brandeis University’s Mandel Center for the Humanities recently hosted Gideon Levy. Levy, the author of articles such as, “Did Israel Really Think Hamas Would Turn the Other Cheek?”, is yet another in a line of Students for Justice in Palestine speakers who have justified the racist murder of Jews.

Last year, SJP’s Israel Apartheid Week included Max Blumenthal, an advocate of the ethnic cleansing of Israel, whose views even critics of the Jewish State find horrifying. A Forward reviewer wrote of his previous book that, “It could have been published by the Hamas Book-of-the-Month Club.”

One of Blumenthal’s attacks on Israel was cited by the Neo-Nazi gunman who tried to murder Jews outside the Jewish Community Center in Kansas City. Blumenthal was deemed too hateful by the German Communists who had invited him to speak. And yet he was not too extreme for Brandeis’ SJP.

Jewish students at Brandeis are forced to cope with a campus where Students for Justice in Palestine campaigns for Rasmieh Odeh, who took part in the bombing of a Jerusalem supermarket before the Sabbath. Leon Kanner and Edward Joffe, two Hebrew University roommates who had come there to buy canned food, the way so many college students do, were torn to pieces by bombs hidden in coffee cans.

On Islamophobia First, let’s define phobia.

The Compact Oxford English Dictionary (1971):

Phobia: Fear, horror, or aversion, esp. of a morbid character….So Phobist nonce-wd. one who has a horror of or aversion to anything.

Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (1956) states:

Phobia: An irrational, persistent fear of a particular object or class of objects.

The Oxford definition does not claim that a phobia is necessarily irrational, but however stresses its cause as being a person. The Webster’s definition does not even mention a person, just objects or classes of objects, which, of course, can include persons. Other dictionary definitions more or less track the Oxford and Webster’s definitions.

And here is the origin of the term Islamophobia, from Discover the Networks.

The term “Islamophobia” was invented and promoted in the early 1990s by the International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT), a front group of the Muslim Brotherhood. Former IIIT member Abdur-Rahman Muhammad — who was with that organization when the word was formally created, and who has since rejected IIIT’s ideology — now reveals the original intent behind the concept of Islamophobia: “This loathsome term is nothing more than a thought-terminating cliché conceived in the bowels of Muslim think tanks for the purpose of beating down critics.” In short, in its very origins, “Islamophobia” was a term designed as a weapon to advance a totalitarian cause by stigmatizing critics and silencing them….

Although the term was coined in the early 1990s, “Islamophobia” did not become the focus of an active Brotherhood campaign until after 9/11. Since that time, Islamist lobby organizations (including the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR) and Muslim civil-rights activists have regularly accused the American people, American institutions, law-enforcement authorities, and the U.S. government of harboring a deep and potentially violent prejudice against Muslims. The accusers charge that as a result of this “Islamophobia,” Muslims are disproportionately targeted by perpetrators of hate crimes and acts of discrimination.

As students ‘occupy’ Brandeis University this week, a look at how the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is playing out at universities in a new post-PC world order.

Located on the outskirts of Boston, Brandeis University has been under siege since Friday when a group of some 150 undergrad and graduate students indefinitely “occupied” the Bernstein-Marcus Administration Center. The students, who are taking shifts in the round-the-clock protest, have vowed to remain until 13 demands are met.

On Thursday, the group, which operates under the monikers “Concerned Students 2015” and “Ford Hall 2015,” submitted their 13-point list of demands to acting president Lisa Lynch, giving her 24 hours to comply. The demands include a 10 percent across the board hiring of full-time black faculty and staff, the appointment of a vice president for diversity and inclusion, and mandatory diversity education for all students. (In 2014, the school’s website states the entire student body is under 6,000, of which some five% was black, 6% Hispanic, and 13% Asian.)

In response, over the weekend the acting president wrote the students a multi-page letter validating their feelings and vowing to boost diversity. “The atmosphere described by our students is painful to hear and calls on all of us to address these issues,” Lynch wrote, but she declined to set a timetable for actual action. (In a leaked email, interim Provost Irving Epstein instructs faculty to use discretion in regards to protesters’ class attendance and assignments.)